• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, September 17, 2007

In hopes of boosting its online ad business, AOL said today it's moving its headquarters from Dulles, Va., to Manhattan, where it will integrate newly acquired behavioral targeting company Tacoda and mobile marketing shop Third Screen Media into its new "Platform A."

The new platform will give marketers access to a variety of ad options both within AOL and on its network of other sites.

The move comes more than one year after AOL decided to stop charging broadband users subscription fees, in an effort to remake itself as a free, ad-supported Web portal.

Since then, the company has shed paying subscribers. As of the end of the second quarter, it counted just 10.9 million U.S. Web users as paid subscribers, down from more than 18 million last summer, when it made the switch. At the same time, early reports showed that the company was gaining users. In December, then-chief Randy Falco wrote in a letter to employees that the was on track to garner more members than the year before.

Yet, even one year after making the decision to focus almost exclusively on online advertising, the company appears to still be struggling to compete in a Web 2.0 world. Like Yahoo, AOL isn't known for either social networking or user-generated video -- though the company certainly has platforms for both. Its ambitious experiment to transform Netscape into a Digg-like social news site flamed out; earlier this month, AOL said the site would revert to its old portal-like appearance.

While the new back-end capabilities in Platform A sound like a boon for advertisers, AOL, like Yahoo, probably still needs to figure out what content will work best in Web 2.0.