• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, August 11, 2008

Offering advertisers more prime online real estate, AOL has launched a new skyscraper unit on its home page nearly double the size of the largest placement the Web portal previously sold on its main page.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau-standard (300 x 600) unit dominating the right side of the screen debuts with Samsung Mobile's Olympics-themed "Medal Mania" campaign, awarding a $100,000 prize to the winner of an online scavenger hunt for virtual gold medals.

The half-page format can be equipped with rich media features including video, animation and the ability to expand to an 810 x 730 unit on AOL.com. Clicking on the Samsung ad opens an in-screen landing page for its promotional contest.

The struggling portal introduced the new placement the same week that parent Time Warner disclosed a 14% drop in AOL's display ad revenue during the second quarter, reflecting softness in areas such as automotive, financial services and travel advertising.

While a new ad unit itself will not turn around AOL's ad woes, it could help the company extract more revenue from its highly trafficked home page. AOL was the fourth-ranked Web property in June with 110.8 million unique visitors, according to comScore.

AOL also views its super-sized placement as a competitive advantage over chief rivals Yahoo and MSN, which typically run smaller display ads on their home pages. Yahoo, for instance, usually runs 300 x 250 or 350 x 200 units in the upper right side of its welcome page. It also offers a variety of custom placements, including side-by-side banners.

The largest unit, 425 x 600, is typically found on the Yahoo Mail or Yahoo Games pages.

"The reason why other portals may not have done this yet is for aesthetic reasons," said David Smith, CEO of mediasmith, a digital media agency. "They want to have a home page more editorially pure, just like the front page of a newspaper."

But he noted that even The Wall Street Journal has begun running ads on its front page to boost declining ad sales "and every space in the world is being monetized as far as advertising."

Certainly, top Web publishers and advertisers have begun experimenting more with attention-grabbing formats. NYTimes.com made a splash late last year running tandem banner ads on its front page for Apple Inc.'s "Get a Mac" campaign.

In the placement developed by Omnicom Group's TBWAMedia Arts Lab, the cool "Mac guy" and the nerdy "PC guy" appeared in a video banner on the right side of the screen, interacting with a leaderboard unit at the top of the page.

Smith said AOL's large skyscraper ad should intrigue advertisers because of its size and location. "From an impact standpoint, it's huge." An AOL spokesman said that in addition to Samsung, other marketers have expressed interest in the placement, but he declined to name any others that might follow.

AOL declined to provide pricing information on the home page skyscraper ad.