I just read today in Newsweek and on a few sites about AOL’s effort to revamp their business model into an ad-supported model. The company has also announced it will be opening up their content by relaunching their site as a portal. A beta of this new portal was released today. I’m very curious to see how this will shake out. Will the company begin to grow again, or continue it’s current pattern of decline?

According to the Newsweek article, the company’s subscriber base has reduced from a high of 27 million to 22 million. A time frame for the decrease was not given.

The full the new portal is expected near the end of July. The article also mentions AOL is planning to release a new web browser based on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which especially puzzling considering the enhanced security of the Mozilla/Firefox project that AOL has already substantially funded in the past.

While AOL does seem to be on the right track, it’s as if they just ‘woke up’ to the current market. They trail far behind other major internet players, such as Google, MSN and Yahoo!, with the newly announced offerings of blogs and photo storage with organization tools. They may, however, catching up to the current timeline by offering radio on demand, XM Radio stations (eventually) and video content.

The source code for the website also validates via the W3C Validation Tool, which is more than could be said for the heavily publicized MSN relaunch.