AOL has announced the second major initiative in a month designed to help it evolve from its business model as a dial-up ISP into an advertising company competing with Google, Yahoo and other online heavyweights.

The most recent twist is the announcement April 9 that AOL's display advertising division, Advertising.com, would offer a tool designed to allow smaller publishers to run ads from major publishers, but give them a measure of control over what ads run as well as the ability to monitor traffic to ads that are sold according to the size of the viewing audience, rather than the number of clicks the ads generate.

AOL also bought the social networking site Bebo in March for $850 million to increase its slice of the social networking pie and add to its own ad-space inventory.

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