AOL Black Voices new director has plans for pumping up the volume
 
By Amanda Fung
Crain’s NY Business
(November 18, 2007) While AOL Black Voices is one of the top Web destinations for African-Americans, Tariq Muhammad believes that there is room for improvement.

Last month, the former Black Enterprise.com executive became director of AOL Black Voices, overseeing the African-American news and entertainment site's editorial content, business strategy, new partnerships and expansion.

"I want to extend our lead and expand our coverage on news and issues that are relevant to the black community," says Mr. Muhammad, a former journalist, who has his eye on the 20 million African-American Internet users in the United States.

AOL Black Voices attracts only a fraction of those nationwide users: It drew 2.5 million unique visitors in September, according to comScore Media Metrix. Nevertheless, the site is edging out its major rivals. BET.com, the entertainment and news Web site operated by Viacom's BET Network, drew 2.3 million unique visitors that month. BlackPlanet.com, a social networking site for African-Americans, lured 2.2 million.

These competitors are trying hard to catch up, however--largely by stealing talent. Both Janet Rolle, formerly Black Voice's general manager, and Nicholas Charles, previously editor in chief, have joined BET. Mr. Muhammad has assumed their responsibilities.

Eyeball advantage
Of course, the site that lures the most eyeballs has the advantage with advertisers looking to target African-Americans. That group will spend $1.1 trillion in 2011, up from $799 billion in 2006, according to projections from the Selig Center for Economic Growth.

"Successfully appealing to African-American consumers online requires understanding them as a separate consumer group," says Michael Chapman, editorial director of research firm eMarketer.

Mr. Muhammad has spent more than a decade figuring out what African-American audiences want. In the late 1990s, he was the tech editor for Black Enterprise magazine, a niche business and personal finance publication. During the dot-com boom, he left the publishing world to satisfy an entrepreneurial itch.

In 2000, Mr. Muhammad co-founded iClique, a company syndicating online content that became a casualty of the Internet collapse. Picking up the pieces, he returned to Black Enterprise as a Web consultant. He was later hired as director of interactive media at BlackEnterprise.com, which he had helped create during his early days at the magazine.

"Tariq was definitely a great fit to head up AOL Black Voices, bringing more than a decade of advertising and content expertise to an already talented team," says Mike Rich, senior vice president of AOL Music, Moviefone, Television and Black Voices.

See you later, CNN
Mr. Muhammad hopes to beef up Black Voices' content, making it an even better source of online news and information for African-Americans. Ideally, he says, Black Voices will be so comprehensive that users will no longer have to go to sites like CNN.com for news. But he acknowledges that the company has work to do.

"We do really well in entertainment coverage," he says. To enhance the site, he adds, "we could emphasize news--not breaking stories, but giving people analysis of the story and how it affects them as African-Americans."


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