America Online, Inc. has launched AOL Black Focus, a new programming area developed to serve the needs and interests of African Americans, the interactive services giant announced last week.

Speaking at the launch, Jim Bankoff, executive vice president of AOL programming, said Black Focus is the latest in the company's efforts to give its members an experience tailored to their interests. African Americans are being offered a combination of exclusive content and features to make their experience on AOL more relevant to their lives than ever, Bankoff said.

AOL has been struggling to shore up its rapidly shrinking subscriber base. A recent article in The Washington Post reported the company has lost more than one million subscribers since late last year. Blacks make up almost 14 million of AOL's close to 30 million members in the U.S.

Black Focus, AOL's newest news and content area, was developed in response to online custom marketing research conducted by Digital Marketing Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL. Among the survey's findings are that 85 percent of African Americans online have a strong preference for news and information from a Black perspective; that the top three online activities for Blacks are checking and sending e-mail, accessing news/headlines, and playing online games; and that African Americans are active online consumers — buying more clothing, music, and videos than the general online market — and are more likely to get a broadband connection within the next year than the general online population.

Black Focus content and features will include information about the latest skin and beauty products for Black women; African-American perspectives on news, politics, careers, and business, featuring radio segments by "The Tavis Smiley Show" from NPR; the inside track on Black culture and entertainment; and virtual venues for building relationships and making connections with people who have similar interests.

Omar Wasow is executive director of BlackPlanet.com, a premier Web site for African Americans and one of the 50 most popular sites on the 'Net, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. Wasow, also a leading Internet analyst, praises AOL's Black Focus initiative.

"I am excited AOL has launched this African-American focus area, because it confirms what we've known at BlackPlanet for more than four years, which is the African-American online audience is large, loyal, and underserved."

That a company of AOL Time Warner's size is committing resources and energy to reach the Black online market helps raise the profile of all companies in the running, Wasow says.

"But, at the same time, they've got some challenges," Wasow said. "BlackPlanet has more traffic than the next five African-American sites combined...and, as a result, AOL's Black Focus is kind of a late entrant."

Wasow says that although there are opportunities for AOL to become a leader in the African-American market by focusing on news content, making partnership deals like it has with companies such as Black Enterprise and Vanguard Media, and bringing together leading news and information providers on the Internet, he thinks it will be difficult to make Black Focus a breakthrough product by focusing on content.

"We think that our dominance in things like online dating and diversity recruiting, where we are the leading African-American dating and leading African-American employment site, that those are the bigger opportunities, and it's going to be much harder for them to get traction," Wasow says.

Robert Rucker, cofounder of KemNet Technologies and creator of BlackWebPortal.com — a one-stop shop with detailed information about Black Web sites, businesses, and events in the U.S. — says, "The AOL Black Focus is so much like NetNoir," the once-leading, California-based new media company promoting, developing, digitizing, archiving, and distributing distinctive Black/Urban programming.

Rucker says reaching all the segments that make up its market share is a great strategy for AOL, but it's tough competition for independently owned sites such as BlackWebPortal.

"It makes it harder. It's pretty tough," Rucker says.