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

The most recent twist is the announcement yesterday 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 last month for $850 million to increase its slice of the social networking pie and add to its own ad-space inventory.

The PubAccess service will allow publishers to block specific advertisers or categories of ads and get detailed activity reports. The service comes with AOL's ad-targeting optimization tool AdLearn to help Web publishers pick the right ads for their site.

The ads themselves are sold by Advertising.com's normal salesforce, which maintains relationships with advertisers far larger than most small publishers could manage. Advertising.com and AOL's other ad services already manage  the placement of 88% of online ads, according to Media Metrix.

PubAccess is part of AOL's Platform-A – a separate division formed in 2007 to combine and leverage the ad-market power of not only Advertising.com, but also content sites such as MapQuest and TMZ, services such as AOL Instant Messenger, the behavioral-targeting technology of its Tacoda division, the AdTech ad-serving service and the contextual-targeting of Quigo, which it bought in December. AOL bought Tacoda last September.

AOL also announced it is consolidating many of its most popular blogs – including Engadget, Switched, The Unofficial Apple Weblog and DownloadSquad – onto a consolidated site called the AOL Technology Network,  to make the blogs a more effective selling vehicle for Platform-A's salesforce.

Platform-A has also had its own troubles. Designed as a way to give advertisers one place to buy ads on AOL's sites and the rest of the Web, the division has failed to close the gap between AOL and the leading players in the portal market -- Google, Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and Yahoo, according to research firm eMarketer. Its revenue growth has also flattened to 12% in 2008 compared to 37% in 2006, though Platform-A is still the fastest-growing business at AOL, according to company releases.

Platform-A President Curt Viebranz was reportedly fired in March – five months after taking over the new division -- for clashing with AOL top management over strategy. He's been replaced by Linda Clarizio, a nine-year AOL vet who was president of Advertising.com and whose elevation was part of a plan to consolidate and integrate the divisions making up Platform-A, company releases said.

AOL's acquisition of Bebo was ridiculed by some analysts who said the price was too high, the prizewas too small and the need for a social networking component was redundant. Bebo's 22.4 million unique visitors January lagged far behind Facebook's 100 million and MySpace's 109 million, according to comScore World Metrix.

AOL's ICQ and AIM were the first effective social-networking tools online, so having to buy a full-blown social-net site reflects badly both on AOL's strategy and its ability to manage its massive assets, according to SiliconAlleyInsider's Henry Blodget. "I am still trying to figure out why AOL–which was built on the pillars of community, communications and connectivity–has consistently not been able to leverage its still-valuable assets," Blodget wrote at the time of the Bebo acquisition.

eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson points out, however, that Bebo members spend significantly more time on the space per month than either of its two competitors. She said Bebo was the first company to effectively market to and with widget developers, a market AOL execs have also said they're interested in pursuing.