For $4.4 billion, Verizon is buying the social media brand with the second lowest brand health, with only mySpace having a lower score.
Even the next highest social media company, Flickr, has triple the brand health levels of AOL.
For this research, YouGov BrandIndex used its centerpiece brand health metric, the Index score, which is an average of six key sub-scores: Quality, Satisfaction, General Impression, Reputation, Value and Willingness to Recommend. A score can range from 100 to -100 with a zero score equaling a neutral position.
Google leads the social media category with a current 53 Index score, which means that 53% more people said they were positive than negative about the brand. YouTube has a 49 Index score, Yahoo is at 29 and Facebook is 28.
AOL currently has a 3 Index score, the highest it’s been since June 2014. AOL’s Index score has not reached higher than 3 over the past 29 months. For the past two years, AOL’s Index score has generally ranged between zero and 1, although in first quarter 2013, it was in the -4 to -2 range.
