A couple days ago at the Web 2.0 Summit, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong caused a little bit of a stir when he hinted that AOL is working on a “secret” technology project. When pressed for details on what exactly it is, he was vague. But after fishing around with our sources, we have a pretty good idea.
The secret project is a new content-management system (CMS) which will make it easier to produce and publish Web content across AOL’s sites and perhaps beyond. It will also help AOL scale up the number of contributors who write articles and produce videos for its numerous media sites well beyond the thousands who are working for it today.
During the on-stage interview at Web 2.0, this is what Armstrong said:
TA: We have some secret sauce that I can’t announce. But we’ve been working on something for 3 months that’s a big tech shift. I can talk about it later.
JB: Wait, tell me more. What tech?
TA: It’s a broader platform with more information about content, and around content. I can’t give you a better answer. We’ve gone from 500 journalists to over 3,000. We’re going to keep growing. Our content is 80% our own, we’re going to keep going. It’s all about taking content management serious. There’s an opportunity there.
Armstrong’s maniacal focus right now is on increasing the amount of content AOL spews out. In addition to its main Website, AOL operates more than 75 independent topic-specific sites and blogs in its MediaGlow business run by Bill Wilson. All told, AOL already employs a growing staff of journalists (3,000 to date).
The new CMS system will allow AOL to accelerate along that path, and bring in even more writers from the outside. Built into the system is a way to include content from freelance writers and pay them based on the views and ads shown on the pages they write. It’s like a fancy blogging platform with all sorts of tracking and ad-monetization built in.
Demand Media has something like this called Demand Studios which is paying out $17 million a year to writers, editors, and video producers. In addition to furnishing Demand Media’s sites with content, Demand Studios also farms out articles and videos to other sites. AOL could do the same thing and provide the ads as well.
In addition to the content coming in from thousands, or even tens of thousands, of lowly-paid contributors, the CMS system might also be able to automatically generate related content on the fly. AOL is already experimenting with lightly-curated, automated topic pages on Love.com, which uses technology from its Relegence acquisition.
What isn’t clear is whether AOL is building an entirely new CMS system from scratch, or integrating technologies from past acquisitions. All of AOL’s blogs (Engadget, TMZ, Autoblog) already run on the Blogsmith CMS that came with its Weblogs, Inc acquisition. The new CMS might very well be based on Blogsmith or at least be built by the same engineers. AOL’s non-blog sites run on a relatively new CMS called Dynapub. It would make sense to have one CMS for everything. Then there’s the contextual feeds from Relegence. And blog-link generator Sphere, now known as Surphace, may also play a role. Put them all together, and you’ve got cheap content galore.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/05/lazy-publishers-rejoice-get-your-content-from-pluck-on-demand/
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The the Walmart of ISPs to become the Walmart of content? Brilliant!
Double use of “the” – Genius!
The the error in my comment is allusive to the emphasis of quantity vs. quality in AOL’s business plan.
better be cheap content cause studies show users are reluctant to pay for it. universal services integration is the future of digital media. content is no longer king.
“universal services integration is the future of digital media”
Actually, the future of digital media is meaningless buzzwords.
hopefully nowhere near as successful as walmart though… I still have a grudge against AOL from the 3 coasters a month in the mail days.
I have wondered what happened to them after that though as people got real ISPs (or I assumed they did)
The the ‘Walmart’ analogy is warranted. The ‘Brilliant’ accolades throughout this comment stream also make me stutter. AOL and Demand Studios are essentially building ‘contrived’ keyword content holding pages stuffed with paid hyperlinks and only being a small notch above the domain name squatters who litter premium .com urls with skeletal hyperlinks that provide no substance for genuine content-seekers.
As an example, take a look at AOL Travel’s Cruise page.
This kind of low-rent approach isn’t all that different from the greedy techniques of terrestrial and cable TV networks that overpack each program with annoying Billie Mays spots yelling from the grave by time-shifting the shit out of every program. Sir David Lean rolls over in his grave every time “Lawrence of Arabia” airs and the lingering apparition of Omar Sharif riding into the foreground becomes an artistically-savaged series of jerky jumps that are vomit-inducing for more reasons than one.
No doubt all the ‘name journalists’ will be indoctrinated into the keyword-pumping dogma that is the new syndicated content model.
On the positive side – these castoffs from the NYT and other companies are finding new income sources and hopefully they will bring new depth, context and value to a business model that puts more emphasis on leeching the Adwords model and driving keyword and link revenues than on providing quality content, products and services to its potential users.
Saving money on bulk toilet paper at Walmart is one thing – spending a little more on the things consumers invest more time with and place more value upon (such as a bed, iPhone, home theater system – or information sources online) is quite another.
If AOL can achieve a good balance between the revenue structure and the quality of content, then perhaps it can earn the ‘Brilliant’ accolade.
This is all a Google / SEO exploit. Add cheap content to an authority site (old, high PR) and get tons of long tail traffic to pages full of ads. I’m sure far more effort will be placed on optimizing CTR than editorial workflow or fact checking. This will seriously denigrate the web if junk content gets to piggyback on authority sites… I can’t wait to see how Google solves this problem.
You are mixing it up. You’re half right- sites like love.com are garbage doorway sites rife with ads and little else. But AOL is doing some content building apart from those love.com-like sites on other websites they own, and I agree with the overall premise of the article…if you’re paying any attention to AOL and/or to Tim Armstrong at all (which unfortunately, I am) you would know that he is serious about turning AOL into a content platform to monetize content with ads to make up for the rev he is losing hand over fist as AOL subs unsubscribe by the millions each year. There are only 5 mil subs left, give or take a few hundred thousand, and he is losing on average 1-2 mil of them each year, so AOL better get the content profitable fast, or it’s all going down.
Also, if Google had any brains they would kick love.com and any sites like it right out of their index. The problem with that is two-fold: Google is comprised of hypocrites; they “officially” discourage doorway/spammer-like behavior but they host the same sort of garbage on Google for Domains, and AOL and Google have been holding hands for so many years that getting Google to kick their friend out of the index, even for doorways, is probably impossible.
To clarify, my association of any brand with “Walmart” is typically debasing and my reference to brilliance was meant to be sarcastic.
I appreciate your insight. However, I doubt that this will succeed (in a conventional journalistic sense). If anything, AOL is selling snake oil to an industry in transition and, frankly, I hope that the transition will not be towards the shill content that I assume this venture will undoubtedly produce.
I think everyone understood the debasingly brilliant sarcasm. Well, almost everyone, from the looks of it.
The sad thing about the whole AOL/Time Warner geek tragedy was the monumental clash of the corporate titans and their respective cultures.
If you take a look at Pathfinder.com, it’s an enduring and pathetically ‘brilliant’ example of how TW never understood how to leverage its content/brand assets(and it’s not even showing the full breadth and scope of the brands it commanded from Turner and AOL). TW/AOL had the potential to dominate the web and it all got pissed away, in part, because of old media/new media pissing contests. And those rivalries also existed inter-departmentally at TW long before the AOL boys moved in.
This pre-existing wealth of content sources should have been able to provide solid ammunition for creating new revenue models to offset the erosion of the AOL subscriber base.
But there has never been a CEO of TW/TWT/TWT-AOL who’s been strong enough to achieve this kind of convergence, even though Gerry Levin had a great vision of it. There was always too much interdepartmental territorialism and fiscal largesse that was a byproduct of a bloated corporate structure that needed a visionary with big enough balls and superhuman mediation/motivation skills to make it all work.
Levin had the vision, he just didn’t have the balls.
(Sigh), what might have been . . . .
It will take some ‘brilliant’ journalism on the part of AOL’s new hires to rehabilitate and rebuild brands/sites that have become tainted by its doorway antics. And as Marah pointed out, Google is also culpable in this.
Everyone loves a fighter and a comeback, and I hope Armstrong succeeds – but if the content doesn’t shine any brighter than the existing regurgitated SEO dreck, then the lights will progressively dim and ultimately burn out at AOL and any brand associated with it. Content consumers are too sharp and too impatient to put up with the doorway/spammer crap anymore.
Unless of course they’re the type glued to every episode of ‘Khloe and Kourtenay Take Miami’.
But don’t get me started on that . . .
Don’t know if I would call their journalists “Walmart”. AOL is picking up every journalist the NYT lets go. As content is able to be easily shared around the web the original source of that content is going to be able to generate some big bucks. Smart move my Armstrong and co.
Brilliant is right. Low-cost, high profit is what aim for in most cases. However, AOL might have just realized it.
So basically they’re letting everyone else do the heavy lifting by submitting articles and profiting off of it?
Hmm…I wonder where I heard that one before…
Right, isn’t producing a low-cost content generating machine the goal of nearly every web site/portal?
Is that prettyboy’s great idea for fixing AOL? A network of automatically generated splogs (spam blogs)?
Is this why they pay this douche the big money?
Google/MSN/Yahoo will ban AOL’s splog pages, and he’ll be fired within six months. Guaranteed.
sounds similar to Associated Content, which Armstrong was involved w/ for a while as investor/chairman (and which is run by a former Googler Patrick Keane)
http://www.asso...tedcontent.com/
He’s still involved as major investor.
here is the problem. they are not going to have the traffic. they are losing distribution and the isp user base is going to continue to go in only one direction – down.
They have underutlized SEO assets, so they will drive new traffic. The name of the game is finding keywords that payout for ppc ads with the right balance of search volume in a winnable serp. Assuming they target low competition SERPS, they should have no problem.
I hate to be vague about my ” secret” technology project but let me just say, Oracle, China and Canters Deli
+1
Not sure why TA is talking about the new CMS system?
The CMS in question is the same BlogSmith with added tools that make it easier to publish articles and integrate with the Java based Dynapub platform. There is nothing amazing or great about it. Maybe Ted Cahall has been making a fool of him to save his as*.
Deep analysis of AOL’s supposed plans is premature — the company hasn’t confirmed anything, and even if it’s true, the updated CMS and “low-cost” content strategy may be only part of the picture.
More interesting is the possibility (outlined in two of your earlier posts) about an expanded niche strategy, using the arsenal of journalistic talent that the company has recently acquired. The question is, what would those niches be?
check out Tim’s relationship to Associated Content and you will get a sense of where he’s going with this…
saw Tim at Web 2.0….his “fragmentation is our friend” was best line of the conference…..AOL has gone hard in that direction over the past 2 years with their niche content strategy (spinner, stylelist, asylum, walletpop, popeater, etc.) and although the blogosphere does not give AOL any props for it….it is undeniable they bet on the right strategy early on….TechCrunch has written the most about it actually while other sites I actually don’t think they get what AOL is doing yet
The CNN and AOL line will blur.
Quickly.
AOL had its identity crisis. As did Yahoo. Both happen to be content heavy. I guess they felt the turmoil before the big media houses did.
As Tim stated at the end of his 2.0 Q&A, AOL is a risk…he is taking a calculated risk…having worked at AOL for 3 years until 4 months ago….I plan on putting my money on AOL once they spin (I have a 3 year time horizon)…the assets they have are worth a lot more then people realize….their content business has actually already grown 20 million people in the U.S. alone over the past 2 years….the implosion of sales (Curt, Lynda, Greg) has allowed that growth to fly under the radar along with the erosion audience for MapQuest, AIM and Email….bet on Tim…I am planning to.
they are just doing another About.com knock off – distributed/cheap workforce with significant topic expertise
This sounds like AOL is going to become the new Associated Content. AC has been posting assignments that are linked to some of AOL’s affiliates. Hm, I wonder how much they’ll pay…
Looks like the West Coast is just now figuring out AOL’s plans. Come to NY sometime for a visit.
speculation or not, this guy is getting some eyeballs. Wonder what Murdoch thinks of AOL’s move.
Too bad their brand image is crap.
Most people have a very short memory of things that were tried out before on the Internet – wasn’t this exactly the old AOL strategy after their ISP/modem scam lost out to broadband? They are just going to repeat their mistakes all over again, but Tim will cash out and move on by the time this strategy won’t work for them. They should really build a platform for content and put in the content once the platform is working. But I’m afraid this is not in their DNA or they just don’t get it.
Turning AOL into a “content” company is what Ted Leonsis was talking about doing back in 1994-1995.
So AOL is going to focus exclusively on content. Where is the evidence that AOL is making money on content today? To the extent that AOL makes money on content is it an adequate and sustainable return on investment? Why will AOL make money on content tomorrow if it is not making money on content today? Does this strategy put AOL growing market share in a growing market? If not, then why should a shareholder buy the stock expecting it to increase?
Any word if the CMS changes are going to screw up/change/close the remaining message boards? I’d love to know at least a little bit ahead of time so I can warn people.
Randy Falco wanted to make it a media rich content company and see how that worked out. This boy is only a player in a very big game that is going to take the AOL LLC off the hands from TW and then it is going to sink really fast once it is relying on it’s brand to keep it afloat. There really are no trucks waiting to deliever loads of cash to AOL as Tim has stated. This man has come in and ran an Obama style campaign in “Yes we can” spending money left and right having town hall meetings selling this line to the troops. All the while knowing he will be laying off 30 to 40 percent of the work force and is now trying how to figure out how not to pay out layoff benefits. Kids AOL is a company not a town and your annual lump of coal is coming and Tim’s secret plan is to shut a company down and look like he’s not trying. CMS is a smoke screen as they just did Dyna-pub; there is no plan. Fear for your job!
This new CMS sounds a little like Feed.Us