Arianna Huffington eponymous blog is being built by AOL. $315 million for 25 milion visitors/month and a brand name in Political commentary. Applause to Huffington the business tycoon.
Personally, I try to avoid Huff Po for a variety of reasons:
- Their science and health sections are full of drivel
- Too much of their article presentation skews towards controversy churning (from annoying shock titles adopted from Drudge to wording that raises the alarm on any issue)
- The cadre of celebrity contributors are probably nice dinner and cocktail party guests, but not great bloggers
I subscribe to 200+ feeds using Google Reader in the Chrome Browser, Google Reader Android app on my 3G devices, but my favorite way to browse twitter, Reader and Facebook news feed is using Flipboard on my iPad.The CEO of Flipboard on what’s wrong with journalism on the web:
Journalism is being pushed into a space where I don’t think it should ever go, where it’s trying to support the monetization model of the Web by driving page views. So what you have is a drop-off of long-form journalism, because long-form pieces are harder to monetize. And it’s also hard to present that longer stuff to the reader because no one wants to wait four seconds for every page to load.
Now, what fits AOL model? Let’s let AOL tell us:
Five years ago this week I began writing for AOL’s blog network Weblogs Inc. I wrote 5 technology news stories each day and was paid a mere $5 per article. It was grueling, that was just one of 3 jobs I had at the time – and it was great.
AOL’s secret internal plan to ramp up its online content business was leaked today to New York business blog Business Insider and people are saying it’s got “content farm” written all over it. In-house writers are expected to write 5 to 10 blog posts per day and those stories are expected to go from an average of 1500 pageviews per post today to an amazing 7000 views per post in the future. How will stories be selected? The only thing that will matter, apparently, is search engine friendliness and monetization potential.