You've got fail: AOL's half-baked attempts at news
This Wednesday, AOL will be going solo. The company merged with Time Warner in 2001, losing $100bn in value along the way. Yahoo, Hotmail and Google eroded its once dominant position in the email market to the point where AOL mail is a dead service. Now, AOL is repositioning itself as a content provider. Tim Armstrong, chief executive was interviewed in BusinessWeek:
AOL is not some dot-com has-been selling Web access and e-mail. It’s a digital media colossus with 80 Web sites churning out everything from personal finance advice to bedroom tips for women. With 100 million unique monthly viewers, Armstrong asserts, AOL has what it takes to lure blue-chip companies eager to reach multiple audiences with one ad buy.
It’s a little bit late to hop on the bandwagon, though. It is true that AOL is bringing in some talented journalists from Time to work on its online publications, which might give credence to an area of publishing that has so far been dominated by gossip columns and the copying and pasting of press releases. Yahoo! and Microsoft are ahead in the quantity game:
AOL can beat them on quality. Sadly, there’s no talking about journalism nowadays without the phrase “business model” attached. BusinessWeek reports that AOL’s ad-supported content is only generating 30 per cent of the company’s profits. A meagre amount, when that’s the core of your business.
Worse still, anyone expecting AOL to produce serious investigative journalism will be let down. AOL is developing an algorithm that will assign stories to freelance writers based on what people search for and the sites they visit. Some of its editorial guidelines for new writers are revealing:
This isn’t print. So do it fast. We’re looking for colorful, concise, opinionated analysis that always expands the consumer viewpoint. We’re not Gawker, so be friendly and authoritative, but on the other hand, don’t be afraid to take sides.
Why choose to compete in the news market, when you can only make a half-baked effort? AOL should be looking at some other options. More particularly, resuscitating its instant messaging network. Facebook and Twitter have dominated the “micro news” market for too long, and have grown too powerful. In Twitter’s case, its position is almost monopolistic. AOL should challenge Twitter. It is certainly capable of designing and supplying a much better product. Its brand, though not as strong as it once was, is still powerful.
What’s more, AOL should open up the technology, turning it into a full-scale, decentralised communication network that will be immensely useful, especially to journalists. I would like to see the Iranian government trying to shut off access to a decentralised version of Twitter. It would be like playing Whac-A-Mole against the Internet. I think we’re beyond the stage where we could dismiss Twitter as a fad. It’s proved itself to be an important technology and effective communication tool in the same way that the telegraph once was. AOL is capable of filling the gap in vision left by Twitter, a company with no direction and little sign of a viable future.
