New York – A new document leaked to the blog Silicon Alley
Insider reveals the purported new editorial philosophy of AOL (NYSE: AOL), which focuses on
vastly increasing original content and page views in a bid to bolster profits.
According to the memo, entitled "The AOL Way," the company’s goal is
to increase original articles by nearly double by April, with the percentage of
video stories increasing from 4% to 70%.
Page views per story are expected to
increase nearly five-fold.
To help accomplish those goals, AOL is asking
editors to choose content topics based on four factors — traffic potential,
revenue potential, edit quality and turn-around time.
Part of the equation is a
chart that tells editors the number of page views it will take to break even
financially, based on the type of content.
The complete memo is available at
the link below.
Related Links:
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-aol-way#
As a small blogger, my first reaction was a bit of fear. How can anyone compete with such an onslaught of content?
After dwelling on it a bit longer, the inherent problem of AOL’s plan becomes a bit clearer. How exactly are they going to increase both volume and quality at the same time everyone is slashing jobs?
While I’m sure meeting such goals would be great for AOL’s bottom line, I hope they have a much bigger strategy about how to make it happen besides forcing editors & writers to church out a dozen “great!” articles in a day.