They employ a technology called multivariate testing (or A/B testing) to figure out what users want in near real time. According to Paul Berry, CTO, the site randomly displays one of two headlines for the same story for five minutes. After the elapsed time, the version with the most clicks wins and everybody sees that one. The result is the same: sensational headlines. “Wisconsin Protests Have State GOP Sending State Troopers After Democrat” turned into “GOP Sends National Guard After Dem Leader.”[33]
The Huffington Post’s parent company, America Online, is far from its dialup and busy signal roots. AOL makes its money by acquiring content and selling advertisements. In 2011, it ranked as the fifth largest property online in the United States behind Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Facebook. It reaches, in any given month, over a third of the United States population: about 110 million people.
The New Journalists
The industrialization of information is doing to journalists what the industrialization of farming did to farmers. In an effort to squeeze every bit of profit out of a piece of content, expensive journalists are being replaced by networks of less-qualified but much cheaper independent contractors. In the world of fiduciary responsibility, quality journalism means market inefficiency.
Though it still makes money from its Internet service provider business, today AOL is what’s known online as a content farm, and it shares a lot in common with its agricultural counterpart, the factory farm. AOL’s content is driven by a policy known as “The AOL Way,” a document in the form of a Powerpoint presentation that was leaked from AOL in early 2011. The AOL Way instructs the entire content arm of AOL on how it should operate.
The intent of The AOL Way is to decrease the costs and increase the profitability of the content the company produces. According to the plan, each editor should use four factors to decide what to cover: traffic potential, revenue potential, turn-around time, and at the bottom of the list, editorial quality. All editorial content staff are expected to write 5 to 10 stories per day, each with an average cost of $84, and a gross margin (from advertising) of 50%.
In short, it’s the job of the writer to produce popular content as cheaply and quickly as possible. That explains why the front page of AOL.com features the headline “Watch: Orangutan Gets Even With Rude Lady”; asks me to guess the age of the world’s oldest female bodybuilder; and offers me “Ten Bizarre Mosquito Prevention Tips.”
At the heart of The AOL Way is a technology called BlogSmith. It’s a software platform that allows editors to generate and produce content and measure their impact on the revenue and profitability of the network. AOL’s editors are instructed[34] to first use BlogSmith’s Demand module to identify topics in demand. BlogSmith looks at search query volume and breaks terms up into three categories: breaking (current trending topics), seasonal (topics historically in demand during certain time periods), and evergreen—topics that are consistently in demand across all AOL products.
Editors are then assigned these categories by their managers, and instructed to quickly write content matching these topics. (If management expects 5 to 10 posts per working day, then that’s about one post per hour.) Each post is to be tagged with popular search terms so that they’re more easily discoverable by search engines. Sarah Palin’s ride through downtown D.C. on Memorial Day was tagged on AOL-owned Huffington Post as: “2012 Election, Sarah Palin 2012, Elections 2012, Sarah Palin, Sarah Palin For President, Palin 2012, Palin Bus Tour, Palin For President, Palin Motorcycle, Rolling Thunder, Sarah Palin Bus Tour, Sarah Palin Motorcycle, Politics News” to cover all the search bases.
BlogSmith then carefully tracks the return on investment. Under its performance tab, it tells the author that it cost $15 to make the piece of content, and it’s returned $82.95 in advertising. In big green letters it tells the editor they’ve made $67.95 in profit for the mothership. It’s journalism, commoditized.
So, why this setup? Here’s what one AOL writer—John Biggs—had to say on AOL blog TechCrunch.com:
“There’s no money in shaking the crown of power from a lowly perch. There is money in feeding novel info to a ravenous, neophilic audience.”[35]
They do it because it works! The headlines are irresistible. In doing the research for this chapter alone, I’ve watched a one-and-a-half-minute short film on Lindsay Lohan, seen John Lithgow’s dramatic interpretation of a press release from Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign, learned that Shiloh Jolie-Pitt turned five years old, and yes, have seen a lot of pictures and videos of Sarah Palin riding a motorcycle. The age of the oldest female bodybuilder as of this writing, by the way, is 74.
These articles aren’t written by people with a journalism background. They’re written by freelancers—independent contractors—who needn’t be provided any healthcare or retirement benefits. For content farmers, they’re simply credited—about $15 for a written piece of content, $20 for a video—directly to their bank account. Copy editors are paid a remarkable $2.50 per piece of content. Traditional newspapers pay about $300 to a freelance journalist for the same amount of work.
The jobs themselves tend to be no piece of cake. According to former AOL employee Oliver Miller:
“My ‘ideal’ turn-around time to produce a column started at thirty-five minutes, then was gradually reduced to half an hour, then twenty-five minutes. Twenty-five minutes to research and write about a show I had never seen—and this twenty-five minute period included time for formatting the article in the AOL blogging system, and choosing and editing a photograph for the article. Errors were inevitably the result. But errors didn’t matter; or rather, they didn’t matter for my bosses.
I had panic attacks; we all did. My fellow writers would fall asleep, and then wake up in cold sweats. I worked the graveyard shift—11PM to 7 or 8AM or later—but even the AOL slaves who wrote during the day would report the same universal experience. Finally falling asleep after work, they would awake with a jump, certain that they had forgotten something—certain that they hadn’t produced their allotted number of articles every thirty minutes. One night, I awoke out of a dead sleep, and jumped to my computer, and instantly began typing up an article about David Letterman. I kept going for ten minutes, until I realized I had dreamed it all. There was no article to write; I was simply typing up the same meaningless phrases that we all always used: ‘LADY GAGA PANTLESS ON LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID LETTERMAN,’ or some such.
Then there was the week where I only slept for about six hours over the course of five days—a week that ended with me being so exhausted that I started having auditory hallucinations, constantly hearing a distant ringing phone that didn’t exist, or an imaginary door slamming in the background.”[36]
Now granted, Miller was still working from the comfort of his house. You can’t compare the job to farming at the physical level—as we’ve noted before, farming tends to be one of the more dangerous professions in America. Mr. Miller isn’t going to lose his life in a tragic blogging accident. But it also doesn’t sound like it was a particularly nice job to have.
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http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/17/journalist-crowdsources-an-article-about-a-crowdsourcing-company-hilarity-ensues/