AOL's New Strategy Is To Fill The Internet With Crap?
from the pollution-is-in-their-genes dept
Remember how AOL first became "famous"? It cluttered the world (and our garbage dumps) with millions upon millions of CD-ROMs offering "try AOL for free!" It seems that pollution is in AOL's genes, and it just can't get away from it. How else to explain AOL's new plan to rebuild its brand: to flood the internet with poorly written, but quickly written, content based on whatever search terms are hot. Danny Sullivan points out the amusing fact that AOL is looking to leverage search engines for more traffic this way, at the very same time as others, such as Rupert Murdoch, are claiming that Google is "stealing" from him in sending traffic, and he's considering opting-out.But, of course, that doesn't make AOL's strategy very well conceived either. Farhad Manjoo makes the case for why this is a dumb plan, and there's plenty to agree with:
The trouble with AOL's plan, then, isn't that it's based on data-mining. Instead, it's what the company will likely do with search data--publish quick, vapid posts that do little to advance any hot story and instead feed readers a collection of factoids gathered from other places. How do we know this will happen? Because AOL's model is strikingly similar to that of Demand Media and Associated Content, two start-ups that also use search data and user contributions to build Web content. Indeed, AOL's Armstrong--who was an advertising executive at Google until earlier this year--is reportedly an investor in Associated Content, whose CEO is also a former Googler.Effectively, it's a plan based on adding crap into the system to trick search engines. It's pollution and web spam as a business model. But as folks like Umair Haque are fond of pointing out, business models based on tricking people and not adding any real value aren't business models that will last. They're short-term scams. Manjoo, in his writeup, helps explain why:
Associated Content stands as a cautionary tale for anyone looking to do news by the numbers. It is a wasteland of bad writing, uninformed commentary, and the sort of comically dull recitation of the news you'd get from a second grader.
Will this plan do wonders for AOL's bottom line? It very well might, at least in the short run. If AOL can replicate the success of Associated Content across its network of sites, it will surely see huge gains in traffic and renewed interest from advertisers. But this plan hinges on something that can't be guaranteed for long--a weakness in search engines. By any measure, stories like those found on AC don't deserve top billing in search results. If you search for "Tiger Woods mistress pictures," you should get pictures of Tiger Woods' alleged mistress, not a story that repeats that phrase a dozen times. Google and other search engines constantly battle search engine spam, and over time they're sure to steer people away from sites that rely on such trickery to get visitors. Then what? Associated Content gets 90 percent of its traffic from search engines. Once Google and co. wise up to AC's schemes, its business model is toast.A short-term strategy based on polluting the internet with bad content may be a last-gasp effort to revive a dead brand, but it's difficult to see how that's any sort of long-term strategy to survive.
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Filed Under: business model, content
Companies: aol
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dead?
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Re: dead?
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Re: Crap On The Net
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Re:
Oops. Fixed the link. Thanks.
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/sarcasm.
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Re: Re:
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If they won't do anything about racist pictures of the first lady, do you think they will do anything about quality crap?
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2) 'The reality is that Google loves crap' & 'little that can be done"in the algorithm" to stop crap...'
What the hell does this have to do with the point of the article, make up your mind about your perception of Google's opinion on 'Crap', and you have no idea what you're talking about anyway, do you? You're sounding like those third world countries that blame Google because somebody halfway around the world published an unflattering web page about their dictator and is blaming Google for its existence.
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Re:
Once Google and co. wise up to AC's schemes, its business model is toast.
The reality is that Google can't separate out this crap from other valid crap, and thus crap will flourish, unless Google manually penalizes them.
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Best Headline You've Ever Had!
I will confess that way back in the dark ages, I was a member for awhile. And now everyone knows that I was a dork. :)
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Firefox's "customize google" plugin fixes this problem
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/snark
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Re:
Ransom is my game.
Now, give me $10 or the business model walks the ramp!
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...!
Way back in the day, I remember having to manually clean customers' hard-drives to get rid of A.O.Hell's mountain of rubish piles.
Although there was a time when their free, stylishly-labeled CDs made great coasters for my coffee mug. And after that, the CDs made great test subjects for my new CD cross-shredder!
" };> "
;) .. I reeeeeally hate AOL. Always have, always will.
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ok ...
two.. if you think that pumping "tiger woods mistress" into the content of your page will get you traffic on that term .. your delusional.
you have to SPAM the text link .. across their "network of sites" this will only work for a time, eventually GBot catches on (within two days) then its over as far as using those same TLDs to garner position. The thing is.. you can't use the same domains to command ranking over and over (I wanna use the ol -- PR, but I know it's not exactly right). At any rate they should hire a 9th grader to tell them how this actually works as they clearly have no Idea! Google has a about nine sources that are root servers for news, everything else is expendable. SOOOOOO AOL is going hyper nova in it's final bid for viability? How appropriate.
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Business Models Based on Trickery
It works for governments and other criminal enterprises all over the world. Umair Haque lives in a bubble.
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Similar to Demand Media
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia/
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Why change now?
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RE: ok...
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Exclude from search results?
Or is that feature already there?
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Re: Exclude from search results?
Or is that feature already there?
No, Google won't allow you to do that. You might filter out some sites of their advertising customers and they wouldn't like that.
However, if you're using Firefox as your browser, you can install the CustomizeGoogle extension and it has a filter function that will let you do that. :)
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AOL can't stop sucking
Will they get more traffic at first? Yes, but shame on anyone buying advertising too, because any customer "duped" into viewing your message will not only abandon, but abandon with a bad feeling about your collusion with a company as subversive as AOL.
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AOL
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They're going to have to write very fast.
For a while, I was tracking Google's top searches. The time something stays in the top 10 is measured in hours.
There's a little-known feedback effect with Google search. Google Suggest (the command completion in Google's search box) is driven from Google Trends. So once a phrase gets some popularity, it shows up as an option in Google search boxes. That phrase then tends to get picked by later users looking for something roughly similar to a top search. Suddenly, an obscure phrase gets to the top of Google Trends.
This system is spammable. Right now, the top entry in Google Trends is "discount medspa". That didn't happen because millions of people suddenly developed an interest in that topic.
Google doesn't try very hard to stop web spam. They can't. It's essential to their business model. If search takes you where you want to go on the first try, Google doesn't make any money. It's those Adwords-heavy pages that bring in the revenue.
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AOL Forgets: Readers are Human
If the high rankings of search engines counting keywords turned directly into dollars, AOL might have a great idea here, but they don't. Between the keywords and the ads, human beings read copy and make decisions.
Searchers will be able to tell the difference between good content and bad. This strategy is all about reducing the costs of content production, without recognizing that only quality content--that is, the words people read--can be monetized in the long run.
Thanks for your article, I blogged on it here: http://bit.ly/6pox3T
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dum stupid aol
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