"I have no idea how any of this will affect TechCrunch. So far AOL has kept true to its promise not to interfere with our editorial and there’s no reason to suppose that will change under Huffington. That said, it would be idiotic to think that our parents’ content strategy – particularly the SEO stuff – won’t have annoying trickle-down consequences for all of us in the long term."
[edit- Corrected source of the quote.]
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-aol-way
AOL tells its editors to decide what topics to cover based on four considerations:
traffic potential, revenue potential, edit quality and turn-around time.
AOL asks its editors to decide whether to produce content based on
"the profitability consideration."
The documents reveal that AOL is, when the story calls for it, willing to boost
traffic by 5 to 10% with search ads and other "paid media."
AOL site leaders are expected to have eight ideas for packages that could
generate at least $1 million in revenue on hand at all times.
In-house AOL staffers are expected to write five to 10 stories per day.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1734020
Traditional publishers are cottoning to this tactic, too.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects...
Think like that, but 100x more aggressive. Will it degrade the NYT brand a little bit? Meh, it is the NYT: they'll still be the world's preeminent newspaper, they'll still make money from advertisements, and they'll still be able to credibly threaten Google with PRmageddon if Big Daddy G gets uppity about it.
1) Tech Crunch doesn't really operate in an eCPM world, they operate in a "real" CPM world with advertisers that are largely paying for branding rather than conversions.
2) The CPMs on electronics reviews (high end or otherwise) are significantly lower than the CPMs on "content a CTO would want to read".
SEO for a publisher really only serves the purpose of getting organic traffic to more premium ad campaigns, much like paid traffic (where a publisher buys CPC ads). The catch with this is that inbound search engine traffic needs to roughly match the demographics you've sold ads for or you end up shooting yourself in the foot. You can do short term traffic buys to inflate ad views with otherwise shitty traffic, but only rarely and it's still dangerous.
(For those of you old enough to remember the Ford "quality" commercials.)
So no, I don't think direct sales are dead and I'm willing to pay not to see ads.