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Comment by Samuel_Michon | Hacker News Reader

For those who haven't read it yet, AOL's "Master Plan" for its blogs and news sites:

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.

Every time AOL buys another site, I mourn.

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In other words "content farm". But since it will be done by "leading" blogs it will be considered an ok thing to do. Makes perfect sense, huffpo and TC was never too far from being a content farm. These sites are rarely about quality but quantity. They often rewrite news they find in their rss feed.

I said it before and I'll say it again: take TechCrunch as it currently exists, bolt-on a section for high-end electronics reviews, and you'd goose their revenues without any actual human who reads TechCrunch noticing. (The reviews rank based on on-page optimization plus the earned trust of TechCrunch, and the eCPM would be out of this world relative to any article TechCrunch publishes.)

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.

Two things here!

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.

"Quality is Job 3!"

(For those of you old enough to remember the Ford "quality" commercials.)

As a quick counterpoint: I'm curious how much you pay directly for the quality writing/journalism/investigative reporting that you consume each day? So far, journalism knows only two business models: direct sales or ad revenue. The first is dying/dead, and until someone invents a new business model for content producers, expect this to be the new reality moving forward.

I pay for my digital newspaper subscription. I pay to read stories (McSweeney's Small Chair) online. I use the tip jar on blogs I like and I buy their merchandise. I'm also planning to get into Kindle Singles [1] (I just don't like Amazon's proprietary ebook format, I'm hoping another etailer comes up with something similar using ePub).

So no, I don't think direct sales are dead and I'm willing to pay not to see ads.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=2486013011

Well, good thing that these businesses know that Samuel_Michon is just one data point, and what he does doesn't necessarily reflect the majority of the market.

Not every business chases the majority of the market, and aforementioned businesses do just fine. I'm convinced there's always money to be made offering quality content, without having to rely solely on selling ad space.

Probably true, but the money to be made is probably less than what can be made by catering to the 80% of people who buy supermarket tabloids and are influenced enough by the ads therein to drive the ad supported economy...

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