Paul Miller Leaves Engadget/AOL - Cites AOL Way Issues | Hacker News Reader

Paul Miller Leaves Engadget/AOL - Cites AOL Way Issues

pauljmiller.com

62 pointsmoses140028 comments

I wonder if gdgt.com will have something to announce soon.

AOL seems like a flaming jet plane rapidly heading towards the ground. They keep thinking that you can use cash to create a parachute, but it seems not to work.

Good for potential acquisitions though!

Someone recently did the math on the "economics" of The Huffington Post (a recent AOL acquisition): http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/the-econ...

An average of $13 of revenue per post doesn't exactly fill one with optimism. If they were paying the going rate for writers, they'd be making a loss..

"picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates" might as well be the Web 2.0 motto.

They probably make most of their money on the outlier posts that go big.

I agree, but that $13 figure was their calculation for the mean. The median is only $3. Lucky they're not paying much ;-)

See this page: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-aol-way#-18

The cost of a premium article is $250? The writers must get paid a lot less than I imagine.

$9 eCPM (per ad, not even per page)? If they can seriously get that for run of the mill non-niche content, that's where their real skill lies. There are plenty of part-time bloggers (including many HN users) who could make a serious chunk of change earning $9 eCPM even on their personal blogs..

Pretty interesting article. Tim Armstrong is clearly insane, deeply evil, and yet also an idiot.

That's for blog posts. The point was that news is much more profitable for them than blogs, and that's why the people who blog there don't make that much.

"Good for potential acquisitions though!"

Only if they get paid in cash...

I believe I mentioned that word.

I'm more upset by the fact that he wont be on the Engadget Podcast. Those 3 make up probably some of the best dynamics for podcasts.

Unquestionable. Great chemistry. They should consider bringing Joanna fulltime for Paul.

Eh, Joanna's a good writer but she's not really that good on the podcast. I'd prefer Myriam Joire (tnkgrl) instead - she's very entertaining on the Mobile podcast and would make a good compliment to Josh and Nilay.

unfortunately Engadget is owned by AOL, and AOL has proved an unwilling partner in this site’s evolution.... AOL has its heart in the wrong place with content.... AOL sees content as a commodity it can sell ads against. That ... doesn’t promote good journalism or even good entertainment, and it doesn’t allow an ambitious team like the one I know and love at Engadget to thrive.

This reminds me strongly of this old, but still very relevant post which explains why textfiles.com doesn't have advertising: http://www.textfiles.com/thoughts/advertising.html

This is very disappointing. Paul is a great writer and a great voice on the engadget podcast.

I'm still angry at AOL from 10 years ago, when they kept stealing money out of my bank account - after I had cancelled my subscription.

Why are they getting in to journalism? Did the government finally outlaw AOL's previous business model or what?

They're trying to ride the SEO wave before search engines become self-aware and make slaves out of humanity.

I know it doesn't mean much, but that AOL and this AOL are really two entirely different companies for all intents and purposes.

So basically they're just a real-time Demand Media.

Ugh. This looks painful http://www.businessinsider.com/the-aol-way#-16

No wonder he quit. Any self-respecting writer wouldn't want to stay on.

Most full-time, high volume writers or journalists are used to this - it's not a question of self respect any more than questioning the self respect of someone who works in WalMart. You can still take pride in (and enjoy) your work even if it's under someone else's direction.

On a much smaller scale, I, a small-time 'problogger', do the same. Monitoring trends, tracking things I know will be coming up.. For example, it's in my calendar that next Thursday it'll be 18 years since Matz started to develop Ruby - you can be sure I'll be writing about it ;-)

Sure, it certainly helps to pay attention to trends and write on what people care about, but when your entire operation is centered around writing articles with the sole intention of attracting page views, you know there's something wrong. While I agree that you can take pride in your work even under someone else's direction, AOL's plan seems to involve mindless "slave-driven" writing - something I'm sure Paul is sick of and that I would be sick of as well.

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