4 ms·

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.

• petercooper 16y ago
  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-economics-of-blogging-and-the-huffington-post/ 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..
  • ojbyrne 16y ago
    "picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates" might as well be the Web 2.0 motto.
  • mkr-hn 16y ago
    They probably make most of their money on the outlier posts that go big.
    • petercooper 16y ago
      I agree, but that $13 figure was their calculation for the mean. The median is only $3. Lucky they're not paying much ;-)
  • kenjackson 16y ago
    See this page: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-aol-way#-18 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.
    • petercooper 16y ago
      $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..
    • ojbyrne 16y ago
      Pretty interesting article. Tim Armstrong is clearly insane, deeply evil, and yet also an idiot.
  • chc 16y ago
    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.
• larrik 16y ago
  "Good for potential acquisitions though!" Only if they get paid in cash...
  • ojbyrne 16y ago
    I believe I mentioned that word.