14 DAY TRIAL // As AOL nears its spin off from Time Warner, which will be in a little over a week now, it's talking more and more about the future. So far, most plans haven't really been all that groundbreaking and the company has been saying for a while now that it wants to become a content powerhouse reaching into any niche it believes could be profitable. Now CEO Tim Armstrong has detailed some more plans the company has in this segment and it's a surprising turn for the company though, in hindsight, perhaps not a totally unexpected one. The CEO told the Wall Street Journal that it planned to develop a hybrid system for creating news and content, part machine part human, which would push out content on the topics most likely to be popular at that particular time.
The system is designed to create the content which will bring in the most readers, in turn generating the most advertising money. An algorithm will track breaking news stories and popular topics and will determine which subject is likely to generate the most revenue. It will then present these findings to the company's editors, which are at about 500 at the moment, but AOL has been on a hiring spree in this front. Then, they will chose the ones they'll push through to the next step, sending out article requests through a new web site it has set up to any freelance editor willing to write it.
The site isn't up yet and the system isn't up and running yet, but it should be going live and scaling up in the next year. Anyone will be able to choose a subject to their liking or close to their area of expertise and then write an article about it. After submitting it, it goes through the company's full-time editors for fact-checking and proof reading and finally ends up online. The freelancers get paid, either upfront or with revenue sharing, depending on the subject and how well the article does.
This may seem a little far fetched and a bit too experimental, especially for an established company like AOL. But, there are already a couple of companies, Demand Media and Associated Content, seeing massive growth in revenue, in traffic and in content generation, employing a very, very similar system. Armstrong should know, it's said that he has a 20 percent stake in the latter. These companies use existing avenues, like YouTube, or their own sites to push the content, but none have the sheer mass AOL still enjoys. More details are bound to come out as the company rolls out the system but if it can pull it off AOL could very well become one of the biggest media companies in the world.