AOL Hell: An AOL Content Slave Speaks Out

[TalkingDog]

It's just about what you imagine

http://thefastertimes.com/news/2011/06/16/aol-hell-an-aol-content-slave-speaks-out/

I was given eight to ten article assignments a night, writing about television shows that I had never seen before. AOL would send me short video clips, ranging from one-to-two minutes in length — clips from “Law & Order,” “Family Guy,” “Dancing With the Stars,” the Grammys, and so on and so forth… My job was then to write about them. But really, my job was to lie. My job was to write about random, out-of-context video clips, while pretending to the reader that I had watched the actual show in question. AOL knew I hadn’t watched the show. The rate at which they would send me clips and then expect articles about them made it impossible to watch all the shows — or to watch any of them, really.

That alone was unethical. But what happened next was painful. My “ideal” turn-around time to produce a column started at thirty-five minutes, then was gradually reduced to half an hour, then twenty-five minutes. Twenty-five minutes to research and write about a show I had never seen — and this twenty-five minute period included time for formatting the article in the AOL blogging system, and choosing and editing a photograph for the article. Errors were inevitably the result. But errors didn’t matter; or rather, they didn’t matter for my bosses.

snip

And since I wrote for AOL TV, my words doubly didn’t matter. The entire purpose of my columns was to get the reader to click on the “Read More” link: when this happened, a video would automatically start to play; this was a video that we had added our own advertisements to — ads for Ford and Match.com and McDonalds and so on. This practice is debatedly illegal; but that’s fine — after all, AOL has taken part in many illegal activities before. Inserting our own ads into other people’s videos was how we made our money, and that was the entire purpose of our writing: to get readers to click on the video that led to the ad. Of all the shows that we featured, only the “Conan” show rebelled, pointing out that we were stealing their content and inserting our own ads. There wasn’t much writing about “Conan” after that.

[MrScorpio]

1. It's all about clicks and cash...

Facts and truth be damned, when it comes to that quest for the Almighty Dollar.

[sakabatou]

2. I knew it was evil!

[PoliticAverse]

3. AOL is still in business?... n/t

[tinrobot]

4. They just bought the Huffington Post

Kinda makes you wonder about the quality of that rag.

[TalkingDog]

11. My first thought too.

Selling out should be made much more difficult than it is.

[TheWraith]

21. The HuffPost operates on a similar premise of abusing and exploiting writers.

Instead of unrealistic deadlines, they just expect them to work for free.

[NYC_SKP]

26. I try to encourage posters here to NOT link to Huffington Post. Usually...

...it's possible to find the source article that HuffPost uses, (in their very own article) and post that URL instead.

Fuck Huffington Post and AOL.

grrrr.

[rocktivity]

5. I'll never forgive them for keeping people off the actual Internet

until they'd developed their own browser. Once I caught on, I dumped them.

x(
rocktivity

[kelly1mm]

6. "Slave", really? Not getting paid? Can't stop writing? Don't deminish the word. nt

[bertman]

25. Good response, kelly1mm, but it's 'diminish'.

[XanaDUer]

7. "Content Farms"

the new, 21-st century sweatshop.

[XanaDUer]

8. How to get around finding content farms

when you search:

You have probably run into content farms without even realizing it. What's that, you ask? A content farm is a web site that has large quantities of low-quality text, often written by poorly-paid freelancers. The content is designed to be search-engine friendly and to generate large numbers of page-views, which leads to revenue from advertising on the page. (For examples of content farms, see www.ehow.com, www.123people.com and www.allexperts.com.) Often, when I am researching a topic, I find a number of articles from content farms on the first page of search results. Fortunately, we now have a couple of ways to avoid encountering content farm manure.

First, consider using Google's Domain Blocker. It's still in development, so some features are still changing, but here's how it works. First, you need to be signed in to Google and using the google.com site. In the search results page, if you click on a link and then use the browser BACK button you'll see a new option for that hit: Block all results. If you don't like what you saw on that page and don't want that site to show up in any other future search results, click that link. You can also manually block any unwanted domains by going to www.google.com/reviews/t.

http://www.batesinfo.com/Writing/Archive/Archive/mar2011.html

[Le Taz Hot]

9. Thank you.

This is especially popular with ancestry sites -- EVERYTHING brings you back to Ancestry.com. It also happens when I'm searching recipes. Now I know how to deal with it.

[XanaDUer]

10. You're welcome

I get so sick of seeing the same old crap on page after page after page...

[arikara]

12. I did not know that... I never pay attention to the ads anyhow though

The problem is that Google is just as bad, or worse in their own way. I use Ixquick for a search engine, I'm happy with the results I get and they don't track you and save your searches in a big database like Google does. The only time I use google is when I briefly want to use a specific feature of theirs.

I suspect that Firefox probably has a plugin to block domains, they have good popup blockers and privacy add ons.

[alp227]

13. leave the period out of the google address, that's a good find right there though nt

[DesertDiamond]

14. The incremental shortening of turnaround time resonates with my knowledge and experiences...

I worked as a medical transcriptionist and we were paid by the line. When I started in the field, a transcriptionist who worked fast could make a decent living. Then came the creeping incremental reductions -- whenever it looked like transcriptionists were cranking out work fast enough to make a nice living, they would reduce the per-line pay or stop paying us for things, like headers or footers. If a new software came out to help us crank the work out faster, they would immediately reduce our pay some more. A friend who is a union steward told me this is common for piecework. Migrant farm workers, for instance were paid x amount per bushel of vegetables picked. Then when they got good and fast at it, they were told they would now have to pick two bushels to make the same amount. And so on. We should have unions for any job paid by piecework. Otherwise, the worker gets ripped off a little at a time.

[zentrum]

15. Exactly like Huffpo today

Click a read more--get an ad.

[Capitalocracy]

16. You think writing about TV is immoral? SEO articles commonly contain medical advice!

Written by people who have no idea what the hell they're talking about!

How do I know? I've done it. I didn't last long because I insisted on taking the time to do the research necessary to not give people bad advice (which in the end really meant always including "when in doubt, see a doctor")

[Dreamer Tatum]

17. Having trouble giving a shit

Getting paid for writing uninformed, potentially misleading things about a fictional, animated television show?

Boo hoo.

Seriously - how many threads have there EVER been, EVER, about people incensed by inaccurate internet blurbs about TV shows?

[Capitalocracy]

18. See post 16

it's not a big deal for TV shows, but there are similar SEO articles giving advice on lots of topics, like medical advice, financial advice, all kinds of things

[Dreamer Tatum]

19. My point remains the same.

If you get your medical advice from AOL, without reading the disclaimers, well...you're asking for it.

[daleo]

23. Or you are to poor to see a doctor. n/t

[Capitalocracy]

24. It's not just AOL that does it, it's all over the internets

and very few of them have disclaimers

[Mimosa]

20. The computer revolution is a bizarre mix of good and bad.

Excellent truth telling there.

Thanks for the topic, Talking Dog.

[Anakin Skywalker]

22. No wonder AOL is so full of videos lately. Very little actual, original news articles.

It's also a shame they bought HuffPost. I noticed that the number of rightwing troll comments have increased by a lot on HuffPost stories since AOL's purchase, and that is reflective of the general readership/users of AOL.