As creators of actual good content, we're pretty critical of content farms like Huffington Post or Answers.com or the rest of them - if HuffPo steals a fair-use snippet from our site it will rank higher in Google than the actual article, though not because their content is better but simply because they learned how to game the Google algorithm.
Well, who can we criticize when HuffPo socked away over $300 million from AOL doing what it does? But at least a few people have been disgruntled at the content farm mentality - though not because they had the sort-of sense of entitlement journalists get about how media exists to keep them employed.
No, this person is disgruntled because “The AOL Way” - content farming - destroyed their dream of being paid to write.
The quality of the words don't matter, in the world of content farms, as much as volume and the nature of the words chosed. Lady Gaga is a good thing to write about, on AOL, but it doesn't really matter what is written.
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.
And I guess there is no chance AOL is giving us $300 million after linking to Oliver Miller's piece.
AOL Hell: An AOL Content Slave Speaks Out - Oliver Miller, The Faster Times
