How Content Slaves work
By Techgirl

While AOL hasn’t had much success in India, it is huge in America.  Apart from other valuable properties, AOL owns blue chip online sites like Huffington Post, Engadget and arguably America's most powerful tech blog Techcrunch.  Quite separate to quality sites like Techcrunch which pay writers very well, AOL hires a number of low paid freelancers to churn out thousands of articles a day for their main site. The idea is that these slave content writers would write up catchy headlines and snippets which would grab the eyeballs. And if readers come to the AOL site, so would advertisors.

Now, an AOL writer has spilt the beans on how these slave content writers work.  Note that a number of other online companies, including at least 2 Email giants, do the same. Some online media in India are equally bad.

AOL Content Slave Oliver Miller’s article has all the elements of lives of overworked and underpaid writers.  These including writing 8 to 10 articles in a night about TV shows they had never watched.  How was it done?  Watching extracts for a few minutes and writing it up as if the whole show had been carefully reviewed.  Oliver wrote about how Editorial Integrity is at the bottom of the official AOL priorities.

“
With the recent release of a top-secret business document from AOL, things have been clarified.  “The AOL Way,” as the document is called, lays the whole plan bare — long flowcharts, an insane number of meaningless buzzwords… the works. One slide is titled “Decide What Topics to Cover.” It then lists “Considerations” from top to bottom. “Traffic Potential” is the top consideration, followed by “Revenue/Profit” and then “Turnaround Time.” “Editorial Integrity” is at the bottom.
“

Sadly, this is the life of many writers in most countries.

Techgoss note:  Techgirl is a senior Tech journalist who reports on the IT, KPO and KPO Sectors for a leading media house.  In her spare time, she dabbles in satire in her blog techgirltalk.blogspot.com.  Techgirl has been ejected from Twitter for satirizing an Indian Minister.  Her satire blog has links to her Times of India interview detailing her being kicked out of Twitter, and then being invited back