Spalpeen

A response to Mediaite’s little piece on David Carr’s New York Times piece on AOL.

I count one link to an AOL blog property on AOL.com right now. One. That goes to ParentDish.com. Besides that there’s a permanent link to Autoblog on the top left sidebar. Every other link goes to an AOL.com news/fashion/celeb property (which I don’t count as a blog property).

AOL.com does drive a lot of traffic to its own properties. But it isn’t the reason sites under the Weblogs, Inc. umbrella (and their sister sites that run on Blogsmith) have been a success. Nor are galleries, which are used by 99% of AOL’s competitor sites. The real point the Mediaite piece hits on here is “what happens when/if AOL turns off dial-up, and it loses half its traffic to AOL.com?” Well, that hasn’t happened yet, and even if it did, it probably wouldn’t change a lot for most of AOL’s smaller spin-off properties.

I don’t know why I’ve written all this about AOL (disclosure: I used to work indirectly for the company at Weblogs, Inc.), other than to say that writing for them on a spin-off site is an amazing experience. Why? Because as a freelance writer at AOL you can work for them for 3+ years and never have to actually meet or talk to or even email someone directly employed by AOL (if you do happen to meet them, they’re usually very nice!).

Blogging for AOL in my mind equals complete editorial independence. In fact, you’re so cut off from “AOL proper” that getting a link to your blog post on AOL.com really isn’t worth the frustration and bureacracy. You get such a small and temporary gain in traffic and readership (and those @aol.com users still haven’t figured out what Caps Lock is for), that you’ll probably end up not bothering. That was certainly the case when I was there between 2005-2007, and judging by the number of AOL blog links on AOL.com, it’s probably still the case.