Eh, Joanna's a good writer but she's not really that good on the podcast. I'd prefer Myriam Joire (tnkgrl) instead - she's very entertaining on the Mobile podcast and would make a good compliment to Josh and Nilay.
AOL seems like a flaming jet plane rapidly heading towards the ground. They keep thinking that you can use cash to create a parachute, but it seems not to work.
An average of $13 of revenue per post doesn't exactly fill one with optimism. If they were paying the going rate for writers, they'd be making a loss..
That's for blog posts. The point was that news is much more profitable for them than blogs, and that's why the people who blog there don't make that much.
$9 eCPM (per ad, not even per page)? If they can seriously get that for run of the mill non-niche content, that's where their real skill lies. There are plenty of part-time bloggers (including many HN users) who could make a serious chunk of change earning $9 eCPM even on their personal blogs..
unfortunately Engadget is owned by AOL, and AOL has proved an unwilling partner in this site’s evolution.... AOL has its heart in the wrong place with content.... AOL sees content as a commodity it can sell ads against. That ... doesn’t promote good journalism or even good entertainment, and it doesn’t allow an ambitious team like the one I know and love at Engadget to thrive.
Most full-time, high volume writers or journalists are used to this - it's not a question of self respect any more than questioning the self respect of someone who works in WalMart. You can still take pride in (and enjoy) your work even if it's under someone else's direction.
On a much smaller scale, I, a small-time 'problogger', do the same. Monitoring trends, tracking things I know will be coming up.. For example, it's in my calendar that next Thursday it'll be 18 years since Matz started to develop Ruby - you can be sure I'll be writing about it ;-)
Sure, it certainly helps to pay attention to trends and write on what people care about, but when your entire operation is centered around writing articles with the sole intention of attracting page views, you know there's something wrong. While I agree that you can take pride in your work even under someone else's direction, AOL's plan seems to involve mindless "slave-driven" writing - something I'm sure Paul is sick of and that I would be sick of as well.
There's a difference between maximizing profit and making enough to run a respectable operation.
The better websites will post a lot of short, less than stellar articles to get search traffic and revenue, but still post good articles regularly. Ars Technica is a good example.
Ars Technica does have stellar articles and they are not so short... I just think that it is sad that the main strategy is maximizing profit through page views over quality and creative writing... maybe I am crazy but that's my point view...maybe the actual system is broken...
