AOL buying HuffPost for $315M — ugh

Really? For $315 million?

Ugh in many ways. Among them:
1. This is surely another case of overvaluing a social media-type company. (I'm convinced we're due for Net Bubble 2.0 to crash in about 4-5 years.)
2. AOL + The Greek Goddess? Isn't this going to be like the wedding of a craptacular failure with a still-to-be-realized craptacular failure?

The story says the money was really just a "finder's fee," if you will, to get Arianna Huffington's alleged genius to AOL.

Well, she's about as overvalued, IMO, as is HuffPost.

Beyond value issues, I dread the idea of a B-grade Oprah now having AOL as a vehicle to "brand" herself.

And, this all said, will the bloggers which produce much of HuffPost's comment for free now want to get paid for their work, if the company is worth $315 million?

Eventually, as more and more people realize that the fragmented Internet doesn't guarantee you 15 minutes of fame any more, the novelty of writing online for the hell of it will wear off for at least some.

Per Business Insider, this move is part of a larger AOL master plan. And, that master plan sounds like it involves even more use of Examiner-type writing serfs, probably more efforts to crack/bollix up Google/Bing/Yahoo search rankings, likely some AOL search engine effort and more.

An example from "The AOL Way":

• AOL tells its editors to decide what topics to cover based on four considerations: traffic potential, revenue potential, edit quality and turn-around time.
• AOL asks its editors to decide whether to produce content based on "the profitability consideration."he documents reveal that AOL is, when the story calls for it, willing to boost traffic by 5 to 10% with search ads and other "paid media."
• AOL site leaders are expected to have eight ideas for packages that could generate at least $1 million in revenue on hand at all times.
• In-house AOL staffers are expected to write five to 10 stories per day.
• AOL knows its sites are too dependent on traffic from AOL.com, and it wants its editors to fix the problem by posting more frequently, with more emphasis on getting pageviews.

Some of the topics on that "AOL Way" document make clear it wants to go down some sort of Examiner-type route. So, no, free bloggers at HuffPost, you will NOT get a cut of Arianna's $315 million. That said, it's called WordPress or Blogger. Start your own blog and sign up for Google AdSense. A buck, while working for yourself, isn't that better than zero while working for an ugly corporation?

Salon's Scott Rosenberg has more on this, based on the participants' backgrounds:

Maybe Huffington and Armstrong will prove a great team: The queen of low-cost SEO-driven content paired with the guy who built the Google ad machine that made SEO-driven content pay.

But he goes on to express his doubts:

Fitting in with that? People who think The Greek Goddess is "progressive" (and she really isn't), should note carefully that politics, especially opinion/commentary, will NOT be a big feature with the merger.

Salon spells out the options:

People think of Huffington Post as the leading popular liberal-Democratic news site. Huffington is now at least suggesting that the progressive point of view isn't a part of what she'll be pursuing at AOL. "Ms. Huffington said her politics would have no bearing on how she ran the new business," says the New York Times story. Really? This strikes me as strange, disingenuous, and about as credible as Roger Ailes claiming that Fox is not a partisan-driven institution.

One possibility is, Huffington is just saying what the corporate script requires and actually the plan is to position AOL as a sort of Democratic alternative to Fox News/Drudge -- which I think would be a really interesting move. I have to assume Arianna has big TV ambitions. ...

The other, more likely possibility is that this whole thing is about the money, the investors needed to cash out, HuffPo's numbers weren't looking good enough for an IPO, and Huffington is basically improvising. She'll spend a couple years at AOL and then move on. This means that, in 2011, Huffington Post will be playing the same role in relation to AOL that AOL played in relation to Time Warner back in 2000.

So, you serfs who've been writing for free on that issue, you've got yet more reason to quit.

A friend of mine pointed out that AOL's Armstrong has been doing this for a year, already. What he gets from HuffPost? The stable of Examiner/Demand Media serfs he didn't have before. Only thing is, the pay, if any, will be Examinder-style and based solely on blog post hits — no advance money.

So, congrats, HuffPost serfs — you just got sold like cattle. At least it's likely you'll be primarily SEO-gaming entertainment news and consumer tech, and what's left of allegedly political commentary at HuffPost will fade further away.

Dan Lyons also doesn't like it, and compares the HuffPost serfs to Ben-Hur's galley slave compadres.

But, it may not be just blog posts.

One other thing, that will make this even more craptactular? With Memeorandum, etc., now aggregating Tweets, not just blog posts ... I think you can follow all the ways in which that could go. And why stop at Twitter? If Ted Armstrong is really going to go balls to the wall, he's either going to:
1. Work with Facebook;
2. Try to "crack" FB in some way;
3. Work with MySpace;
4. Buy MySpace from Murdoch.

Oh, another question about the HuffPost-AOL merger — will this new conglomerate spam CareerBuilder and Monster with as many help wanted ads as does Examiner?

And, finally, a rhetorical question to people like David Dayen at FDL who touts HuffPost's progressive bona fides — how does a company with a business model like that (not to mention its repeated plagiarism) qualify as "progressive"? In a neolib world, where holding the right positions on one or two social issues qualifies, maybe so.