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Comment by benologist | Hacker News Reader

Considering the AOL Way highlights them as a glorified content farm (that everyone scrambled to say doesn't apply to them leaving approximately nobody it does apply to) I don't blame them for leaving.

Churning out content on w/e the stats say is trending would be a shit way for a writer to express their creativity.

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(that everyone scrambled to say doesn't apply to them leaving approximately nobody it does apply to)

Actually, Paul Miller made no bones about the fact that AOL was the reason he left Engadget. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2238175

Actually, Topolsky said before that Engadget is not affected by the AOL Way.

Arianna Huffington (the new Cheif Editor of all AOL content sites) said she won't be messing with TechCrunch and Engadget.

Engadget are a textbook example of it and quite likely where the entire plan originated.

Their most recent article other than the resignation letter:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/12/htc-droid-incredible-2-sm...

- 3 sentence summary gives them a strong chance of hitting their rev per article goals.

- 3 internal links and a shitton of tags to reinforce their SEO

- 1 solitary little external link at the bottom to minimize the SEO juice they leak

If your job involves tagging summaries with "Android 2.2" and "Android2.2" then you're working the Aol Way™, even if it's not official.

I've always found the tags on Engadget to be completely useless, and I was wondering why they even waste their time with them. SEO makes a lot of sense.

sidenote- Blogsmith, the AOL blog editor, does the tag optimization for spacing / hyphens automatically.

I get that the AOL Way is kind of insulting to the writers, but it is really that big of a deal? Tons of posts, SEO bait, more video content seems like the status quo for nearly all mainstream blogs, even those without a big corporate overlord. I kind of assumed all the Engadget folk saw the AOL Way as a formalization what they were doing already.

I imagine it's every bit as exciting as cloning the little instantly-viral websites and apps that pop up - probably get paid, but making sites/apps stops being an outlet for your creativity.

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