AOL Hell: An AOL Content Slave Speaks Out | News

13/02/12 11:52AOL Hell: An AOL Content Slave Speaks Out | News

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AOL Hell: An AOL Content Slave Speaks OutI got the job through a friend. The job was this: Iwould write about TV for a section of the AOLTelevision website. In theory, this sounded great.In exchange for writing about The Simpsonsand other TV shows, I would be making $35,000 ayear (which sounded like a shockingly largeamount of money to me at the time; and sadly, itstill does). I performed this job for less than a yearbefore I was fired. During that period, I wrotemore than 350,000 words for AOL.

Youd think itd be fun, wouldnt you? Writingabout The Simpsons and such for money. Its every slackers dream job. And I wasmaking $35,000! I remember that I crossed a certain threshold, soon after I got mynew job: I stopped buying Sensor brand razor blades, and upgraded to SchickQuattro brand razor blades. This was exciting. The Quattro had four blades in-stead of the measly two blades of the Sensor, plus a sideburn trimmer on the back,plus it vibrated to supposedly aid the shaving process. This was the big time.

Some people struggle to write for their whole lives, and only dream of ever gettingpaid for it. And here was I was, Mr. Big-Shot-Razor-Blade-Man, getting paid a realsalary. I could sit at home and write in my pajamas while eating take-out food; andthats what I did. I was so grateful.

But this was part of the problem. We by which I mean me and my fellow employ-ees were all so grateful. Which allowed us to ignore or willfully overlook cer-tain problems. Such as the fact that AOL editors forced us to work relentless hours.Or the fact that we were paid to lie, actually instructed to lie by our bosses.

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I was given eight to ten article assignments a night, writing about television showsthat I had never seen before. AOL would send me short video clips, ranging fromone-to-two minutes in length clips from Law & Order, Family Guy, DancingWith the Stars, the Grammys, and so on and so forth My job was then to writeabout them. But really, my job was to lie. My job was to write about random, out-of-



context video clips, while pretending to the reader that I had watched the actualshow in question. AOL knew I hadnt watched the show. The rate at which theywould send me clips and then expect articles about them made it impossible to watchall the shows or to watch any of them, really.

That alone was unethical. But what happened next was painful. My ideal turn-around time to produce a column started at thirty-five minutes, then was graduallyreduced to half an hour, then twenty-five minutes. Twenty-five minutes to researchand write about a show I had never seen and this twenty-five minute period in-cluded time for formatting the article in the AOL blogging system, and choosing andediting a photograph for the article. Errors were inevitably the result. But errorsdidnt matter; or rather, they didnt matter for my bosses.

I had panic attacks; we all did. My fellow writers would fall asleep, and then wakeup in cold sweats. I worked the graveyard shift 11PM to 7 or 8AM or later buteven the AOL slaves who wrote during the day would report the same universal ex-perience. Finally falling asleep after work, they would awake with a jump, certainthat they had forgotten something certain that they hadnt produced their allottednumber of articles every thirty minutes. One night, I awoke out of a dead sleep, andjumped to my computer, and instantly began typing up an article about David Letter-man. I kept going for ten minutes, until I realized I had dreamed it all. There was noarticle to write; I was simply typing up the same meaningless phrases that we all al-ways used: LADY GAGA PANTLESS ON LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID LETTER-MAN, or some such.

Then there was the week where I only slept for about six hours over the course of fivedays a week that ended with me being so exhausted that I started having auditoryhallucinations, constantly hearing a distant ringing phone that didnt exist, or animaginary door slamming in the background.

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At the time this all seemed mysterious. AOL is a billion dollar corporation, and thefoundation of its current business model is words. So you would think that AOLmight care about the people who write these words. Or, at the very least, that theymight care about the words themselves.

But now, I am not so mystified. With the recent release of a top-secret business docu-



ment from AOL, things have been clarified. The AOL Way, as the document iscalled, lays the whole plan bare long flowcharts, an insane number of meaninglessbuzzwords the works. One slide is titled Decide What Topics to Cover. It thenlists Considerations from top to bottom. Traffic Potential is the top consideration,followed by Revenue/Profit and then Turnaround Time. Editorial Integrity isat the bottom.

Specifically, The AOL Way, is to massively increase writing production, while atthe same time cutting costs. The document reveals the same attitude that the bossesat the old Ford Motors factory had, when the assembly line was first introduced.Every week or so, the assembly-line was sped up; incrementally, barely noticeably,but the increase had a staggering, cumulative effect, and soon, those workers whocouldnt keep up found themselves standing by the wayside. If AOL could find agood way for machines to write about Lady Gaga, they would almost certainly firethe writers who remain.

When it comes to an article, what AOL cares about is the title, and the keywordsthat will make the article more likely to show up among the top results on Google.You type phrases into Google Trends, and it suggests the most popular combina-tion of words associated with that topic. You then stick those words into your title



and first paragraphs. Rinse, wash, and repeat. The article itself was just ballast.

LADY GAGA PANTLESS IN PARIS is the example given in The AOL Way in-ternal documents. Thats the best possible title. A buzz-worthy topic, a sexy result. Itmattered little if Lady Gaga was actually pantless in Paris; it only had to relate some-how to the article as a whole. The entire title could be a come-on, a tease. It mightwell turn out that Lady Gaga was neither pantless, nor in Paris at the time. The im-portant part was that the reader would click on those words to read the rest, therebyproducing ad revenue for the websites. Words didnt matter; stealing other peopleswork also didnt matter.

I still have a saved IM conversation with my boss, written after 10 months of employ-ment, when I was reaching the breaking point:

Do you guys even CARE what I write? Does it make any difference if its good orbad? I said.

Not really, was the reply.

_____

AOL has a plan. The plan involves the future; and the future, oddly enough, involveswriting. But what does it mean to write without freedom?

Part of the lack of freedom meant it was risky to criticize anyone else who workedwith AOL, which is what I did. It was a mistake on my part; a seemingly harmless er-ror brought on by exhaustion, while writing alone in my room at 3 or 4AM. At thispoint, during the course of writing my ten daily articles, I made an ironic aside abouta Hollywood star implying that he was jealous that another star had won a majoraward. It was meant to be a joke. It was meant to be ironic but of course, the Inter-net is the place where irony goes to die. My article was selected for placement on theAOL home page, which is where the Hollywood star saw it. Since I knew little aboutAOL corporate structure, I hadnt realized that this particular star had just signed amulti-million dollar contract to promote the AOL brand.

The Hollywood star was not amused. He wrote an article bitching about the stupidityof AOL, and about the stupidity of the AOL home page, and about the stupidity ofme in particular. In fact, he said that I was an eighth-degree black belt idiot. Ouch. Those words were meant to hurt. This was made all the more distressing by the fact



that I actually really enjoy the Hollywood stars work in real life, and so I had toimagine his proud, rough, gravely voice calling me an idiot in real life, over andover again.

I was called into AOLs offices in Manhattan for the first time and only time. I wasreprimanded. I was put on notice. And from then on, my days at AOL were num-bered. I wasnt fired, but a special editor was assigned to review all my articles andtweak them as needed. My new editor would change my articles and add gram-matical errors to them. Lots of grammatical errors. Its became its; their be-came there but with the horrifying result that these things were all wrong.

When I pointed this out to my bosses, they were annoyed by my complaints. Errorsdidnt matter. Grammatical errors be they major or minor didnt matter. Thebrainless peons who read the website simply wouldnt notice. What mattered wasgetting the product published.

What was happening was that words were starting not to matter. The words that wewrote didnt matter, and the words that we got in response to them definitely didntmatter.

And since I wrote for AOL TV, my words doubly didnt matter. The entire purposeof my columns was to get the reader to click on the Read More link: when thishappened, a video would automatically start to play; this was a video that we hadadded our own advertisements to ads for Ford and Match.com and McDonaldsand so on. This practice is arguably illegal; but thats fine after all, AOL has takenpart in many illegal activities before. Inserting our own ads into other peoplesvideos was how we made our money, and that was the entire purpose of our writing:to get readers to click on the video that led to the ad. Of all the shows that we fea-tured, only the Conan show rebelled, pointing out that we were stealing their con-tent and inserting our own ads. There wasnt much writing about Conan after that.



_____

Was this my destiny? Writing words in order to make gullible people be auto-forcedto watch ads? This wasnt what I wanted was it? Had I gotten a masters degree inwriting in order to do this? Even if I had, it was a destiny that I rebelled against. Butwas it what I was meant to do? No. Probably not.

And so, eventually I was fired, of course. Fired for complaining about typos and forinsulting a Hollywood star and such fired even though I routinely worked unpaidovertime and would generally log 60 or 70-hour work weeks.

Under The AOL Way a huge number of other people were fired as well. AOL washemorrhaging money. They had invested in a bad business plan, and we the poor-ly paid writers were the ones to pay. Never mind that paying us writers made upan incredibly tiny fraction of AOLs total expenditures. We were all fired anyway. Some 30% to 40% of us were fired. We received a form letter; an email form letter in-forming us that our services were no longer needed.

The most depressing aspect of the whole affair was reading the responses to this let-ter. Yes, my fellow co-workers all of them hard workers, all of them fairly poor,



all of them now fired with no unemployment (AOL paid us as independent contrac-tors, meaning that no money was provided for unemployment) these peoplewere sending out polite email responses to an automated form letter that had firedthem. I have so many great memories of working for AOL, they said. It was aprivilege to work with so many talented people. There were no replies to these re-sponses essentially, my co-workers were saying thank you to an uncaring robot. They may as well have been trying to have a conversation with the coffee maker inAOL headquarters. And many of these people had been working at AOL for years,sometimes more than a decade.

I disliked my job, but I dreaded being fired from it, and with good reason; its beenfive months since my firing now, and Ive run through my savings, and I still haventfound another full-time writing gig.

And, as much as I need the money, maybe I shouldnt. AOL is among the most egre-gious offenders but then, this isnt just an article about AOL. This is an articleabout a way of life. The AOL Way doesnt simply stand as a pattern for a majorcorporation; its the pattern of the Internet as a whole. The Internet has created morereaders than ever before in the history of the world. And yet, perversely, the actualwriter is more undervalued than ever before. Every news site that hopes tosurvive, The Faster Times included, thinks about whether their titles will show up insearch engines. In the age of Internet news, Google keywords matter. Regularold words, not so much.

Read More: The Confessions of a Summer Intern

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Oliver Miller

Oliver Miller writes for Thought Catalog, and writes a second column for The FasterTimes. ...Read more about Oliver Miller ->

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AOL Hell: An AOL Content Slave Speaks Out | News