AOL Looking to Hire Hundreds of Journalists, Editors and Videographers

Sounds like AOL will be doing their part to help the economy this year. They are focused on being able to churn out massive amounts of content all in-house and will be hiring hundreds of new content creators. David Eun, president of AOL’s media and studios division, studied the numbers and came to the conclusion that this is the most profitable route for the company to take. Yahoo just recently reached a similar conclusion, which was part of the reason they acquired Associated Content.

“Our mission at this company is to be the world’s largest producer of high-quality content, period. The content driving our traffic is home-grown, and 80% of it is now produced by folks on the AOL payroll.” – David Eun, president of AOL’s media and studios division

AOL is already home to 500 full-time editorial employees and content creators. Eun says that this number could double in the coming year depending on the marketplace and that AOL will be “the largest net hirer of journalists in the world next year.” The goal of this operation is to attract advertisers. The content operation involves over 100 brands, which will be reorganized into 17 separate content networks.

They’ve done their homework and have not only represented all types of content that attracts users, but also content that advertisers want to spend money on. These huge networks will range in topics from finance and sports to music and communities like AOL Latino and Black Voices.

500 more full-time employees is apparently not enough to turn the company from a dial-up ISP into a media giant. AOL is also looking to expand their network of 40,000 freelance contributors. As part of this, they are working on a system that will judge the value of a piece based on traffic, visit length, and the ad revenue associated with it.

It seems that both Yahoo and AOL have chosen the same path. AOL already has a base of writers to work with while Yahoo had to get most of theirs through acquisition. It remains to be seen if simply flooding the web with content and throwing ads on top of it will be a profitable strategy for either one, but the strategy of monetizing other people’s content has worked just fine for most major players on the web to this point.

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Rahsheen has been a certified geek since before it was the thing to do. He started programming and tinkering in the 4th grade. Now, Rahsheen mostly writes on various sites about technology trends in social media and mobile. . He is also a musician, singer, rapper, writer, and producer. @rahsheen - +Rahsheen Porter - coachrah.com
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