AOL Begins Culling Content Sites
AOL will begin rolling out its plans to overhaul its panoply of content sites as early as today, a key part of its integration with the Huffington Post, sources familiar with the situation said. — AOL CEO Tim Armstrong will be sending out an internal memo …
Context & Ripple Effects
The cull is the execution phase of a pivot AOL has been telegraphing since it hired 'hundreds' of journalists for its content division in June 2010 — a bet on volume that CEO Tim Armstrong is now visibly unwinding through the Huffington Post, which AOL acquired in February 2011.
The sequence was laid out in advance: Armstrong said in early March there was 'no way around' layoffs once the deal closed, sources reported several hundred employees would be cut, and by mid-March even TechCrunch had been asked to tone down its content. Today's site-by-site overhaul, delivered via internal memo, is where those warnings land.
First-order effects
- Editors and staff on the sites marked for closure or consolidation lose their properties immediately, with the several-hundred-person layoff wave reported on March 9 now hitting specific mastheads rather than staying abstract.
- Armstrong's memo formalizes Huffington Post editorial control across AOL's owned network — confirmed by the earlier directive that TechCrunch tone down its content — meaning acquired blogs answer to a new editorial standard from today.
Second-order effects
- Surviving acquired properties like TechCrunch and Engadget are pushed toward the Huffington Post's traffic- and SEO-driven playbook, trading editorial independence for distribution scale inside one combined media company.
- Advertisers who bought against AOL's long tail of niche sites get fewer, larger inventory buckets, shifting pricing power to the flagship brands and forcing rival content networks to defend their own sprawl.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the portal era's strategy of owning dozens of thin vertical sites gives way to consolidated flagship-brand portfolios, making editorial voice a cost center that acquisitions are expected to rationalize rather than preserve.
- A rumored Outside.In acquisition, reported in March 2011 but unconfirmed, hints at where this leads: buying technology to automate hyper-local coverage instead of staffing it, extending the same logic from culling sites to replacing them.
The trend: Legacy portals are converting sprawling owned-content networks into a few scaled flagship brands, with post-acquisition integration — not editorial judgment — deciding which mastheads survive.