AOL Seed

» see seed.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

None of this reached me, and it could not have. Seed was a machine for manufacturing English-language pages that would rank in American search results and sell against American advertising, and the searches I was doing in 2010 were in a language it never processed. Turkey had its own content farms by then, working the same logic in Turkish, and neither side of that arrangement knew the other existed.

AOL launched Seed in 2009 as an open submission platform. Writers and photographers signed up, took assignments, and got paid per piece, with rates that ran from five dollars for something small to three hundred for something substantial. The output flowed into AOL's network of sites, which at that point numbered in the dozens and split subjects like food and celebrity gossip out under separate brand names.

To run it AOL hired Saul Hansell, who had spent seventeen years at the New York Times as a reporter and then as the editor of its Bits blog. That hire was the argument in miniature: a serious newspaper journalist would supervise a system that generated content at industrial volume, and the seriousness would keep the volume honest. Hansell's phrasing for it was that Seed took the freelance model that had always existed and used the internet to make it far more efficient.

The showpiece came in March 2010 at South by Southwest, where Seed put five hundred freelancers onto roughly two thousand performing bands and produced a profile of nearly every act at the festival. No newsroom on earth was going to do that. It was also the high point, and it happened about four months into the thing's public life.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how the machine worked ~

The assignments were the product, not the writers. AOL knew which search queries it was losing and could describe, in a brief, exactly the page that would win them back. Seed turned that brief into a job posting, a few thousand freelancers saw it, and whoever filed something usable got paid. The company had about three thousand contributors moving through the system at its widest point.

This was the same idea Demand Media was running at larger scale and Associated Content had been running longer, and everyone involved understood that the economics only closed if the cost per page stayed under the lifetime ad revenue of that page. Five dollars bought you a page. The question nobody at any of these companies answered convincingly was what happened when the search engine changed its mind about what a good page was.

~ the memo ~

In February 2011 a document called The AOL Way leaked. It was an internal deck laying out how the content operation should choose what to make, and it put traffic projections and search demand ahead of editorial judgment in a way that was legible to anyone who read a slide. It became, briefly, the standard citation for what the content farm era looked like from inside.

Google's Panda update landed later the same month and cut the ranking of exactly the kind of page this economy produced. Between the memo and the algorithm, the model stopped being defensible in public and stopped working in the numbers, in roughly that order.

~ the freelancers ~

AOL bought the Huffington Post on 7 February 2011 for $315 million and closed the deal in March. That purchase came with a working content operation and an editor-in-chief the company intended to put in charge of everything, which left Seed as a solution to a problem AOL had just bought its way out of.

Seed was moved into the Advertising.com group in May 2011 and reframed as a business-to-business product. Hansell left AOL that November for Betaworks. Nobody published a shutdown announcement and no outlet reported a date, which is its own kind of information about how much the company had come to care. By 2012 it was gone.

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