SeanReadsTheNews

Fortune on AOL's Failed Patch Strategy

In its more proflific days, this blog made frequent sport of traditional publishers bemoaning the fact that there is no way to make money online, which it finds kind of hilarious given that Google and Facebook are two of the most highly valued companies.

Say what you want about AOL, at least its leaders never made that claim.  They may have a new business model every 36 months but they don't try to claim the deck is stacked against them.

J.P. Mangalindan of Fortune Magazine had a column last week about one of AOL's more recent strategic shift, local news via "The Patch," and how that isn't exactly working out either, getting the money quote up front.

The math around Patch has always been tricky. In two years, it rapidly expanded to 863 sites, from Agoura Hills, California to Woonsocket, Rhode Island. Content is supplied by 1,000 professional journalists and some 14,000 bloggers. AOL has poured $160 million into the venture, despite paltry revenues. In 2011, it made just $20 million from Patch. "Basically, there [were] two ways to do it: get the product perfect in one market or go for a land grab approach," explains a former AOL executive directly involved in the company's strategy. This executive, who declined to be identified, says management opted for the latter, spending lavishly to expand and hire staff. "They went all in before they perfected the product and, in retrospect, that wasn't ideal."

When you have a lot of money, throwing it at your problems must be an irrestible urge.

Mangalindan gives AOL its due for a decent report last quarter but also quotes an old friend, Saul Hansell, former technology reporter for The New York Times who jumped to AOL a while back, who sure sounds like he's whistling past the graveyard.

 Not only is Armstrong's dream of a thriving hyperlocal news hub at stake, more than 1,000 jobs are too. "I don't know for sure if Patch will pay off," admits Saul Hansell, former Programming Director for AOL's Seed.com and one of Armstrong's first prominent journalistic hires. "But now that they've built it, as a shareholder, I want them to keep it going for a few more years at least to see if they can capitalize on its enormous potential."

Today's Blog Brought to You by Google Chrome

I've been having a lot of trouble with crashes and other problems with Firefox the last few days, the worst being a seeming reluctance to load pages from The New York Times, so today I did the blog in Google's Chrome browser.

That's why some of the formatting is off, particularly where I was cut-and-pasting content from the source articles. I hope to get that figured out shortly. For some reason, the last two versions of Internet Explorer won't work efficiently on my machine either.

Chrome seems to be fast-loading and crash free, even when I have 30+ tabs open but it does lack some of the functionality of the more established competitors.  It's hard to format a post in a single font and when I hit return after a paragraph it doesn't automatically move the cursor to the bottom line, so I have to move it with the slide bar on the side of the text box.  Little stuff, but annoying if you're trying to get a post out in a hurry.

If any other bloggers - particularly ones using WordPress - are reading this, I'd love to hear any suggestions for other browsers that make this easier.

It's hard to believe a browser was ever at the center of an anti-trust dispute.  They are the easiest pieces of software to download and use.  I got used to using Firefox, which I preferred to IE when it had tabbed browsing and IE didn't, but it only took a few weeks of frustration to get me to switch.  And that's despite the fact that I liked Mozilla's independence from the other big tech companies as a founding myth.  

At some point, I may decide that Google Search isn't doing it for me any more, either, and then I might start using Bing or Yahoo!  Google's place at the center of the universe is exactly that fragile.