LESSONS LEARNED BUILDING THE AUTOMATED TOPIC NETWORK

LOVE.COM

AOL LivingAOL Living

The Boom BoxThe Boom Box

FANHOUSEFANHOUSE

AOL NEWSAOL NEWS

Background

• This story takes place from January to August of 2009

• I worked at AOL leading media products

• AOL’s content strategy was to build beyond branded verticals, and increase coverage with many niche blogs

• I was asked to take it to the next level increase coverage density across the query space (next)

AOL MusicAOL MusicAsylumAsylum

AOL Television

AOL Television Moviefon

eMoviefone

Lemon-drop

Lemon-drop

InsideMoviesInside

Movies

InsideTV

InsideTV

AOL VideoAOL

Video

AOL LivingAOL LivingStreet Level

Street Level

The Boom

Box

The Boom

Box

Tour Tracker

Tour Tracker

Cinematical

Cinematical

Slash-controlSlash-

control

The BootThe Boot

Rocks, pebbles, sand, water

It’s helpful to many to think of the query space (all searches) as a physical space.

Content in the query space is the same. Major topics, minor topics, entities, elements.

Media companies strive toward total density, or query coverage.

This background image is a magnification of sand.

mission

• Our mission was to complete our content offerings by finding micro-materials like sand and water (micro-niches, topics) to occupy the gaps between pebbles and rocks (programmed verticals & blogs).

• In other words, to cover as much of the query space as possible by automating coverage of entities at scale.

• Or… “program robots to write many thousands of blogs for us.”

• We called them “Robot Blogs”.

CERNY AND TEAM! – WE NEED YOU TO PROGRAM

ROBOTS TO WRITE MANY THOUSANDS OF BLOGS FOR US.

GO DO IT!

CERNY AND TEAM! – WE NEED YOU TO PROGRAM

ROBOTS TO WRITE MANY THOUSANDS OF BLOGS FOR US.

GO DO IT!

Robo-Materials

SILICON• Blogsmith Blog Platform

(Weblogs acquisition 2005)

• Relegence Real-time News & IR Platform

(Relegence acquisition 2006)

CARBON• 1 front-end dev

• 1 back-end dev

• Shared product (me)

• Some wack design chops

• … and a whole lotta company resources we commandeered as we went along.

GOAL 1

• Build a system and launch 80 automated sites by February.

• We created one site for Horror Films and another for Jazz, with custom designs.

• PROBLEM: this approach wasn’t really scalable.

• We needed a design system… with a unifying brand.

CONSUMER APPEAL

• We didn’t really think “Robot Blogs” would sell to the mass market.

• We needed a name generic enough to work with mostly all topics, but with appeal. Maybe even with emotional appeal.

• It just so happened that AOL owned and was underutilizing the domain Love.com.

• We used it.

Scale METHOD 1

• We set up a search-based publisher tool to enable us to quickly profile topics.

• We set up over 500 topics by mid-February, striving for passion points (e..g Trains, Kung Fu, UFOs, Paranormal, Roller Coasters, Cigars...)

EGG MUFFIN• Some people we knew

were doing similar things and sniffed us out.

• Mike Jones was at Tsavo Media launching a topic network Daymix.

• He tweeted that Love.com’s coverage of “egg-muffin” was irrelevant compared to Daymix.

• I saw his tweet, configured the topic and tweeted back “looks OK to me”.

• That was fun.

FAIL. GOAL 2.

• Even if this was fun, this wasn’t really scale, nor was the setup process scalable. (Fail).

• We decided we weren't thinking big enough. We set our minds to how we could scale to hundreds of thousands (robot legions). (Goal 2).

Method 2

• Automatic Topic Creation based on Heat, Velocity & Relationships

• Entity clustering and automatic profiling was introduced, to automatically create and build upon a “concept dictionary” so that our real-time news engine provided results against topics that created themselves via detected entity relationships & heat, and quickly hit 30,000 topics and growing.

GREAT SCOTT!

BY MARCH WE HAD OVER 200,000 DOCUMENTS INDEXED IN GOOGLE!

WTF?!?? WE WEREN’T EVEN DOING ANY REAL WORK!

GREAT SCOTT!

BY MARCH WE HAD OVER 200,000 DOCUMENTS INDEXED IN GOOGLE!

WTF?!?? WE WEREN’T EVEN DOING ANY REAL WORK!

Susan boyle

• When Susan Boyle broke on April 13th, news didn’t hit the US until the morning on the 14th.

• Overnight, our system identified her as a hot topic, susan-boyle.love.com was created automatically, and, for a period of about 6 hours, was the #1 google result for searches on “susan boyle”.

• That was very exciting. We got lots of traffic.

• I pretty much hit refresh on my Omniture all day long.

Oh my user!

• But what was Love.com?

• The public on average assumed, “a dating site.”

• Some individuals were offended, thinking their named topic pages were real blogs. We got a take-down from a US Senator, for example.

• Our robots had an identity crisis!

• So we decided to deliver more features to create a fuller offering.

Feature fun

• Related Content• Videos (YouTube)

• Quotes (extracted)

• Photos (Getty / AP/Reuters)

• Twitter • Commerce

(PriceGrabber feed)

• Site Submission• Location

(honolulu-hi.love.com)

• Internationalization(e.g. jazz.love.com/de)

• Personalization(topic dashboard)

Hub, dashboard, charts

social• Now we had a lot of stuff!

• But we were missing social, and social is hot.

• I talked to Mike Sommers at KickApps, and we made a plan to deliver topic-level Video & Photo sharing, Blogs, Profiles, Friends and Following, Points and Levels, Groups, and more.

• It was exciting, and we could have it in less than a month.

• Senior Management preferred an internal solution.

• In the next month, we added comments powered by Blogsmith.

Press

• Steve Rubel clued into what we were doing & posted to his blog Micropersuasion

• Frank Gruber covered us on Somewhat Frank

• Then Mike Arrington posted “AOL’s Secret Love(.com)”

• … and then… came the backlash from the SEOers.

• They called us SPAMMERS!

• That hurt!

Seo doghouse

• But not as much as this hurt…

• Within 2 days we dropped from 500,000 organic referrals a day to 20,000 or less, then flatlined around 5k.

• We were in the doghouse.

• We confirmed this with Google’s Matt Cutts:

• “There is no original content on these pages.”

• “Try fixing that.”• He said something like

that, in 140 characters, I think.

Hindsight 20/20

• In hindsight:

• We might have led with original content, and filled in with web content

• We might have blocked crawlers from pages with no original content

• We might have held back press until we had social integrated

• But we didn’t – we were too excited and impetuous.

• Without the Google Juice, we lost support and focus in the company.

Doldrums, conclusion(s)

Sadly, the hope of user-generated content many months away was insufficient to prolong the project, and it slowly spun down.

Takeaways: • Building content around every conceivable topic with in-

house resources isn't scalable.

• Wikipedia was only able to this because they don't handle the creation internally... they built a platform and let the audience (who were already passionate about all these niche topics) take care of it for them.

• That's what we were missing... a way to engage the audience and let them contribute to our content. Demand-based and user-gen platforms like KickApps, Demand Media & Associated Content would have fit the bill nicely.

• AOL eventually developed Seed.com, and continues to pursue the mass-generated original content path via avenues such as Patch & recent acquisition 5min Media.

love.com forever

• When I left AOL at the end of 2009, my mom was most worried about Love.com.

And it’s still working away, doing its thing*, and will keep doing it… at least until someone pulls a plug.

*In truth, the system requires tuning and maintenance, and since it’s getting none, relevancy, coverage and currency are starting to suffer. It’s not so bad for over a year on auto-pilot, though!

MA, IT’LL BE FINE. WE BUILT IT TO TAKE CARE OF

ITSELF!

MA, IT’LL BE FINE. WE BUILT IT TO TAKE CARE OF

ITSELF!

BUT WHO IS GOING TO TAKE

CARE OF LOVE.COM?

BUT WHO IS GOING TO TAKE

CARE OF LOVE.COM?