Problems at Patch.com

Just because you have cash to burn (and AOL's income continues to drop as less & less people pay for dial up) doesn't mean it's wise -- especially if there's not a point in the foreseeable future where you expect to make money.

How do they expect to make a profit in five years?

And, does no one find it ironic that the guy heading up AOL and who is championing Patch used to head ad sales at Google?

If there's one thing I'd expect him to do, it would be to sell ads, yet there aren't any.

And, I hate to say this, but $40,000 for adults with college degrees and good writing skills is really nothing to crow about. It's not a good salary, and if that's something you're shooting for, I really need to beg some of you to consider other fields.

 

No. Because Facebook scales and Patch doesn't.

At the end of the day, Facebook can be profitable because it only needs a small number of employees to keep the servers firing while millions of users generate the content. Patch can't do that, it needs more employees per web hit than a social media site will.

 

There are plenty of people working for newspapers making less.

If you want to say they aren't transparent enough with their financial plan, that is a valid point. Anything more than that is just more talking out of the wrong end of your anatomy.

 

You HAVE seen the FanHouse thread, right? These people don't know how to run shit. I wouldn't trust Tim Armstrong to handle a paper route.

 

I understand that. And, I understand that it's a labor of love for some/many/most. Airline pilots, doctors, and others make very little early in their career, but there's eventually a payoff for them.

The odds of a payoff in the newspaper industry are very low.

Many of you have moved away from family & friends to areas of the country you don't want to live in to pursue the dream.

And, that's great, but, if you ever want to make a good wage, the sooner you realize that newspapers are unlikely to provide it, the better. It's far easier to change careers when you are younger.

While Patch may look like a lifeline to some now, it may prove to be an anchor in he long run if it keeps you in a dead end industry only to jettison you when they decide they no longer want/need/can afford you.

If they had a better financial plan, they'd be more transparent about it.

It's not hard to see that they're going to have a tough time ever bringing in more money than they spend -- especially as they grow.

And, there's no indication that their sites are well trafficked.

If they have some winning business plan, they've got it well hidden.

 

One of the main reasons AOL has cash on hand is it continues to sell off parts of its campus near Dulles.

 

Again with the guesswork. There is no indication that the sites are not well trafficked, either. I know...I know...."which do you think is more likely."

Which is another way of saying you like your guess, but you can't back it up.

 

Fallacy of equivocation. The fact that we can't produce their books doesn't mean we can't examine the evidence and draw conclusions.

 

All due respect to your passion and the length of your post, but it's clear you haven't been following a damn thing AOL has been doing for the past 10 years, or else you would know that what they're committing to today has absolutely no bearing on what they'll do tomorrow. In fact there's probably a negative correlation, because they seem to get flat-out bored more routinely.

If Murdoch were behind Patch, or maybe a truly stable tech company like Cisco or Apple (with its billions of dollars in cash reserves), your post might make sense. Saying "AOL has a lot of money so this will last" shows only that you're in for a rude awakening.

 

Unless they are in a public union. Then it's too much.

 

Sure you can. You're just doing a whole lot of guessing when you do it.

 

And implying that "guessing" somehow means that other conclusions are equally valid is wrong.