Aol strikes again

I can't see anything good coming out of the merger between Aol and Huffington Post. I was working at then-AOL when it undertook what is largely seen as the most disastrous merger of all time with its takeover of Time Warner. As a deadweight in Time Warner, Aol missed all the chances to reinvent itself as something useful. After it was spun off and Tim Armstrong came along saying that the company's future lay in content, I was more skeptical than ever.

The idea of the merger, apparently, is to harness HuffPost's large audience to Aol's other content and make real money on ads. There are so many things wrong with this conceptually, it's hard to know where to begin. HuffPost has its audience because it put up content that people wanted to read. The fact that Aol's expensive new content has not found its own audience speaks for itself.

But the crux of the matter is that what makes HuffPost work, and the only thing of value to pay $300 million for, is that the site's hugely left-wing audience loves it for a freedom it cannot possible have as part of a large corporation. The site's main capital is a group of bloggers and commenters and "community" that will now search for a new spiritual home, and leave HuffPost bereft of so much Aol wanted to acquire.

I was equally baffled by the linkup between Daily Beast and Newsweek. Tina Brown, Arianna Huffington and Tim Armstrong are presumably all smart people, so maybe there's just something I don't see.

Even in the AOL-Time Warner merger there were areas where you could pretend there were synergies. There's nothing visible in this new merger except irreparable damage to HuffPost, which was on its way to being something, and another lost cause for Aol, which may finally succumb to its long series of mistakes and missed opportunities.