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Various executives close to and within AOL say it will be late 2010 before the company's Seed.com system is complete. 

Seed will create one content-management-system (CMS) that manages a large number of freelancers and assigns them topics according to search popularity.  We are believers in this strategy.

When Tim Armstrong took over as CEO, AOL had 24 ad serving systems and 14 CMS systems.

As of now, of the original 14 CMS's,

  • 2 had been consolidated into Seed.com.
  • 2 remain separate.
  • 10 have been retired and will be built from scratch within the Seed.com system.

Seed.com was launched a couple months ago as mostly a front-end interface with limited backend functionality.  This took about 6 weeks to build. 

We believe it could take 6-9 months to complete the entire Seed.com building process, which would be in late 2010.  Until then the company will need to manage with a less-than-ideal CMS, meaning the turnaround from an editorial perspective likely won't begin in full until Q4 2010.

WITH STUDIONOW ACQUISITION, AOL TAPS INTO A HIGHER QUALITY FREELANCE NETWORK AND GETS NEW TECHNOLOGY

The StudioNow acquisition enables AOL to tap into a video freelance network that is for the most part higher quality and more professional than the company's current stable of video freelancers.

In addition, we were told by those close to the situation and the company that the acquisition is also largely about the technology and CMS. 

The fact that the company is in some form pursuing a strategy of acquiring technology to use in its Seed.com platform underscores how long it takes to build the system from scratch.

We have heard that the company would like to acquire a CMS for traditional articles similar to those used by companies like Demand Media or Associated Content. 

MANAGEMENT PUSHING FORWARD DURING THE TRANSITION

Though Seed.com is not complete, management is not waiting to pursue its strategy of producing targeted content on a massive level around people's search and reading habits.  The company's announcement that it would request submissions for interviews and bios on every act attending the SXSW music festival in March despite the technology not quite being ready indicates it is continuing to push its editorial strategy through the transition.

However, Seed programming director Saul Hansell did concede that the technology was not quite ready to handle such a large publishing initiative at this stage so the company will likely be scrambling to get the interface to a point where the submitted content will be published in time to catch the surge in searches leading up to SXSW during February.

See Also:

AOL's New Robo-Content Strategy Is Actually Smart

AOL Turnaround Update: Busy Fixing Email (Good), Rolling Out Seed