Any Plans to Pay Them?
August 17th, 2007 by Dan GillmorScott Karp reports “The Huffington Post Allows Top Commenters To Become Bloggers.”
I wish he’d asked the obvious question: Will any of these people get paid? As far as I know, Huffington doesn’t pay her bloggers, even the well-known ones.
Apparently the topic didn’t come up. Karp defends Huffingon’s no-pay approach in the comments.
This is a great business model for Huffington.
Let’s hope it’s unsustainable.
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August 17th, 2007 at 6:36 pm
Dan, do you think they should pay them? D.
August 18th, 2007 at 5:53 am
Dan,
What I wrote in the comments to my post was not a defense of “no-pay” but rather a defense of the market economy — the Huffington Post will have to pay bloggers when they find they can’t attract the caliber of talent they want without paying. Or, when they have sufficient cash flow they may find, like Google, that they can scale their business faster through revenue sharing. But so far, that hasn’t been the case — HuffPost is making a rational economic decision, which may or may not be borne out.
But bemoaning that state of affairs is like bemoaning the demise of many old media models which, as monopolies, were protected from market forces. Media has become a much more market-driven economy — instead of betting against it, i.e. like Eric Schmidt’s “don’t bet against the Internet,” we should be teaching content creators how to work the new system so that their collective success can help lift all boats.
August 18th, 2007 at 6:54 am
Ofcourse, they should get paid. Don’t they bring traffic to Huffington?
August 18th, 2007 at 8:42 pm
Scott,
I’m wondering if you feel that you have undue power over the bloggers — that although it’s a market transaction, it is not a fair one? (and thus not sustainable?)
Delia
P.S. I’m really curious what Dan is thinking (because he’s been through this himself and probably has some pretty good insights). D.