It’s nice to see that Arianna Huffington’s writers are rebelling once they’ve learned that they won’t be getting a red cent from the recent $315 million sale of Huffington Post to AOL. I’d like to see her at least acknowledge this issue, which was completely absent from the mutually fellatory AOL/HuffPo statements about the deal.
Acknowledgement is probably the best HuffPo writers can hope for, because Huffington never pays for anything she gets from the little people, not even blogging software (Movable Type):
Six Apart relied exclusively upon the honor system when it came to collecting payments for people’s usage of the platform. One story in particular exemplifies Six Apart’s attritude towards its very own license, a story that can only be described as legend within the walls of Six Apart: the Huffington Post, the poster child of Movable Type, never actually paid for their license to use the software. To this day, even as Huffingpost is sold for over $350,000,000, its success can be attributed to the effectively free platform it built a business on.
This is Six Apart’s fault, of course, because anyone who relies on Arianna to follow an honor system is living in a fantasy world.
Face
Sorry to threadjack — AOL is getting a shit product for 3X what it could buy it for….but…I just saw this and…
Holy f’in wow. My jaw just wont leave the floor.
Kristine
I don’t understand how HuffPo is worth a third of a billion, but I don’t understand Facebook’s multi-billion valuation either. Friends tried to explain it to me–always some variation of eyeballs/pageviews and relations to ads and sales–but it all seems so qualitative to me. Can they track pageviews and relate them to actual sales on other sites? Are they able to track things that well? Or is it all still at the throw-it-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks phase?
Superluminar
Really? HuffPo’s success was because of the software, not the content? I’m not sure that’s not wishful thinking.
bjacques
The new HuffPo would be a great forum for Anonymous to air their views. I hear unpaid writers can be sloppy with their password security.
mark
it doesn’t make AH a good person, but it is up to employees to negotiate their own deals. People wrote for huffpo for free because of the exposure. To expect a financial kickback now is to feign ignorance about how they ended up writing there in the first place. (And I say this as someone who produces content for a network that operates similarly.)
mistermix
@Superluminar: Well, they could have chosen WordPress, which is free. I’ll let other commenters weigh in on whether that would have made a difference in the success of HuffPo.
matoko_chan
“attritude”….i quite liek that.
a meme splice between attitude and attrition?
mistermix
@mark: True enough, but if that HuffPo is fragile because of it (i.e., one side had an expectation that they’d get a piece of the pie even if that wasn’t in a contract and therefore will quit upon acquisition), then Arianna has misrepresented the value of her company. She did, IMO, and AOL should walk away from the deal, because Arianna sold herself in part as the person who can do local sites, which rely on free or low-paid writers. Clearly, that’s not going to happen since she’s got a track record now.
mistermix
@matoko_chan: To the rest of us, it’s a typo, to you, it’s an insight. The m_c experience in a nutshell.
ET
Is the value of HuffPo to AOL in any way diminished if all the writers go away because they are pissed? I assume AOL thought that most writers would be like “whatever” and keep writing, but if many/most decide to bolt will AOL get what they think they purchased or a collection of those who might have stayed behind.
marshall
Don’t forget that Think Progress piece a few weeks ago. Most of AOL’s revenue comes from scamming old people. And now AH is in league with them…
mark
[email protected]mistermix: AH blew the deal, no question – they are going to lose their ability to produce cheap content. But I have three friends who write for Huffpo. They were never promised anything and they’re not complaining.
jrg
No one could have predicted that writers would refuse to donate their time to a large corporation.
I swear to God, AOL’s management are the dumbest people on the planet.
burnspbesq
@mistermix:
You really are ignorant on some topics. Please explain why, in your view, people who don’t own any interest in a company are entitled to receive any portion of the sales proceeds when the company is sold (hint: there is no legal theory that supports your view. Not in corporate law. Not in contract law. Not in labor law.).
Superluminar
Mistermix @9 :
cudlipTHIS. As to your earlier point, I don’t deny that the blogging software has some impact, but I just dont think it’s that important compared to content – would this place be much different without FYWP?Wil
If your software is free, or essentially free (‘on the honor system’) then complaining that you don’t get paid is kind of irrelevant.
I don’t really understand all the Huffington hate, honestly.
Are we saying that we’d rather NOT have a very popular news aggregate site that leans left and is headed by a pretty good spokesperson (Arianna) who is willing to invest in moving the media conversation to the left?
I was a Californian when her right-wing husband ran for governor before he imploded….it was scary, a mega-rich, mega-right-wing guy had a good chance of winning, good looks, boatloads of money, attractive wife, etc.
Luckily she is now on our side.
Imagine if she were a yet another right-wing powerhouse, and Huffington Post was a highly popular right-wing site.
Barb (formerly Gex)
Just because the shift in politics makes her seem more center than before, doesn’t mean the money grubbing conservative aspects of her personality got scrubbed.
With fiscal conservatives or libertarians, just always know that money is THE most important thing to them. Everything else is a distant second.
Ija
@Wil:
But she’s not on our side. She’s reinvented herself as a centrist for the purpose of the AOL deal. HuffPo is just going to be the next Politico or something.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@burnspbesq: I think the point is that these unpaid volunteers will likely stop doing so. And then AOL isn’t getting what it thought it was buying.
Superluminar
I just want to slightly second burnspbesq’s comment (“slightly” because it was a bit assholish). At the end of the day, people posting on HP knew they were doing so for free so don’t really have any grounds for complaint right now.
lol
@burnspbesq:
I don’t think mistermix is saying they deserve a piece of the #315 million, I think he’s saying they’re expecting to get paid to write now that the company is clearly financially able to do so. And if they leave because that’s not going to change, Huffington loses her cadre of low-cost writers and potentially her audience.
Of course, the problem for them is that HuffPo’s attraction isn’t really the writers – it’s a sensationalistic media aggregator and the writers are largely interchangeable. There’s just not that much leverage for them.
jrg
@burnspbesq: Apropos of nothing, I can name one such condition – stock options (that’s clearly not the case here, but it is an example of people who own no interest in a company, but are entitled to a portion of proceeds upon the sale of the company).
I think what’s important here is that her writers are under no obligation to continue writing for free, and they arguably have less incentive to, since it violates a sense of fairness when someone else is so heavily compensated for their work.
Laura Clawson
Do you have any empirical evidence that a significant number of people who blog at HuffPo are “rebelling”?
Barb (formerly Gex)
@jrg: I thought this was the American way? Sense of fairness violated seems like our entire approach towards labor relations.
jrg
@Barb (formerly Gex): If Alec Baldwin was an impoverished single mom, and Huffpo was a Tyson chicken plant, I’d say you had a point… But the kind of people who write for Huffpo have money in the bank, and are under no obligation to continue writing for free if their sense of fairness is violated.
joe from Lowell
@burnspbesq: When you’re a hammer, everything is a nail.
When you’re such a self-absorbed lawyer that you put “esq” in your internet handle, everything is a law school question.
Let me give you a hint: mistermix didn’t write anything about the writers having a legal claim. The word “expectation” has a meaning outside of the law, you know.
He didn’t say that the writers can sue AOL or Arianna. He said that they can quit writing, and that this is to AOL’s detriment, and makes their new acquisition less valuable than they thought.
scav
It’ll certainly be interesting to watch what survives and what doesn’t. One can’t really “purchase” independent non-mainstream cachet either (let alone volunteer staff) and that might have been a value to readers. Mom was about to jump ship earlier because of the disappearance of news — wonder what she’ll do now (have a guess, actually). What’s another news aggregator? I mostly just aggregate my own but she will be asking me.
joe from Lowell
@Ija:
Really? Huffpo, the Scourge of the Health Care Law?
Nobody could have predicted that Arianna Huffington would find it easy to abandon a set of political ideals that she had loudly and stridently promoted.
Well, except for the other time she did that.
mistermix
@Laura Clawson: Nope. Just wishful thinking and a Twitter hash tag.
@Superluminar: The reason a huge site like HuffPo used Movable Type is that, at the time of launch, WordPress probably wasn’t really ready to host that kind of traffic. Movable Type works in a much different way that WP – it essentially writes out a static HTML page or a very lightweight php page that is then served up by the web server software. This takes far fewer resources than stock WordPress, which has to pull the page out of a database, making a number of queries in the process. WP has come a long way in a couple of years, mainly by using some sophisticated caching, but back then MovableType was probably a safer choice.
So, arguably, it was a key factor in HuffPo’s success. I think the quoted article overstates its importance – content is key, of course.
@joe from Lowell: This. And, burns, since there was no legal agreement, a point I fully understand, btw, Arianna has no recourse if/when those writers ditch her.
Amir_Khalid
It feels to me like the data is still incomplete here. i see people here assuming that Mme. Huffington went back on a promise to share the loot if she should cash out. But my own reading of the linked post suggests there may have been a promise to stay independent of corporate ownership, and this is where the poster feels she went back on her (stated or implied) promise. I.e. this might be about perception of the contributing bloggers’ independence rather than any money they are due.
Either way, is there any indication yet how many of Huffpo’s contributors are ticked off enough to jump ship? And are there other bloggers willing to replace them, so as to gain the chance at wider exposure that Huffpo offers in lieu of money?
Joey Maloney
@Kristine: Think tulips.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@jrg: Just because they have that luxury doesn’t mean the dynamic is any different. I don’t doubt that what Arianna did was legal. And perhaps she will still be able to get people to write for the HP gratis. But that doesn’t mean that a sense of fairness wasn’t violated. I still see this as symptomatic of the self-centeredness of the ownership class, even if the folks they are exploiting aren’t suffering.
danimal
@Wil:
Please don’t go down that rabbit hole. Huffington is on Arianna’s side. The most recent iteration has been ok for liberals, but anyone who trusts her is a fool. She learned politics from Newt Gingrich, forgawdssake.
Superluminar
@mistermix
ok i’m cool with what you said there, a much stronger argument IMHO.
Mark
@joe from Lowell: Maybe I’m cynical from working in Silicon Valley for 10 years, but this is how things work with private companies.
Don’t like not having an ownership stake? Join a startup. Don’t like being an employee whose equity keeps getting diluted by new rounds of VC or PE money? Start your own company. Don’t like having to give VCs 40% of your stock? Raise money from friends and relatives or fund it yourself.
Outside of SV, the situation is far, far worse for employees. People (like the HP writers) are too naive to ask for stock compensation, and so they get nothing if the company gets sold. When Dolby Labs IPOed, members of the Dolby family controlled 99.9% of the stock; that’s a lot of money that the people who actually invented things didn’t get. (Dolby is notoriously miserly in the salary department.)
Zifnab
@Kristine:
Buying Facebook was like getting in on the ground floor of NBC back in the 50s. In theory at least. We’re talking about the single most visited site on the internet. 1 in 4 page views are facebook page views.
I scrub my early statement. That’s like owning “TV”, as in all of TV.
Likewise, HuffPo gets 25 million hits a day. Again, this is like buying the TV Show “Friends” during its heyday.
And yeah, they can count the click-through to different ad sites and track how much revenue it brings in. I imagine the HuffPo purchase was inflated. But their estimates were probably a lot more accurate than anyone trying to pin down the actual value of a TV spot on the “Friends” series.
I don’t think $315 million is as crazy overpriced as you’d think.
Marc McKenzie
Well…what else should we expect?
This is the underside of the Internet…basically telling writers, artists, and musicians to do it all “for free” or just not giving us a red cent for anything done on the web. And we’re told to accept it, because, well, that’s how it is.
Harlan Ellison pretty much sums it up best:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj5IV23g-fE
agrippa
AH is a businesswoman. She may be as sincere about her current liberal views as she was sincere about her former conservative views. But, she is, first and foremost, a business woman.
joe from Lowell
@Mark:
But that’s exactly the point; these people didn’t anticipate that their relationship with HuffPo would be like that of someone working for a company, and that Arianna was looking at the whole thing as a business opportunity, rather than as a movement and a forum.
Kristine
@Joey Maloney:
I have. That’s what concerns me.
Joey Maloney
@Marc McKenzie: I love Harlan to death, he’s one of the most challenging writers I know and I’ve been reading him for nearly 40 years…but in this case he has no fucking idea what he’s talking about.
And it’s a shame, because if there were ever an artist who could connect with his fan base and leverage free content to make himself a crapload more money, it’s Harlan Ellison.
JGabriel
Seems like this should be a perfect opportunity for Olbermann & Gore to increase the user base over at Current.TV.
.
lol
@Marc McKenzie:
Funny Harlan Ellison story:
So Tycho and I are up in front of the audience with Harlen, and Hank (the con organizer) presents us with some jester hats (“Fool’s caps”). Tycho and I put ours on because we are polite, but Harlen – who is apparently too cool for school – refuses to wear his. I turn to him and say, “Don’t you want your hat?” and he tells me to fuck off. This caught me off guard, I mean I have no clue who this fucking coot is. Then he points to a pad of paper he has and asks if I’m aware that his paper is also called foolscap. Now, I’ve never heard that term before, I pretty much just call it paper so I shake my head “no.” This really isn’t a fair question. I mean, it would be like me asking him about Photoshop or if he can remember what he had for lunch. The guy was essentially setting me up to look stupid in front of all these people. So then he asks me if I even attended college and I say “No, I did not.” Then, he says “did you at least finish high school?”
I said that I had, but you couldn’t really hear me because the audience is laughing at me along with Harlen. So once they stop, I turn to him and I say, “While I’ve got you here I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed the Star Wars stuff you wrote.”
I didn’t know him very well but I felt like mistaking him for someone who writes Star Wars books was the sort of insult that would cut right to his brittle old bones. The audience seemed to agree because I could hear a lot of ooooooooh’s and oh no’s over the laughing. Some people in the front even suggested a fist fight was now in order. I look over at Harlen and he’s staring at me like he wants to choke me. He then says “so that’s how it’s going to be.” Now keep in mind that he’s the one that started hostilities when he told me to fuck off. I’m just the one that finished it. The guy tells some pretty funny stories about how witty he is and how he’s always saying clever things at exactly the right moment. When confronted with someone who was unwilling to take any crap from him he had no clever retort. The great writer just glared at me and then walked off stage. I don’t doubt that given enough time he could craft a perfectly worded and extremely vicious response but up there on stage in front of all his fans the man didn’t have shit.
I don’t blame Harlen for not knowing who I am. I honestly don’t expect him to. I don’t expect anyone that old to know who I am. I did expect him to be polite and at least respect the fact that I was a fellow guest of honor. That was apparently too much to ask for from the great Harlen Elison.
liberal
@joe from Lowell:
Heh.
Double heh. It’s like the time someone accused some neocons or something of treason, and Burnsie said it wasn’t (because it didn’t meet the legal definition). As if the legal definition is the only one in the dictionary.
liberal
@Barb (formerly Gex):
Right. It’s similar to the “iterated prisoner’s dilemma” in theories of how human non-kin altruism evolved.
Anyone that writes for it now is a fool. “Fool me once…”
Bobby Thomson
@Face:
I understand the ties people get to places where their family has lived for generations, as well as the significant costs that can be involved in moving, but it still amazes me how many African-Americans continue to live in Mississippi.
xian
i’m sure when twitter is sold to GM everyone who’s been tweeting there for free will get equity.
Pongo
@mark: Agree to a point, but expecting a kickback does not seem to be the reason most are angry. They contributed freely assuming they were engaged in a new form of ‘citizen journalism.’ The sellout to megacorp is what they are unhappy about, not their personal paychecks. We really don’t need more corporate media vehicles, and while I often questioned the quality of the ‘reporting’ on Huffpo, at least you got the sense it was independent of corporate editorial bias. Arianna’s cashing in totally destroys that.
scav
@Pongo: Bingo. They’ve been reifying the value of “brand” for years but now they’ve moved it into a really fluid digital realm. Vaporware squared. Starbucks pretending to be the local independent cafe.
Silver
The writers worked for free for years. They established what they were worth to Arianna-and that is precisely nothing.
Moral of the story? Don’t work for free.
Violet
@JGabriel:
Yep. I hope they’re paying attention.
AlanDean
I gave up on HuffPo about a year ago when it started crashing my browser. I also got tired of the misleading headlines, celebrity gossip and the tabloidy crap that became their mainstay. Then they hookup with the most reviled name in the history of the ISP world (possibly surpassed by Netcom or Earthlink). Seems AH is showing her true colors.
May history be unkind to them.
Joel
The law is irrelevant in this case. If writers bolt, the product’s value diminishes. Simple economics.
Judas Escargot
@Kristine:
I don’t understand how HuffPo is worth a third of a billion, but I don’t understand Facebook’s multi-billion valuation either.
IMO Your understanding is just fine: Both ‘valuations’ are fantasy (welcome to dotcom 2.0). Eyeball-farmers.
If it were possible to short Facebook, I’d recommend it. But the hoi polloi don’t get invited to participate in private IPOs.
different church-lady
Wait, lefty bloggers are what made HuffPo?
I thought sensationalistic headline writers and pictures of semi-nude models in fashion magazines were what made HuffPo.
MarkJ
Well she’s a Galtian overlord now. Why does she need any help from anyone to churn out content? It should magically spring into being through her magical powers of productivity.
Aaron Fown
Hey Huffpost writers! I’ve been solo-blogging/vlogging for a while now, and it’s time for a change. I’m looking for bloggers to write about green, sustainable, and neocultural topics on my blog, The Trip for Life. And I promise, no celebrity drivel papering over your hard work, and if I sell out you win too! So come, and be poor and honorable with me, and stop fueling mama-warbucks media machine!
different church-lady
@lol: I don’t know everything about Penny Arcade, but aren’t you quoting from a web dialog between two fictional characters?
pk
I don’t get all this AH dislike. So what if she was married to a republican and schmoozes with Newt. Her divorce was a long time ago, and she was speaking out against republicans during the Bush administration, when a whole lot of democrats, who should have known better were playing dead. Her site may not be the best, may be tabloid style celebrity gossip, but its not a republican propaganda outfit. If it gets people to go there for the gossip and in the process also read a few useful articles, I’d consider that a good thing. If people are writing for free that’s their problem-do not provide a free service. If AOL is dumb enough to buy the site for a ridiculous price and she is smart enough to use it for a democratic cause and line her own pockets, then so be it. If the site does, however become a corporate mouthpiece or starts becoming right-wing then of course life as usual sucks. The left does not have a popular voice in this country, anything which helps, even partially is a good thing.
different church-lady
@pk: You need to think more recently: the animosity has to do with the fact that her joint is as deep as a baking pan, but it’s held up as some kind of totem of political presentation. All the other stuff is just piling on.
Sly
Arianna isn’t some Galtian archtype or soulless business creep. She’s a committed New Ager. And like countless New Agers that came before her, she has discovered the rich spiritual fulfillment of obtaining a shitload of money by exploiting the labor of others while having them kiss your ass at the same time.
I suggest, therefor, that you can view the recent animosity of (some of) her writers as the result of “natural deprogramming.”
TooManyJens
@different church-lady:
And quack-medicine pushers.
Also, the Penny Arcade dialogue you were asking about happened between one of the comic’s creators and the real Harlan Ellison at a con. (Talk about an asshole-off.)
fasteddie9318
@joe from Lowell:
In fairness, though, that other time she did it was totally out of the blue and a complete surprise, unless you were paying attention when she did it the time before that.
Citizen_X
@TooManyJens: So that was the you-old-fart-you-don’t-even-know-who-I-am douchebag (who can’t even spell Harlan) that took down Ellison for not recognizing his greatness? The writer of Penny fucking Arcade? Jeeze. Talk about entitled motherfuckers.
Peter
@different church-lady: Gabe and Tycho are also the pseudonyms of the two guys who make Penny Arcade. That story’s from knot their newsposts and actually happened.
Peter
@pk: Well, for one thing, she shills for homeopathic medicine and other quackery.
Peter
Also, I must admit: I’m curious if Huffington’s BFF Jane Hamsher has sounded off on the sale yet.
Nerull
HuffPo is doing enough damage to science education to make up for just about anything else it prints.
giltay
It’s possible to sell something created for free without generating resentment. I work for an charity that uses a great deal of volunteer labour; we produce talking books which we offer free in our library for the blind. We recently made a deal with a major publisher to exchange some of our audio books for theirs. Even though we hold the copyright on the recordings, we went through a lengthy process to ensure that the volunteers (some of whom are in the actors’ union) who narrated our books accepted this move. We only traded those recordings by narrators who signed a waiver.
There were a lot of different reactions to this. Some volunteers refused to sign, although I don’t think any left the programme. There were some, however, who were quite pleased that their work would be made available to the general public, where they could get exposure.
I think that there are a few differences in our situation than HuffPo’s: we’re a charity, we consulted with our volunteers first, we got permission from the volunteers, the trade was done to advance our charitable aims (we got several books for the ones we gave, with the rights to make indefinite copies for our patrons), and no one got megabucks.
I think the size of the sale is important. If I were a front page poster on a community blog, and the owner announced that he was making enough money to quit his day job and devote himself full time to the site (with enough left over for Tunchfood) I think I’d be glad. If that same person announced that he’d sold it to BigCo™ for 300 mil, partly on the strength of my free contributions, I’d like to start seeing some sort of financial recognition, or I’d go blog somewhere else. I don’t know if that’s the atmosphere at HuffPo, but I would not be surprised if it were.
If I were in AH’s position, I’d be inviting the best N contributors to form a paid staff.
Marc McKenzie
@joe from Lowell: Joe, I’m afraid I have to disagree with you on this. He pretty much does know what the heck he’s talking about–but that’s my view.
Then again, as a freelance artist and writer, I’ve experienced some of what he described in this clip.
“And it’s a shame, because if there were ever an artist who could connect with his fan base and leverage free content to make himself a crapload more money, it’s Harlan Ellison.”
Honestly, I believed that for many years. Tried it myself, and saw a lot of others do the same. Unfortunately, things did not work in our favor. It’s easy to say that the ‘net is the easy way to make a crapload of money and connect to a fan base, but it’s a double-edged sword, where the only ones really raking in the bucks are the pirates and the higher-ups–not the artists, writers or musicians.
Hell, it’s not even just Ellison making this argument. Both Andrew Keen and Jaron Lanier are also speaking out and pretty much bursting the balloon.
In this case, I’d stick with what Harlan said. But that’s just me. I am all for giving my work away for free but I want that to be my choice. I’ve just had it with that choice being yanked out of my hands and then being told that I should hand it over and be happy.
But that’s just me.
BombIranForChrist
@different church-lady:
“I thought sensationalistic headline writers and pictures of semi-nude models in fashion magazines were what made HuffPo.”
You are exactly right.
Citizen_X
@Marc McKenzie: That model sort of works in the music industry. Of course, that was after years of screaming, the life and death of Napster, insane lawsuits by the RIAAA, fatwas proclaimed against Lars Ulrich, etc, etc.
Ellison’s rant is stated far more eloquently, for my money, in this song. That’s the Holmes Brothers’ version; my favorite. The original, by Gillian Welch, is here.
(And notice that this is the model at work. You get to hear it for free, and I, as well as Welch or the Holmeses, hope that you buy the song. Just like I actually did.)
JWL
Every contributor to the HP has been a consenting adult. Any one of them who now bleats about their idealism having been betrayed needed to wise up in any event. They’ve been taught a “life lesson” by a shrewd Zsa Zsa Gabor impersonator, and the woman herself is millions of dollars richer. It’s the very definition of a win-win situation. In fact, they should thank her.
But they probably won’t.
Will
Eh….complaining about AH having changed her political views is a non-starter. After all, you are reading a blog run by a guy who changed his political views.
Complaining that she is making lots of money is a non-starter as well. Not to punch hippies, but the whining about only right-wingers being interested in making money is kind of stupid, when we are being outspent by the corporate right all the time and it costs us politically.
Acting like making money is some kind of sin is not going to win us any elections in this country.
HuffPost is what it is, but I’d rather have it the way it is, even with the gossip and the other silly stuff, than yet another right-wing site.
People who write for free should not expect a piece of the pie. In fact, people who write for free make it harder for actual writers who do not write for free to make a living. I could care less about their complaints, since all they do is damage the writing profession anyway.
RickinSF
I wonder whether she’ll be on “Left, Right and Center” tonight.