HuffPost: No Plans To Pay Contributors
September 28, 2007
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Ariana’s web experiment turned blog super power recently raised another $5 million and “should be” profitable by 2008. They have an expanded staff of 43 full-time employees, but don’t pay their 1,800 or so contributing writers. Ok, so Bill Maher doesn’t need anymore money, but we’re sure some of the lesser known scribes wouldn’t mind getting something back for their words. Or is the platform worth it? We think it is, and that’s why many more are trying get on that list of 1,800. Ken Lerer, the Huffington Posts’s co-founder told CNET that paying contributors is, “not our financial model. We offer them visibility, promotion and distribution with a great company.”
Arianna Huffington spoke with USA Today: “If you wake up and have something to say, great. We’re there for you to say it. Bloggers do it for free to express their opinion, reporters report. We are paying more and more people. We have a huge payroll with editors, reporters and a tech team. When we hire staff, we obviously pay them.”
TechCrunch reports that the site could be worth $60 million and may try to sell or IPO after the presidential election.
Have you contributed – or tried to contribute - for Huffpost?
September 29, 2007 at 11:10 pm
Few web/blog sites pay for content. They insist they are doing you a favor by providing a platform for you to promote your books or speaking gigs, which is reasonable. What I object to, and this happens to me all the time, is being invited to speak at some advertising/marketing event where the attendees are paying big bucks for the privilege, yet they expect me to do it for free, often refusing to even pay expenses. I even had someone expecting me to pay my own expenses for the opportunity to speak for free at an event in Tokyo. I told them what they could do with their opportunity.
Cheers/George
Cheers/George