After the Huffington Post was famously sold for $315 million – making its founders rich(er) in the process – it’s become a lightning rod for those discontented with social sites which derive their value from unpaid sources of content (bloggers writing for free).
The latest chapter involves a tiny, easy-to-ignore magazine boycott of the Huffington Post which just ballooned into something altogether more interesting; the Newspaper Writer’s Guild has called for its 26,000 members to join the boycott.
Is the Huffington Post about to learn what a handful of Mideast dictators now know about the organizing power of social media (wouldn’t that be ironic)?
The New Sharecroppers
When Nicholas Carr famously dubbed those creating value on social sites for free “The new Sharecroppers,” he noted that those populating sites with free content operated in an attention economy (the nebulous “exposure” payment), while the founders operate (happily for them) in a cash economy.
Perhaps it’s time the two were mixed.
Naturally, the Huffington Post says its contributors are happy to have the platform, though some contributors point to earlier HuffPo promises of revenue sharing plans which never materialized.
Whatever the outcome (realistically, I don’t expect the boycott to have much effect on HuffPo), it’s clear that content producers – at least some of them – are taking a closer look at the value of their contribution.
I’d love to see bloggers leaving the Huffing Post in droves (or demanding they make good on their revenue sharing promises), but I’d settle for writers who carefully weighed “attention” vs cold, hard cash.
The attention economy vs. the cash economy — what a great way to put it.
If the choice is an ego stroke, an “attaboy” and holding up a “Will write blog posts for food sign.” or being a nameless, behind the scenes contributor and a living in a nice house, give me the nice house any day.
Let’s hope the revolt ends more Egyptian than Libyan.
Wish I was smart enough to have coined that. I am smart enough to know that the bigger these sites get (and older), the early adopter benefit vanishes, and newer content producers probably won’t ever receive value for their efforts.
There isn’t much in the way of black & white here, but there also doesn’t appear to be much equity for all that labor…