On the one hand she rails against corporate greed. On the other hand, Arianna Huffington, one of the web's most prominent political bloggers, refuses to pay the legion of citizen bloggers that have made her site (The Huffington Post) the 5th most linked to blog on the web according to Technorati. Or, so argues Froma Harrop in a biting editorial in the Providence Journal.
"Like most political blogs, the 'news' on The Huffington Post is merely links to newspapers, TV stations and other organizations that actually pay their creators. Without the serf-written blogs, the site would be worth next to zero.
Being very left, The Huffington Post provides a daily damnation of top-hatted capitalists oppressing the toiling masses. Imagine obtaining such content from slave labor. Business schools will be studying this example for years."
Somewhere in Harrop's sarcasm-infused diatribe she has a point -- or she misses one completely about user generated content. It's hard to tell. The Huffington Post is hardly the first site to build a business around content created by uncompensated users. YouTube springs to mind. MySpace springs to mind. Epinions, Digg, TripAdvisor, DailyKos, etc. Heck, even the very newspaper Harrop sits on the editorial board of prints letters to the editor (or, user generated content) without payment to the writer.
Do amateur content creators deserve a slice of the pie? Yeah, probably. Many user generated content-powered sites are beginning to offer their users payment in the form of revenue share (YouTube just started, for example), and I think that's a trend you'll see continue as these sites mature. But to call it slave labor is probably stretching a point.
No one is forcing people to blog for The Huffington Post, and what those amateur bloggers get in return for their content is a platform. What most YouTubers seek in return for providing free content is a platform. User generated content sites make money off their users, and in return those users receive exposure that they might not otherwise have access too.
As we recently discussed, making money in the long tail of the blogosphere is difficult -- the bloggers contributing to sites like Huffington's likely would not be able to attract much of an audience to their content if they weren't being provided a popular platform to get their ideas out to the public. Making money on the long tail, however, is doable. And that's exactly what The Huffington Post and other user generated content sites are doing -- they've figured out a way to aggregate the long tail of content creation into something meaningful and monetizable.
Certainly there is some irony in the fact that bloggers on The Huffington Post who rant about the corporate greed of old media companies for not paying Hollywood writers for new media usage are doing so on a new media site that is making money off their work and not paying them. But if and when that bothers those writers enough to demand a cut, they'll walk out on The Huffington Post and ask for their fair share of the money they're helping bring in. For now, though, it seems that most amateur content creators are happy enough just being heard.
What do you think? Is user generated content really just a fancy term for slave labor? Do the companies getting rich off user creations have a responsibility to cut those users in on the back end? Sound off in the comments below.
Image credit: jdlasica
Comments
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Posted by: John | December 12, 2007 8:29 AMResponse #1 is very clever.
Posted by: Todd Finley | December 12, 2007 8:41 AMShe gets what she pays for.
Posted by: Don | December 12, 2007 8:47 AMI'd restrict the term "slave labor" to situations where the laborer has no real choice in the matter. As you point out, Huffington writers are not compensated, but they're hardly being forced to write.
What I think would be smart would be for Huffington and her staff to begin identifying strong writers, or at least the writers who tend to generate pageviews. One way might be to have a "Top 10 Stories of the Day" list, a "Most E-mailed" list, and also a "Top Authors" list. Some of those will be dominated by the celebs or media stars who regularly write, but some will be from grassroots types who are genuinely giving a lot to the site. It's those everyday people who deserve compensation.
Posted by: Bill J | December 12, 2007 8:55 AM"Slave labor" suggests the content creators don't have a choice, which doesn't really apply here. Sure, it'd be nice to earn a fair wage for a fair effort, but sites like Huffington and YouTube, etc. make it clear that you're not going to get paid for your submissions. If there *was* a suggestion of payment then I'd think there'd be plenty to scream about, but folks know what they're getting in to, so I don't see the problem. They can stop contributing anytime they like ... or they can put their efforts into something with a better return on investment (whether they achieve that ROI is another matter).
This feels like the old freelancers' lament repackaged for Web 2.0 -- "why won't anyone pay me for my [insert content type here]?" Maybe because your stuff isn't that good? Or, maybe because you didn't cause a big enough stink?
Posted by: Mac | December 12, 2007 9:12 AMI wouldn't say companies are obligated to and slave labor is a bit harsh. But I could see some sort of threshold revenue sharing idea becoming more popular (Eg: If you get X amount of views, you get x amount of dollars, from there we share revenue based on views).
Posted by: Nathan | December 12, 2007 10:56 AMThis overview of the situation seems quite one sided to me. I would take this view myself:
1) content owners who put content on youtube or a similar services are giving away there content for free. Youtube for example has the ability to prevent embedding which prevents this from occurring. Perhaps the onus is on youtube to make uploaders more aware of there privacy/ownership rights.
2) If she links through to another blog she is driving traffic to that blog. Which will probably benefit the end user via self esteem or advertising revenue.
I don't see what she is doing in form of negative context.
Posted by: Roy | December 12, 2007 12:42 PMI think the article was pointing out the hypocrisy of bloggers railing against “big media/old media” within the context of the new media while enriching one of the new media “moguls” Arianna Huffington. As the revenues begin to pile up, you can be sure that some of these bloggers are going to start demanding their fair share and will unionize/sue/virtual picket etc. to get their piece of the pie. The fact that they don’t have contracts or revenue-sharing agreements in place and are currently providing content for free is beside the point. The “fairness” issue will be raised one way or the other in proportion to the revenues that are being generated on these aggregation sites. If compensating bloggers/content providers makes good business sense for investors then somebody will or should figure out a way to do it. “New media” hasn’t’ made obsolete the profit motive, it’s just shifted who’s getting paid and not getting paid.
Posted by: Greg C. | December 12, 2007 2:11 PMAnyone who claims the writers are not getting compensated knows absolutely nothing about making money off websites. First of all, how does Mrs. Huffington get compensated? She either gets paid per click (CPC), per Action (CPA - Someone purchasing an item after they click on a link), or per 1000 impressions (CPM) of an advertisement. If she is getting a ton of traffic, then she is using the CPM model. Which she deserves to get as her computers and her bandwidth cost money. She is the one who gets the readers. Secondly, if people are clicking through to someones blog posting then that writer has a chance to make money through the same methods.
Welcome to the new world people. If you are trying to relate the old way of getting compensated to the new world, then it will always sounds like a bad deal. But if you think about making money in the new world, then you will understand that she is actually giving these people opportunity to make money like they never could on their own. In certain web marketing communities, people would pay to have their blog postings on such a popular site.
Posted by: FBNewtz | December 12, 2007 3:59 PMUGC creators need more control of what we want to endorse. Meta/tags/"like" ad placement isn't control, I don't like the idea that every time someone looks at my UGC some ad is being rotated in or around it that I have not specifically approved.
As a creator of UGC (cooking), I really like what I am reading here, "Pure Verticals' Patent-Pending Technology Revolutionizes Monetization of User Generated Content (MUGC)"
http://www.pr.com/press-release/62268
I'm anxious for their Q1.
Side note: comment #1 was PERFECT.
Posted by: Steven | December 12, 2007 9:36 PMI don't know what to make of the post. What was the arrangement with these bloggers and Huffington in the first place.
If it was content for exposure I don't see how we get to "slave labor"...
The post is a teaser...it pulls me in but when I get there, there is not enough information to have a full debate!
Posted by: Adrian Keys | December 12, 2007 9:46 PMWow, I actually didn't realize that the people posting on Huffington Post were a bunch of unpaid amateurs. The quality of the content is certainly very high, but I always thought it was running in a semi-traditional "publication" kinda way. I'm not sure I'm going to give it so much creedence, as from what I'm reading here it just sounds like an amalgamation of unpaid amateurs?
Posted by: Peter Cooper | December 13, 2007 9:09 AM