"by" Andrew Sullivan on the Huffington Post's Shameless Blogsploitation Business Model of building a personal fortune on cranking out a constant, steaming river of traffic-driving softcore porn, gossip and the unpaid-for writing of others...
The HuffPo Model: Rich Liberals Exploiting Blog-Serfs For Millions...lost as it was in the Daily Dish's usual barrage of posts made up mostly of free content gleaned from Politico, CNN, Ezra Klein, the National Review, Megan McCardle, PBS, The New York Times, Dave Weigel, Tyler Cowen, American Conservative Magazine David Frum, Wired, Twitter feeds, reprints of reader emails, the Wall Street Journal, Glenn Greenwald, Frank Rich, Matt Yglesias, Michael Medved, Christopher Hitchens, Felix Salmon, a variety of other Atlantic Writers, William Saletan, Josh Marshall, Paul Krugman, YouTube Videos, more David Frum, Nate Silver, Al-Jazeera, Radley Balko, still more reader emails, and so on.
14 Feb 2011 02:01 pm
In the wake of the AOL merger, Nate Silver wonders how much money the Huffington Post makes off its unpaid serfs bloggers:The Huffington Post receives huge amounts of traffic: about 15.6 million page views per weekday, according to Quantcast. But it also has a huge amount of content accounting for those page views. It publishes roughly 100 original pieces per day — paid and unpaid — in its politics section alone. And politics coverage, according to Arianna Huffington, reflects only about 15 percent of the site’s traffic. How many page views, then, does an individual blog post receive? And roughly what is it worth to The Huffington Post?...
The Huffpo Model -- which shares little DNA with traditional publishing, but bears a striking resemblance to industries like mountaintop mining or clear-cut logging insofar it concerns itself almost exclusively with the use of technology to ever-more-efficiently exploit its targeted resource while at the same time showing absolutely no concern with the disastrous, long-term damage their techniques are doing to the very environment which has made it possibly for them to prosper -- seems so perfectly engineered to kill whatever "professionalism" is still sloshing around at the bottom of the profession of writing that it is almost impossible to imagine that it was entirely accidental.
Mr. Sullivan's own addenda to the work of Nate Silver :
...was re-printed from his Sunday Times column.
The temptation to run a website devoted almost entirely to hysterical claims about Obama's betrayals of the left and shirtless pictures of Hugh Jackman striding out of Australian surf becomes rather huge. Addictive even. But huge is the point. HuffPo's business model is sheer size. If you can throw as much content - free, borrowed or merely linked to - in one, sprawling place, you will generate a big enough crowd of eyeballs - 40 million of them a month at last count - to bring bigger and bigger advertisers to sign on.
...
Which, as he notes, is pay-walled.
There's a lesson in there somewhere.
I'm not sure what it is, but it does give me an excuse to re-run one of my favorite videos from Harlan Ellison:
7 comments:
I was watching the reaction to Google's new Chrome extension yesterday and wandered what was going to happen to content mills (who, it seems, Google is targeting). I feel bad for the revenue sharing producers/writers, because this could cause that stream to dry up. At the same time I was glad for this extension.
Then I realized that the writers at Associated Content and places such as that have it way better than the bloggers at HuffPo, only because mill producers get paid something.
If Silver's analysis of the traffic to the individual HuffPo blogs is right, then those who are writing for "exposure" aren't getting any. In fact, they'd have been better off writing for Associated Content because they'd at least earn pennies for their few pageviews. As it stands, these bloggers are getting neither money nor exposure (and this publicity is ruining the validity of the clips they may use when trying to get paying gigs). Heh.
I don't believe Arianna is drawing the correct conclusion from Silver's 15% figure for political hits. Political posters are the primary users--it's a place for them to read the headlines, make or read a comment or two, and get some junk food.
Serve mostly only junk food and they will quit coming.
Ms Huffington has been a kind of carpetbagger for decades. (We southerners had the terminology in place.)
Writers should get paid.
OTOH, a world where only the well-to-do have access to important information is frightening.
Writing is becoming like cooking. Many do it well. Few make a living doing it.
Charity Ass
Aunt Leona wasn't really a relative, just a neighbor who attached herself to our family. This not being a real aunt was not a bad thing, as many kinds of profound insanity run deep in my family, and having a non-insane perspective on things could be refreshing.
She had worked as a B-girl in New Orleans after the war because that's the only sort of work she could find until she found a husband, what with all the GIs returning from the war. B-girling provided a nice income, what with all the GIs returning from the war, until she found that husband in one of her clients.
Now, you might imagine that someone of conventionally loose morals might have found the sexual revolution to be a good thing, a welcome come down for the moralism that stigmatized her former profession. But Aunt Leona didn't think about this in moral terms, God bless her. Nor was her thinking prompted by mercenary concerns, because she had been married for 40 years, and was quite unimpeachably moral about that, so the lack of profitability of her former profession had no practical consequences for her.
What bothered her about the sexual revolution was all the charity ass out there making it impossible for a working girl to make a decent living. But this bothered her as matter of totally disinterested professional pride. It was just wrong to give it away for free.
The world will always have its assholes. We just need better assholes, people like Harlan and my Aunt Leona, of whom there are far too few.
Huff Post is like Walmart: chaotic and claustrophobic and full of garbage. But a lot of people seem to like that "model". Quantity over quality, cheap crap in abundance.
Succinct cartoon at the following:
http://blogs.thetimes-tribune.com/johncole/
Skip the prose commentary.
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