"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.
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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:
