Arianna Huffington has responded to the bloggers who are suing her after seeing how much money she pulled in. As long as the bloggers submitted material willingly with no promises of payment, the comparisons to slaves is absurd. Some of the bloggers have even benefited from the publicity of writing for a site with the traffic levels of Huffington Post.
Huffington compared the unpaid bloggers at her site to those who are involved in other ares of social media and the blogosphere. There are some differences between those who post to sites like Facebook as some posting for a limited audience. Still, Mark Zuckerberg is making a considerable amount of money off their work, but nobody who posts on Facebook realistically expects any payment. Those who write for free at Daily Kos present a closer analogy as they are writing material for the general public without sharing in the income received by Markos Moulitsas Zúniga
Doug Mataconis has a good overview of the case from a legal perspective, but I have a minor nitpick over his statement, “Indeed. These freelancers are, in my opinion, no different than an individual who blogs on his own site without generating any real revenue.”
There is one difference. The bloggers at Huffington Post did work which partially led to the large profits there, while an individual blogger is unlikely to lead to such profits for anybody. The claim that they were slaves is obviously absurd and I can’t imagine that legally there is any grounds to their suit. However the key remains that there is a large pot of money here, along with the reputation of a public figure. While their legal arguments might not make any sense, I can see where they thought that there was reasonable hope receiving a settlement making the filing of a frivolous suit worthwhile.
If the bloggers had simply raised the issue, they might have received some sympathy. I could then see thinking that perhaps Arianna Huffington should share some of the profits made from their efforts despite not being under any legal obligation to do so. However, now that this has turned into such a frivolous lawsuit, I hope Huffington doesn’t pay out a dime to anyone involved in this suit.
I would compare this scenario to professional actors. We all know there are thousands of struggling actors who would work for free just to get the exposure of a role. That, I believe, is the benefit free bloggers received in exchange for their services. So to take it a step further, why don’t free actors get hired, even though they are available? Unions! The Screen Actors Guild and various other performance art related unions, make it impossible to hire people below a certain scale. Overall, I see this as a very good thing for working actors, and potentially, for working bloggers.
If working bloggers were smart, they would unionize and make the practice of free blogging on for-profit sites impossible. They would still be able to create their own sites, and do their best to inhance their value, much as an independent film maker does, outside of union rules.
Professional bloggers have no less right to protect their job security to the extent possible as any other professionals, and precluding free labor from for profit sites is one way to accomplish this.
Just running this up the flagpole to see who salutes.
There are also differences. The struggling actors are working towards being professional actors and there are a limited number of acting jobs around in professional venues. Having people take the roles for free would further limit the paying jobs for professional actors, while the struggling actors working for free still would not be making money as an actor. There is also much greater effort in acting in professional venues than putting out a blog post.
On the other hand the internet has created a virtually infinite amount of written material and bloggers generally do not jeopardize the ability of pro writers to make a living. Bloggers often are not professional writers but people who use blogs to express their opinions, promote projects, etc. Even when a professional writer posts on blogs, they are typically using the blog as a means of promoting their work (and are getting free advertising).
Huffington Post is an exception in bringing in so much money. The unpaid bloggers were just one part of all the material on the site. If they did not have people who were willing to blog for free, or if unions prevented this, I bet that they would have a much smaller number of paid writers and would still do as well as they did.
I don’t disagree, but if I were a paid blogger at a for-profit site, I’d seriously consider organizing.
As I said before, I do believe the free bloggers were compensated for the efforts, with exposure that created greater potential for a paid gig.
I suspect that Huffington could have obtained all the free bloggers she needed if the ones working at the time decided they did not want to work for free. If she couldn’t get free bloggers I bet she would have greatly reduced use of bloggers on the site to keep costs down. The paid writers and the material from other sites which she uses would be sufficient, possibly with the hiring of a very small number of bloggers. Either way I don’t think there was a real way for the bloggers to get paid.
It is also significant that bloggers retained ownership of their material when posted at Huffington Post. All they would need is bloggers who are willing to cross post material from their own blogs at Huffington Post to fill the site. They would have no trouble keeping their site filled with blog posts from bloggers who wanted the exposure at Huffington Post to drive traffic to their own blogs.