I sympathize and share the author's dislike of this particular business model, however, I am fairly certain the Huffpo staffer addressed didn't read past the first paragraph.
On what do you base your fair certainty?
I got invited to write for the Huffington Post today
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Re: I got invited to write for the Huffington Post today
#12I write free articles only for marketing, and only on sites that will give me traffic that makes it worth my time.
This means that such sites will get only thinky veiled marketing.
Re: I got invited to write for the Huffington Post today
#13I agree with the writer's points that HuffPo seems like a pretty bad deal for the writer; but honestly how different is that from HN? Ignoring the fact that HN makes no money; the product they offer is obviously desirable or people would stop visiting. Therefore, it is worth something.
A large portion of the top content on HN comes from peoples' personal blogs. While these blogs often run ads, I seriously doubt those ads provide much income beyond covering the hosting bills. So people are obviously willing to write for free.
HuffPo realized there was a market opportunity in connecting people who were writing for free anyway with an audience for their content. I guess my biggest problem with their business model is that the offer seems like a freelance writing gig and could obviously dupe someone who doesn't ask the right questions.
So in the end I don't really have a problem with their business model, but their approach to sourcing content seems a bit disingenuous. If they were more up-front about the lack of payment, I would have less of a problem with this.
Re: I got invited to write for the Huffington Post today
#14Did you ask money to prove a point or just to stroke more your ego?
Re: I got invited to write for the Huffington Post today
#15Good for the writer. I have written for Hufpo once before and soon I realized how their model works: 1 - get free content from the writers. 2 - get free marketing and traffic from the writers (who tell their friends and follower about their article they've just posted on the Hufpo) Most of the articles you write are all hidden in some sub-pages that no one but your friends or google seo would ever find. edit: formatt…
This is the basic model of a lot of similar companies. Get people to provide content for free, then profit from control over the repository. If it weren't for copyright protections, HuffPo and its ilk would just copy your blog posts verbatim and call it a day. They're one step up from the sites that auto-generate product reviews or display reformatted Wikipedia articles.
Or link aggregators who get others (for free) to submit links to freely (not always though) provided content.
It's all about the traffic.
Re: I got invited to write for the Huffington Post today
#16I can understand the frustration of the author, however, HuffPo is not a government or social entity. It IS part of the free market. I am a huge proponent of the free market, however, that does not mean the free market will be perfect. In the short term, there are fits and starts and cycles that everything goes through, but it is only through the free market that we will progress over the long-term. Writers are unfor…
No, I think the author has every right to be insulted and angry over the presumption that he should work for free. Just saying "well, that's the way it is" is intellectually lazy, and portraying a dominant middleman like HuffPo as a healthy part of a genuinely free market is simply wrong.
Re: I got invited to write for the Huffington Post today
#17Good for the writer. I have written for Hufpo once before and soon I realized how their model works: 1 - get free content from the writers. 2 - get free marketing and traffic from the writers (who tell their friends and follower about their article they've just posted on the Hufpo) Most of the articles you write are all hidden in some sub-pages that no one but your friends or google seo would ever find. edit: formatt…
This is the basic model of a lot of similar companies. Get people to provide content for free, then profit from control over the repository. If it weren't for copyright protections, HuffPo and its ilk would just copy your blog posts verbatim and call it a day. They're one step up from the sites that auto-generate product reviews or display reformatted Wikipedia articles.
If it weren't for copyright protections, HuffPo and its ilk would just copy your blog posts verbatim and call it a day.
They pretty much do anyway. Anything saying "CNN has reported..." is basically just a rewrite of the existing CNN article, to just enough of an extent that they avoid copyright issues. Do slightly better SEO (easy because huffingtonpost.com is more popular than cnn.com) and you get all the clicks. The organisation that spent money on the original reporting gets nothing. Yay.
Re: I got invited to write for the Huffington Post today
#18the class of people who own the world and control all the assets may finally begin to see the error of their ways Their ways? Arianna Huffington didn't cause the current epidemic of narcissism making people willing to write for free to stroke their ego as he aptly noted. She also didn't inherit HuffPo so all that talk about socialism and inheritance tax is just more signalling on the author's part. Which is why they…
She was also married to a billionaire and got a nice divorce settlement in 1997.
Re: I got invited to write for the Huffington Post today
#19I wouldn't pay him either. I got bored after the second paragraph. Before you downvote: I have hired hundreds of writers in my time, and am currently paying out hundreds of dollars/day to content creators at http://newslines.org/newslines-rewards/
I have up-voted your before your edit.
Re: I got invited to write for the Huffington Post today
#20I can understand the frustration of the author, however, HuffPo is not a government or social entity. It IS part of the free market. I am a huge proponent of the free market, however, that does not mean the free market will be perfect. In the short term, there are fits and starts and cycles that everything goes through, but it is only through the free market that we will progress over the long-term. Writers are unfor…
Huffpo was never about news anyway,it's about selling stuff, the Kardishians and ads.
Huffpo is just like TV.It's to make people's brain ready for the 5 minutes of ads during and after each show.
The OP should take advantage of it and not take that content farm seriously,because it's garbage anyway.