I’m beginning to see a trend towards business types harvesting the efforts of people who do things for free as gifts for one another, getting rich thereby, or trying to. Cases in point: The Huffington Post, Yelp, Patch, etc.
The Huffington Post, for example, has recently been hit with a class action lawsuit for ripping off its 9000 unpaid bloggers, as detailed here. (I do NOT intend to argue the merits of the specific lawsuit in this thread, that’s not what this is about).
Yelp and Patch and quite a few other aggregators depend on free contributions, in the form of reviews in the case of Yelp. They would have no product if it weren’t for their contributors, who get “exposure” – not gross MONEY of course – for their efforts.
I’ve seen some micropayment approaches to promote blogging, usually in the form of tip payment systemslike this one. I’m not sure that will do the trick. I think we need something like a whole new ethos, a sense that good bloggers SHOULD be paid for their efforts. I think it would be good for the Internet, and good for the economy. But I’m not sure how it would work. Suggestions?
To be honest, i’m not sure what the solution might be.
The lawsuit against HuffPo was dismissed with prejudice—rightfully in my opinion—because the judge said that the bloggers were well aware, before they allowed their work to be published, that they would not receive payment for it. Not only that, but plenty of them came back again and again, publishing more and more articles under the same agreement. The judge also noted that the bloggers were apparently happy with the exposure and reputation that publication in the Huffington post gave them, and never made any noise about money until AOL showed up with its $315 million to buy the company.
The main problem with fighting this business model is that it’s a bit like California agricultural laborers striking for better pay in the Great Depression. The farmers just went out an hired a bunch of other desperate workers who were willing to work for fifteen cents an hour instead of twenty-five. Similarly, the only way to change the model here is for bloggers to refuse to provide content, but there are so many writers out there on the internet who are happy for any chance at exposure that there will be ten people ready to take the place of any blogger who quits.
Part of the problem on the internet is the same thing that makes it so great—space is essentially unlimited. In the days of hard-copy magazines, you had to make much more calculated decisions about what was worth publishing and what wasn’t, because you only had 64 or 96 or 172 pages, or whatever. If people didn’t like what you produced, they might stop buying your publication. Now, publishing one more mediocre piece really doesn’t cost you anything, and if no-one reads it, then big deal; you just move on and grab another piece of free writing from some other blogger desperate to get his or her name out there. It’s all about the page views and ad impressions.
I’m not sure i’d lump sites like Yelp in with sites like the Huffington Post. I write some reviews on Yelp, but Yelp is explicitly about user-created content. Everyone knows that going in, and the same people who are the contributors are also the users. And every new contribution actually increases the usefulness of the site for your fellow users. And i don’t begrudge the folks at Yelp making some money from setting up this forum, and paying to maintain the website, the servers, the code, etc., etc. My only problem with Yelp’s business model has been their alleged tendency to try and extort advertising revenue out of businesses by fiddling with the reviews.
For me, the Huffington Post is different, because there’s far more asymmetry between users and content creators. The site gets over 30 million unique visitors a month, and many of them come for the (huge amounts of) content created by unpaid writers. I also get annoyed with HuffPo’s “news” model, which basically consists of scanning the internet for stories, slapping down a few short paragraphs of summary, combined with some shrill outrage or gleeful agreement (whichever is deemed most appropriate) and adding a link to the original story. If i want a news aggregator, i’ll go to Google or come here; if i want actual news, i’ll read an actual news website.
I’m not arguing that HuffPo’s model should be shut down or anything. These bloggers know, when they submit their work, that they’re doing it for free—or, rather, for the “exposure.” But as long as there are thousands of people willing to do that, the site will continue to thrive and make millions on content produced for free by others.
There’s also the more normative, subjective question of whether most of the writing that appears on the internet is actually worth paying for. If we worked out a system where everyone who wrote for HuffPo got paid, that would probably lead to far less content. Some would argue that this is a good thing, because market forces might actually weed out all the shit and allow the good stuff more prominence and reward; others would argue that choice is the spice of life, especially on the internet where, if you don’t like something, you just hit the “Back” button on your browser on try something else.
Sure, as a matter of law the suit was a nonstarter, that’s why I didn’t want to debate it. But here’s the thing: under the present system, only Arianna Huffington profited from that sale. All the bloggers who make the Huffington Post what it is got zip, nada, nothing. It simply was not FAIR. I know fairness got NOTHING to do with the law, but I still cling to a sense of personal morality about these things. It’s the same morality that keeps me from stealing from others, but I have to wonder why the “don’t steal from people who have” is wonderful morality while the “don’t screw over those who don’t have” morality is foolish starry eyed idealism, as our conservatives would have it. It’s two sides of the same coin.
That is the central problem under the current paradigm. But look … suppose you DID come up with a way for skilled bloggers to make money at it. What would happen? The GOOD bloggers would almost unanimously leave the freebie markets behind and go to the paying markets. There’s a REASON traditional publishers pay writers, and it sure isn’t the goodness of their hearts in most cases.
This is not a problem, this is a solution, as far as writers are concerned. A lot of traditional romance and erotica have moved to the Internet and forgone traditional publishing because there’s more money in self-publishing. The big problem is marketing, but for the most part publishers have stopped making any but the most minimal (i.e., getting the books on bookstore shelves) marketing for all but the bestsellers. The key is marketing, getting yourself noticed, which is the coin that HuffPo has paid in.
What would Yelp be without the user reviews? Nothing. If the site gets sold, who collects the money? Not the posters who made it what it is. It is simply unfair.
Google news agents are great news aggregators on specific topics, much better than HuffPo or anything else. But I’m not even talking entirely about the fairness or unfairness of aggregator’s practices, though there is plenty to discuss along those lines. I also thing that if we could get social media to become a profit engine for the people who participate AS WELL as the site owners, we could get some actual boom going in the Internet economy again. I mean, congrats for the people who had stock in Facebook and all, but wouldn’t it be great if there were a lot of regular folks making money off Facebook too?
Well there’s the rub … how do you get people to pay for good content when it is presently being offered for free in so many places? hell, a lot of the news analysis I see here on the Dope on political topics is a lot more rigorous and cogent than what I see in mainstream media by celebrity talking heads who are VERY well paid to babble. Why can’t the Dope make money on that? Why can’t Dopers?
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What would Yelp be without the user reviews? Nothing. If the site gets sold, who collects the money? Not the posters who made it what it is. It is simply unfair.
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What would the SDMB be without user contributions? Nothing. And if the site is sold (IIRC, it was being discussed a while ago), who collects the money? Certainly not us, the user community, the ‘posters who made it what it is’. I don’t see that as unfair…we contribute here (and hell, many of us pay for the privilege of posting on this site :p) because we want too and enjoy doing so. Just like the folks in your examples in the OP.
If the bloggers, the Yelp reviewers, Angie’s list reviews, or even SDMB posters are upset about someone making money off of their content, then they can stop posting. They, and we, know the deal.
Should I be upset if my cleaning up my yard raises the value of the neighbors house? I mean, really, they didn’t do anything, why should they make money off of it? Facebook is certainly selling my info and my eyeballs, yet I didn’t get anything out of the IPO.
As you said yourself, Huffington bloggers get free publicity out of their writings. Monetarily, that is more than I will ever see from this place.
This is the kind of thing you could write a university essay on, because it’s a very wide topic; it’s quite common in the creative industries for people to do things for free on the off chance that the publicity will boost their profile elsewhere. Back when I was young and lived in London some friends of mine used to gig with their laptops for free, and it did them well in the long run, but they needed decent day jobs to pay for it. Newspapers columnists, for example, generally don’t get paid a lot unless they’re big star names on television - in which case the column is a means of promoting their other interests rather than as a means of income by itself. I surmise that Paul Krugman (for example) derives the vast majority of his income from giving speeches, chairing committees, book deals etc, with his New York Times column purely as pocket money, and as a means of getting his name out there. Boris Johnson is paid a fortune for his Daily Telegraph column but that’s purely so that the Daily Telegraph can have Boris Johnson, Mayor of London and media star, writing for them.
The problem with most bloggers - but not just bloggers, but most musicians, most writers, most artists etc - is that they only have one string to their bow, and unless they’re hyper-commercial opportunists like the late Thomas Kinkade, their art will come and go out of fashion, so they’ll never make a lot of money from it. And to be honest most bloggers are rubbish. It’s the “90% of everything is crap” rule. And the internet! The internet. It would be nice if the Huffington Post et al paid for the blogger’s work, but in practice the payment would be chicken feed. Isn’t there another, similar site where the writers get a certain amount of money based on pageviews, with a brutally efficient rank-and-yank system for the less popular writers? Gawker or something similar. “Up or out” they call it in the armed forces.
But the same thing happens in television, movies, the world of business, ice cream sales, hairdressing. A star that asks for too large a paycheque is ditched in favour of someone cheaper. A star that no-one wants to see is ditched in favour of someone younger, with firmer buttocks, shinier skin. On a tangent, I’ve always assumed that was how SuicideGirls et al was run. The models have their pictures published, someone notes which ones are the most and least popular, the least popular are asked to go elsewhere, and thus evolution improves the overall commercial appeal of the breed. Not necessarily the beauty, or the quality, but the commercial appeal. And, in the absence of objective standards of quality and beauty, what else is there? And yet Thomas Kinkade’s art was rotten, dammit, and will die with him.
Still, I can see the same happening at the Huffington Post, assuming it survives. The trick from the publisher’s point of view would be to keep overall wages tiny, closely monitor hitcounts, and hope that you don’t have a Howard Beale Moment. Not the “mad as hell” speech - harmless amusement, it brings in viewers - but the one where he torpedoes some commercial deal that the owners of his television station are trying to pull down. They have him killed for that.
I actually used to freelance for good old Future Publishing in the UK; actual real paper magazines for real money. The money was never enough to actually live on - but this was the early 2000s, and there was an expectation that the internet would be a boon for writers. Content Is King, remember that? All those websites would need someone to write for them. But in practice (a) they didn’t, really and (b) people would do it for free. And yet Cracked.com, for example, pays for content, albeit in a very restrictive style; there are still paid writers for PC Gamer and so forth, although typically they’re also freelancers and they don’t earn a great deal. It’s a young person’s game, really. Ghost writing cookbooks, that’s the other thing. And endless celebrity biographies. Wayne Rooney had a five-book deal, you know? Five books for £5m. It didn’t pan out, and this was 2006 - still the days of endless free money - but still. John Peel died before he finished his autobiography. He died before he got to the bit where he became a DJ. Sick world. Sick world.
I’m going to have some more gin. Multi-paragraph posts to Straight Dope. Don’t get paid for that. Instead a few dozen people scattered around the world who I will never meet… or perhaps not even that. I have no reliable proof that the rest of the internet even exists. I mean, I could be the only one. Surrounded by millions of those spambots, talking to each other. An illusion of a population. See how I put things in italics? That’s quality, that is. Polish.
Well SDMB has never promised to pay anyone, so there’s no contract law issue here, just like with HuffPo. And I don’t really think SDMB is monetized the way HuffPo is, nor does it depend on a core of writers contributing free for the rest the way HuffPo did. So I’m not sure we’re comparing apples and oranges. But we may be. As you say, the site would be just reprints from the Straight Dope without the contributors. Maybe we should get something in the event of a sale.
I get what you’re saying, but for me, there’s the issue of coercion and consent to deal with here. I’m talking about fairness AS WELL AS the law.
If two people enter voluntarily into an arrangement whereby each one knows all of the conditions going in, and either one can decline to participate without any direct repercussions, then what makes that arrangement unfair? As others have noted in this thread, those individuals can choose, freely and without penalty, to post their musing elsewhere, and not give the Huffington Post the benefit of their free labor.
This is, it seems to me, the perfect opportunity for collective action. If the bloggers feel that they deserve to get paid, then they can join together and organize, and refuse to provide free content to the website. If i were a popular blogger on HuffPo, one strategy i would consider would be to get in touch with a dozen or so other bloggers whose interests were similar, or complementary, to my own, and break away to form my own site with those people. You could share server costs and other expenses, and if you managed to make some money, you could work out an equitable way to split it up. Making a website is easy these days, and hosting one is, in the big scheme of things, pretty damn cheap. You could even continue to post the occasional story at HuffPo, or cross-post your stories to both sites, as a way of driving traffic to your own site.
In principle, i tend to agree with you, and it’s clear that the people who run the Huffington Post have made a conscious decision to pursue free content and to profit from it. Because i don’t much like their business model, and because i don’t like the way they also benefit by summarizing other news sites’ stories, i choose not to go there. But i think that any attempt to correct what you see an an injustice will likely lead to a situation where the cure is just as bad as the disease, and possibly worse.
Sure, it’s not a perfect analogue. But it’s got a lot of similarities IMHO. Neither group is posting their thoughts in the expectation of direct material reward. And that’s the key similarity. I think, personally, that this is going to be the model for the future, actually…people participating for their own pleasure without the expectation of material reward, and creating content for their own and others enjoyment. Some really gifted individuals will gain recognition and perhaps even material rewards due to the wider audience they will reach, but most will simply do it for their own pleasure, and perhaps some small recognition of their contributions in their virtual communities. Tell me you don’t want some recognition in our community…and that this wouldn’t be reward enough for most. I know it is for me, coupled with my simple pleasure in posting my thoughts and simply seeing folks from all over, many who I respect, just respond to what I type.
Had anyone asked me two decades ago I’d be spending my (to me) valuable and highly limited time typing and posting (instead of playing games or surfing porn, or other seemingly more valuable activities :p) I’d have said they were nuts. Yet I try and post literally every chance I have spare time and energy to do so…and at a guess most of my fellow 'dopers feel quite similarly.