I posted previously about Ariann Huffington’s business model, Hey HuffPo Bloggers – Was It Fun Working For Free To Make Arianna Richer?:
First, let me congratulate Arianna Huffington on selling The Huffington Post to AOL for a reported $315 million. Isn’t America a great place?Arianna came up with a great business model. Create a place where liberals could tell each other how smart they were, where they could write blog posts without being paid, and where they could create a community of commenters who routinely attacked the evil Republicans…and then sell out for mucho dinero….Who knew that the website devoted to a living wage and moral imperatives actually manged to get liberal bloggers to work for free to make money for the boss-lady and her investment banking investors.There’s a sucker born every minute….
A class action was brought on behalf of the bloggers, but it has been thrown out by a federal judge in New York, as reported by AP via The Huffington Post (full opinion embedded below):
The Huffington Post doesn’t have to pay bloggers for providing content for its website in part because they knew from the start they wouldn’t be paid and could have taken their work elsewhere, a federal judge ruled Friday.U.S. District Judge John Koeltl dismissed a lawsuit that bloggers filed last year. The lawsuit against the Huffington Post and its parent company, AOL Inc., argued they were unjustly denied compensation for their work.The bloggers were seeking class-action status. The lawsuit was prompted by AOL’s $315 million purchase of the Huffington Post last year. The bloggers claimed that the website unjustly profited from their work, promising only exposure. They were seeking at least $105 million in damages.AOL had argued that the bloggers gained exposure and a place to attract a big audience in exchange for the content.
Tasini v AOL and Huffington Post – Opinion and Order
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