A recently file lawsuit on behalf of 9,000 bloggers against The Huffington Post are seeking over $100 million in damages. The bloggers are claiming they made The Huffington Post what it is today due to their contributions. With the recent sale of the Huffington Post to AOL for $315 Million, the bloggers believe they are entitled to a share of that. One outraged blogger stated “without the bloggers there was no Huffington Post and there would be no sale to AOL.” However the bloggers knew they would not get compensation for writing an article for the Huffington Post. Whether or not there was a contract with each blogger is unclear.
As Ritzer & Jurgenson observe, there is a “trend towards unpaid rather then paid labor and towards offering products at no cost” which they conclude as a new form of capitalism. Could you say The Huffington Post, as one of the many online profit-seeking companies, has traits of capitalism? Ritzer & Jurgenson state traits of capitalism include “efforts to gain greater control and greater profits.” Well The Huffington Post did not pay the bloggers who contributed leaving them with greater profits and with AOL buying them, there is now greater control and power.
Ritzer & Jurgenson ponder on a point that can be related to how The Huffington Post functions and the possibility of a new form of capitalism emerging; “If capitalism is ultimately based on (unequal) exchanges based on a money economy, in such a ‘free’ economy can we be said to have capitalism in its traditional sense or are we beginning to see the emergence of the outlines of a new form of capitalism?” We will see how the lawsuit pans out but for the mean time, Did Arianna Huffington create an online journalism platform with capitalism written all over it or did she just create an amazing business idea that made her millions?
Source: Production, Consumption, Prosumption, The nature of capitalism in the age of the digital ‘prosumer’ by George Ritzer and Nathan Jurgenson
