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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Huff Po Sale: Arianna $300 Million, Writers 0

David has his own detailed take on the HuffPo sale to AOL, and it’s a good write-up with some interesting comments which you should read if you’re interested in that sort of thing.

For me, here’s what the HuffPo sale really means:

Ariana Huffington managed to take a model of paying people little (in some cases) to nothing (in most cases) for the privilege of having work “published” on HuffPo. “Citizen journalists” my ass. Using a spin on the “unpaid intern” huckster sell, she convinced many, many smart people to give her their hard work for free, so that she could build up a site over a few years and then sell it for $300 million.

It’s the scam of the century, really. HuffPo fleeces writers at a time when people with journalism degrees are fighting over scraps, and she makes a $300 million sale off (as David pointed out) stealing chunks of some content and selling enough people the crazy Kool-Aid that writing for HuffPo for free was better than not writing at all. To me, HuffPo was always insanely stupid in its inception, and I’ve been amazed at times when people whose writing I otherwise respect turned up from time to time over there. But hey, $300 million. Holy crap. That’s a big chunk of AOL change.

To put the sale in a slightly different perspective: I was working for Cinematical back when it was still owned by Weblogs, Inc, which owned a buttload of quality blog properties including Engadget, TUAW, Blogging Baby and TV Squad — all, at that time, traffic leaders for their niches. AOL bought Weblogs, Inc in October 2005 for about $25 million, and there was much celebrating by the bloggers who worked their asses off for the various sites when we converged in November 2005 in New York City to meet our new AOL colleagues, get schooled in the AOL way of doing things (man, do they have a LOT of lawyers, and a LOT more rules for how you have to deal with linking to other peoples’ content, so good luck navigating that shit, HuffPo.)

But back to the writers: With our hard work, we’d helped build the Weblogs properties into something worth selling for $25 million! Wasn’t that awesome? We drank much sake and other beverages that weekend, congratulating ourselves on our general awesomeness.

Surely AOL would be promptly rewarding the people who did the daily grind for those blogs with full time jobs, or, at least, better pay than the “if we build it, they will buy eventually” $10/blog post, $50/feature rate we’d been getting. To be perfectly fair, I’m pretty sure the guys at Engadget, which at that time at least was a HUGE money property for Weblogs and carried a lot of the weight of the other 80-something blogs, got some payoff. And I’m pretty sure they made more than the standard going per-post rate to begin with.

Also to be fair, Weblogs, Inc boss-man Jason Calacanis figured out very early in the blog-for-profit game that you could pay bloggers per post and motivate them to be hungry and therefore write more frequently to hit the perceived “sweet spot” of X posts per day — that point at which number of posts and the highest increase in traffic, merged. I have no issue with Jason Calacanis at all — he’s a very smart guy, I learned a lot working for him, he paid people fairly for the market at the time, and he wasn’t — and isn’t — afraid to take chances. It takes balls to grow a business, and the ability to delegate to a team of smart people, and Jason knows how to do both.

He also, from my experience, believes passionately in whatever he’s doing at the moment, and I like to think that, if he had it to do over again, he wouldn’t have sold to AOL. Because they took what Weblogs, Inc had built and spent the next few years gutting and gutting and gutting the properties they bought, including Cinematical — and bless the Cinematical team who have somehow managed to hold it together through AOL’s numerous attempts to dilute the brand and merge it completely under Moviefone. Cinematical has a dedicated editorial staff, and some good writers, and they have much more patience for dealing with AOL than I did.

So now, here we are six years later and the same company that bought Weblogs, Inc — which owned sites that actually did generate a great deal of original content for which writers were actually paid — for $25 million, is now buying HuffPo, which generates limited original content for which writers are actually paid, for more than 10 times what they paid for Weblogs. Yowza.

Clearly, my writer friends and I are all (still) working on the wrong side of this equation.

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6 Responses to “Huff Po Sale: Arianna $300 Million, Writers 0”

  1. James Rocchi says:

    Having worked with Kim during this change and that era, I cannot endorse the spirit and sensibility of this piece enough.

  2. Kim Voynar says:

    I feel I need to emphasize here that I don’t take issue with what I was paid when I worked for Cinematical under Weblogs, Inc, which we knew at that time was a lean, mean, growing company. We all knew what we were getting into with that gig, it was the dawn of being paid to blog, being able to legitimately work from home, being paid to fucking write at ALL, which was so great for that period of my life. For all of us at that time.

    I completely owe the career that’s transitioned into film critic and managing editor (at Cinematical) and features editor and film critic here at MCN, to Karina Longworth, then EIC of Cinematical, for hiring me and pushing me to write my best and grow and learn, and especially to Jason Calacanis.

    He believed I could do this job in spite of having four young kids still at home, and brought me to my first Sundance and gave me a shot. It was really a world for 20–somethings with nothing to do but blog 24-7, and he took a chance on an older writer with other obligations and trusted me to be professional. Jason rocks.

    I am less enamored of AOL, who — and I feel I can say this now — didn’t raise anyone’s pay, as we expected they would, and set impossibly high traffic goal hoops for us to jump through always dangling an elusive carrot of bigger budget and more pay at the end of it. And James Rocchi, who was then EIC, would fight and fight for more budget to be able to meet the goals they wanted us to meet, and every time we’d meet a goal they’d say, hah hah just kidding, but if you reach THIS one maybe we’ll pay more. And by the bye, we want better content, better writers … but you have to offer them shit pay and convince them it’s gold.

    It was like being Charlie Brown with Lucy holding the football and jerking it out from under you all the time. And then the constant threat of being merged with Moviefone, or under Moviefone, or whatever the plan was on any given day. Jesus.

    I have nothing but respect for my colleagues who have stuck it out over there through the years, they are pros and they believe in what they’re doing and they support their writers passionately. But I could not beat my head bloody against that wall anymore. When Ted Leonsis, the last of the guys who actually really understood the heart and soul and value of the Weblogs properties, left AOL to go do new and exciting and, I think, better things over with SnagFilms, which bought indieWIRE, that was EOL for me.

    The AOL travel office rocks, though. I’ll say that for them.

  3. christian says:

    Well stated. Too bad nobody in the bought-and-sold-media will ever question Arianna to her face.

  4. Shay says:

    Still better than Demand Media, no?

  5. Senh says:

    You always think that when a bigger company buys a smaller one, they’ll invest some money to grow it, but instead they just want you to do more with less.

  6. Kim Voynar says:

    Preach it, Senh.

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon