The Economics of Blogging and The Huffington Post

When The Huffington Post announced earlier this week that it was being acquired by AOL for $315 million in cash and stock, one group felt slighted: a set of unpaid bloggers for the site, identifying by the Twitter hashtag #huffpuff, which claims that The Huffington Post has “built a blog-empire on the backs of thousands of citizen journalists.”
Some analyses in the mainstream media have echoed these sentiments. “To grasp The Huffington Post’s business model,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’s Tim Rutten, “picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates.”
I have enormous sympathy for anyone writing about public affairs, whether as a hobby or as a career. And I’d encourage people to think very carefully about where they are doing their writing, and what they are getting paid for it.
The fact is, however, that sentiments like Mr. Rutten’s reflect a misunderstanding of The Huffington Post’s business model. Although The Huffington Post does not pay those who volunteer to write blogs for it, this content represents only a small share of its traffic. And, to put it bluntly, many of those blog posts aren’t worth very much.

The Huffington Post receives huge amounts of traffic: about 15.6 million page views per weekday, according to Quantcast. But it also has a huge amount of content accounting for those page views. It publishes roughly 100 original pieces per day — paid and unpaid — in its politics section alone. And politics coverage, according to Arianna Huffington, reflects only about 15 percent of the site’s traffic.
How many page views, then, does an individual blog post receive? And roughly what is it worth to The Huffington Post?
A spokesman for The Huffington Post, Mario Ruiz, said that he was unable to share numbers more specific numbers than the the ones that have been released publicly. However, there is enough data in the public domain that we can make some reasonable inferences.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/the-economics-of-blogging-and-the-huffington-post/?smid=tw-nytimes&seid=auto