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The road to Web serfdom: Huffington’s free-as-in-beer posts vs. the free-as-in-speech Web

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When you post to Facebook, are you a “serf”? When you write a blog post for a site that doesn’t pay you, are you a “galley slave”?

These are terms that journalists at the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have recently applied to the content users contribute to various Web sites and services.

The LA Times’ Tim Rutten writes of the business model of the Huffington Post, “You need to picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates.”

In the New York Times, David Carr’s column headlined “At Media Companies, a Nation of Serfs” chronicles a Web of companies worth millions and billions — Facebook, Google, Twitter, Quora, Tumblr and, again, Huffington — and notes, “The funny thing about all these frothy millions and billions piling up? Most of the value was created by people working free.”

I resisted the urge to jump on Carr’s column because, though its confused thinking induced much head-scratching, it also contained a lot of sense. Having heard Carr reinforce some of the confusion in a brief NPR Morning Edition spot today, I think I better just say this:

As we talk about the plight of journalists trying to earn a living in a rapidly evolving digital marketplace that has devalued each individual contribution and untied the product bundle that till recently paid the media bills, we need to distinguish between the plight of the journalist in a glutted market and the concerns of the citizen seeking a free voice.

Publishing a blog post at Huffington Post for no pay is nothing like being a galley slave. No whips! No chains! It’s voluntary (as Anna Tarkov argues). You get to sit at home and type out your ideas and get a bunch of people to read them. You may well feel shafted when you realize that Huffington & co. just walked off with $300 million in AOL cash and you didn’t get a cent, but nobody made you give Arianna your words for nothing. Presumably, you gave them because you thought her site was a good place to spread your ideas or your reputation, sell your books or bring some visitors to your own site. (Stowe Boyd looks at the non-financial incentives.)

Maybe you’ll rethink that bargain now. If large numbers of people do, then Huffington and her investors may have just played AOL’s Tim Armstrong for a sucker. (Although, by Nate Silver’s calculations, most of the value and traffic on HuffPo derives from the content produced by paid staffers.) Maybe it would have been smart for Huffington to share some of her plunder with her unpaid contributors (as Dan Gillmor and others have urged); it would have been fair, certainly. But my hunch is the HuffPo bloggers aren’t going to stop writing for free. Most of them like the bargain.

There is a reasonable argument to be made about “serfdom” online, but it doesn’t have anything to do with Huffington’s paycheck-less bloggers. It has even less to do with Google’s search engine, which draws its intelligence from the links we all embed in our Web pages. One problem with Carr’s column is that he conflates all these different services and — like so many content-obsessed journalists — ignores the contributions of the platform-builders and their technology. At Google, as at many of the companies Carr lists, there’s enormous value created by paid employees — but they’re writing code instead of copy.

The aspect of the idea of digital “serfdom” that makes sense has little to do with getting a paycheck for your writing; it’s about control of the platform that delivers your writing and ownership of any (typically meager) fruits from that labor. It’s why many people, like me, choose to buy their own domain name and run their own blog software rather than use one of the free-but-corporate-owned alternatives. It doesn’t take much to have your own fief these days.

Interestingly, this is the point made by the writer from whom Carr borrows the feudal analogy — Reuters’ Anthony DeRosa:

In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have any of these platforms. In a perfect world everyone would have their own piece of the web that they own entirely. … Those tech savvy enough to rent out rackspace, install their own web server and plop down their virtual piece of land on the web control and capitalize on all of the content that they deliver there.

However for most of the people on the web today, this isn’t the case. We live in a world of Digital Feudalism. The land many live on is owned by someone else, be it Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, or some other service that offers up free land and the content provided by the renter of that land essentially becomes owned by the platform that owns the land.

(I would just add that to emancipate yourself, you don’t need to rent out rackspace and manage your own server; all you need to do is know how to FTP and pay a few bucks a month to an ISP and a domain registrar.)

The argument about “digital labor” is real and valuable and has been unfolding for some time now in the academic wing of the new-media studies world. It’s what Dave Winer has recently been writing a lot about, as he urges us to find an alternative to Twitter and Facebook that we own ourselves.

Professional journalists worried about their salaries in a world awash in posts and “content” have one set of problems; the much larger population of social-media users who ought to be thinking hard about who controls their contributions have a different one. I wish Carr had done a better job of distinguishing between these different realms rather than lumping them together in one big morass of “people working for free.”

As they say in open-source land, there’s free as in “beer” and free as in “speech” — “gratis” versus “libre.” People aren’t going to stop writing “gratis” for Huffington and her ilk, and that will continue to lower the market price of all but the most specialized and rarefied kinds of old-fashioned journalism. Of course this doesn’t make me happy as a writer, but I’m not going to pretend it will stop. For that very reason, those of us who care about our words will need to pay greater attention to the “libre” side of the freedom ledger, and pitch our posts on ground that we own or control.

There are other good posts on this theme from Michele McLellan at the Knight Digital Media Center:

Fretting about unpaid contributors is just another way of grieving journalism’s past. They’re here. They’re on social media. They’re talking. They’re writing. Get over it, journalists, and use the energy to figure out innovative ways to add the unique value of the journalist to the mix.

And Mathew Ingram at GigaOm:

The funny thing about online content, as former eHow owner Josh Hannah noted in contrasting Demand Media’s paid content-farm model with that of free sites like WikiHow, is that you often get better quality content when people write for nothing than you do when you pay them tiny sums of money, as Demand does. In other words, some people are more than willing to write for the recognition and reputation value and sheer passion (or other intangibles) rather than for money. And there will always be media entities like The Huffington Post that take advantage of that.

Comments

  1. The gap in quality is a demonstration of the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation will often lead people to do great work, but it’s generally pretty difficult to produce. Extrinsic motivation is much easier to access, but can be easily sapped of its power.

    If you’re a person who cares about a topic and you want to express yourself to the world, that’s a strong intrinsic motivation. You’ll put a lot of effort into it, and feel a great sense of ownership about the final product. You’ll believe that the quality of the work will be a reflection of you as a person and therefore will need to be as good as it can be.

    Contrast that with being someone who’s paid a small amount of money, say a dollar, to write up something about a topic you may or may not care about. That’s extrinsic motivation and pretty pathetic motivation at that. The fact that the piece has been given a price (a dollar) means that it’s simultaneously been given a value (a dollar). It’s very unlikely that you’ll feel any sense of ownership of the product and you’re extremely unlikely to feel that the quality of the piece reflects on you personally. After all, it’s just something you hacked out for the price of a Diet Coke out of a vending machine.

  2. It’s a fallacy to equate ‘control of the platform’ and control of your content. Once on the Internet, information can be copied freely, and any of your thought, images, and opinions can be harvested onto other people’s platforms, where they get to monetize it.

    As Coding Horror reports: “last year, something strange happened: the content syndicators began to regularly outrank us in Google for our own content. ”

    http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/01/trouble-in-the-house-of-google.html

  3. Ian, I agree that absolute control of content online is impossible. Yes, syndicators can grab your content. And yes, even if you rent space from an ISP you’re at their mercy, to some extent. Even if you’re a big independent Web publisher you’ve got to get your Internet Protocol service from somebody, and that somebody can be hit with legal/government/police action.

    But I’d still argue that there’s a significant difference between providing your content to a service like Facebook where, basically, once you provide it, they control it — they control the code around it, they control whether you can export it in usable form, they control how it appears and where it appears, etc. — and publishing your content yourself at addresses you have some control over using tools you choose.

    This was the fundamental advantage of Web publishing from the beginning. It’s why people like me and millions of others chose to add their work to the Web instead of to AOL, Compuserve et al.

  4. Wonderful post Scott, as always. I’ve been thinking about this along similar lines.

    One interesting question is, exactly, why someone would choose to blog for Huffington Post rather than set up their own blog under their own domain. I don’t think the answer to that question is at all clear. I also wonder about the role that network effects play in the “feudalism” question; while all space is theoretically equal online, obviously, that’s not actually the case in reality where key sites (like HuffPo) occupy central nodes.

  5. Hmmm. I’ve always assumed that the primary reason people post at HuffPo for no pay was straightforward: To reach her large audience.

    Getting a crowd to read an independent blog is not a simple thing. For instance, this blog had a much larger readership when it was part of Salon. For some time now it’s been a lot smaller. I’m OK with that but if I were relying on the blog for more of my professional status and/or income I might feel differently.

    Now, what’s interesting is that Huffington didn’t *start* with a large audience. When the site was new she got a gang of her friends to contribute for free and begin the snowball that has — along with massive SEO work and prodigious curation/linking/repurposing — built the big traffic base they’ve got today.

    So the motivation of that initial crowd was perhaps different, and critical. There it was Huffington’s skill and ability as a social networker of the old-fashioned kind that assembled the assets.

  6. “absolute control is impossibe“. True, we shouldn`t make the perfect the enemy of the good.

    If digitized content has no value, then value on the web may be location. Many HuffPo contributors have their own blogs. These blogs have zero value in money terms because almost no one reads them. Is HuffPo`s value because they provide a single convenient location for progressive content? Like the one-stop convenience of a Wal-Mart!

  8. I think everything published was actually very reasonable.
    However, think on this, suppose you added a little information? I am not
    suggesting your content isn’t solid, however suppose you added a post title that makes people want more?
    I mean The road to Web serfdom: Huffingtons free-as-in-beer
    posts vs. the free-as-in-speech Web — Wordyard is a little plain. You should
    peek at Yahoo’s front page and note how they write news headlines to grab people to click.
    You might add a video or a related picture or two to get readers interested about what you’ve got to say.
    In my opinion, it would bring your website a little bit more interesting.

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