HuffPo bloggers lose legal bid for share of $315m sale

Court rules that unpaid bloggers are not entitled to share of the profits.

By Press Gazette Published 03 April 2012

Arianna Huffington, the founder of the Huffington Post. Photograph: Getty Images

Thousands of unpaid bloggers attempting to claim millions of dollars from Huffington Post have had their case dismissed by a court in New York.

The bloggers had claimed that their contributions to the website meant they should be given a share of the profits following its $315m sale to AOL last April.

But US district court judge John Koeltl ruled the bloggers were fully aware they would not be paid for their work when they signed up.

“No one forced the plaintiffs to give their work to The Huffington Post for publication and the plaintiffs candidly admit that they did not expect compensation,” he said.

He added: “Quite simply, the plaintiffs offered a service and the defendants offered exposure in return, and the transaction occurred exactly as advertised. The defendants followed through on their end of the agreed-upon bargain.

"That the defendants ultimately profited more than the plaintiffs might have expected does not give the plaintiffs a right to change retroactively their clear, up-front agreement. That is an effort to change the rules of the game after the game has been played, and equity and good conscience require no such result."

The lawsuit was launched by labour activist and writer Jonathan Tasini, who wrote more than 200 unpaid columns for the website before the AOL, and the class action was taken on behalf of around 9,000 bloggers.

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Tags: huffington post

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3 comments

Wed, 2012-06-13 15:16 — Andrew Chapman (not verified)

This is quite a good article. Many new questions emerge to the surface, all you need do is to read further information about the issues. Only then one can form a final view on a particular subject. Otherwise everything is seen only in the dimension of how to cum more black and white. The natural logic of pr agentura evaluating things before catering they were properly cognitively processed is a horrible mistake, made by those less intelligent. People should not throw away their common ubytovanie na slovensku sense easily. Anything and everything deserves appropriate time for making judgements.

Thu, 2012-04-12 03:58 — mbrecker (not verified)

Now, expand from the Huff Post to other news outlets. The same situation is happening. We all know that comment rates are one factor that a site uses to justify charging their ad rates. Whether it's the BBC, Huff Post or the New Statesman, would ANYBODY actually start to pay posters for comments.

If you did, what criteria would you use?:

It must be interesting, entertaining and revelant.
It must not contain any "objectionable" content. Otherwise, our highly trained team of online monkeys will instantly delete you.

Another key point. When was the last time that someone else actually agreed to cross link with you? That may be nice Net etiquette. But in reality, NOBODY does that.

She exploited these people to get rich. Now, she still does that and blatantly censors at will. If they took out all of the NY Post page 6 type of material, HuffPost would lose 50% of their readership overnight. No chance of that happening.

Sun, 2012-04-08 18:58 — Richard Sharp (not verified)

Maybe the legal decision was the correct one but Arianna Huffington's was definitely the wrong one morally speaking. The fact the contributors believed no one would make any big money from the project while she was secretly using free labour to build an empire makes her gravely guilty of cynicism and duplicity.