I always debated why it’s best to have a blog for all those who aspire to make money online. And by Blog -- I mean, a Blog, the one which has xyz.com or xyz.blogspot.com; and you own it the same way as Mark Zukerberg owns facebook.com or I own tech24hours.com .
The reason is simple: A blog is your own entity and its real estate is yours— which no one but you decide on how to use it to make money. It’s alright that others, advertisers etc. will be making money along with you too; but the bottom line is – you will also benefit from anything which occupies your blog real estate. Either by showing ads or selling products or by leveraging brand identity.
Twitter, Facebook and other platforms may be a hit with marketers, and may some times be called as a blogging platform; but as a user, you have not chance to take benefit of the platform real estate. That remains with the owners.
This line of thought exulted itself once again with the latest AOL Acquisition of The Huffington Post – a big blog or a popular news website, which posts content on variety of topics.
In the deal, AOL paid $ 315 million for The Huffington Post. Arianna Huffington, the website owner, is going to take as much as $100 million from the pie, along with a $4 million annual salary.
Obviously, The Huffington Post is not a single person website, it has an army of few thousand bloggers who contribute on everything from politics to entertainment to tech and a majority of these contributors, if not all, aren’t paid anything for their work. They either did for fame or to bring traffic to their respective blogs, if they have one.
So, after the deal, some of these unpaid contributors are asking – “what about their effort in building The Huffington Post?” They never got a penny then and not even now.
Now some of these Huffington Post contributors are demanding a share of the pie. They’ve setup a Facebook Page, appropriately titled Hey Arianna, asking Arianna to “give a little back to the unpaid writers who built the Huffington Post.”
I can feel how these contributors may be feeling. They are bound to feel their hard work being ignored.
But to be frank, even when these contributors want The H Post to acknowledge their efforts monetarily, the latter has its limitations too. In short, it can’t pay everyone and that too in a satisfying manner. And after all, if contributors provided it the content, it provided them fame and traffic.
That said, those who have set up their individual websites may be feeling less disappointment than those who have not. Although a Facebook, YouTube or twitter profile for some contributors may also be keeping them less heartbroken; those who have positioned their blogs to take advantage of their parallel content on The HP, will be more happy, and for obvious reasons.
To conclude, the THP protests have once again proved that those who want to make money online, should not ignore their blog(s), even if they find better ways to make money online.
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The Huffington Post Bloggers protest tells why own Blog should not be ignored
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