Sorry, HuffPo Bloggers, You're Not Worth Anything

Huffington Post bloggers should stop whining about their lack of pay, even after the online site was bought by AOL for $315 million—they're just not worth it, writes stats king Nate Silver at the New York Times. Silver crunched the numbers and estimates that the median blog post is worth three or four bucks. "I’d imagine there are occasional instances in which blog posts hit the jackpot and generate thousands of comments and hundreds of thousands of page views," he writes. "For the most part, however, they do not move the needle very much."

The HuffPo is overwhelmingly powered by paid content, with blogs making up just 15% of traffic. Silver compares HuffPo bloggers with other users who constantly generate tons of content, all for free: "[P]eople think of it as a publishing company, when really—like Facebook—it is more of a technology company." Silver reminds people that although HuffPo gets about 15.6 million page views a day, the typical blog post gets just 1/450,000th of that. "But promises of a huge audience are what persuade people to blog at The Huffington Post rather than somewhere else." (More Huffington Post stories.)