For Exposure
The Huffington Post was launching a German edition, and they wanted writers. Free writers. The same model that had somehow turned Arianna Huffington’s operation into a multibillion-dollar enterprise—just ask talented people to contribute without payment and see what sticks.
Kai Petermann got one of those recruitment emails. He ran Stilsucht and Heldth, two actual blogs, and years back had made the decision to live off the internet—not as a side gig, as his real income. So when he was asked to write exclusively for HuffPo with nothing in return, he said no. And then he said it publicly.
His response spread through German social networks. What resonated was how clearly he’d named it: if you’re a profitable company asking creators to work exclusively for you at no cost, you’re not offering opportunity, you’re extracting labor.
Kai wasn’t against the Huffington Post as an idea. He’d seen it as genuinely good—fast, full of actual voices and opinion, less sterile than traditional online journalism. But there’s a line. He’d work unpaid on projects he believed in, things driven by passion. A massive operation that had already proven the business model works, now scaling it into a machine that values his time at zero? That was asking him to subsidize their growth.
The other thing he pointed out was just true: exclusive content doesn’t drive traffic the way people claim. You don’t discover someone’s blog because they published something on HuffPo. You read things that interest you. And a company taking your exclusive work while paying nothing—at that scale, there’s no pretending it’s not exactly what it looks like.
Still, he was realistic. Germany had plenty of bloggers who’d do it. Enough people making content as a side passion, enough hunger for visibility, enough lingering belief that it might eventually lead somewhere. HuffPo would populate their German edition without much trouble.
When asked if he’d at least read the new publication, Kai said sure. Bundled, edited German content had merit. He just wasn’t going to feed it.