Write For Us (We Can’t Pay You)
The email arrives with flattery upfront: your voice, your work, your audience—exactly what we’re looking for. Then the terms. Exclusive first-use rights. No payment. Just the association.
In the autumn of 2013, the Huffington Post was preparing to launch a German edition in partnership with a media company called TOMORROW FOCUS, positioning itself against Spiegel Online, Zeit Online, and Süddeutsche.de. To fill it with content, an editor named Tobias Fülbeck had been emailing German bloggers with an invitation to contribute—exclusively, for free. One of those emails found Kai Petermann, a Berlin-based writer who runs the blogs Stilsucht and Heldth and who had, at some point, made the decision to try to actually earn a living from this. His reply, published as an open letter, started circulating almost immediately.
The Huffington Post’s origin story is well worn: Arianna Huffington built it into one of the most-read publications in America, sold it to AOL in 2011 for $315 million, and it won a Pulitzer the following year—the first commercial online outlet to do so. The model that got it there leaned heavily on unpaid contributors writing for reach, for credibility, for the CV line. It worked, spectacularly. The argument being made to Kai and everyone else on that mailing list was: look how well it worked.
His response was measured and slightly devastating. He had nothing against the Huffington Post as a publication—he’d been reading it as a wonderful tool for liberalizing online content.
What he objected to was the specific fiction embedded in the pitch: that writing for a company worth hundreds of millions, on an exclusive basis, for free, constituted something that could reasonably be called an exchange. A business, he pointed out, implies a reasonably balanced distribution of giving and taking. The concept of ’business model’ is a very brave choice of words here,
he wrote. He couldn’t locate the balance anywhere in their offer.
The follow-up question—whether the traffic generated by HuffPost links wasn’t itself a form of compensation—he dismissed efficiently. Traffic from aggregator links tends not to be as generous as aggregators imply, and in any case they weren’t asking to link to existing content. They wanted new, exclusive work. First rights, in exchange for a byline on a site that hadn’t yet proven it could build a German audience.
What made the response land, I think, was the logical extension he offered: if writing for exposure was a viable economic model, he’d need his landlord, his grocery store, his phone company, and his gas station to get on board with the same arrangement—uncompensated services in exchange for a relevant backlink. It’s the kind of reductio that shouldn’t need to be made but does, repeatedly, every few years when a well-funded platform rediscovers that content creators exist and might be flattered into compliance.
He was clear that he would have written for them for actual money—no ideological quarrel with the outlet, only with the particular confidence required to ask professional writers for exclusive first-use content, gratis, so that an already-profitable multinational could consolidate its position in a new market. And he was honest that plenty of German bloggers would take the deal anyway: most people blog around day jobs, for reasons that have nothing to do with capitalism, and a HuffPost byline meant something to them. He understood it. He just didn’t share the motivation.
He said he’d read the German edition when it launched. Generous, or just intellectually consistent. Possibly both.