Apparently another former Huffington Post contributor is suing the website, claiming that the "bloggers" for the site (the "blogs" are more like columns and essays, but okay) deserve a cut of the AOL deal money.
He's wasting his time. You don't voluntarily contribute to a blog, with an email paper trail indicating your willing participation, and then insist you're a "slave."
For the record, however, I would love to be paid for my work over there. I would love to write columns like that on a regular basis and get paid for my efforts. I would accept that gig in a heartbeat. But in the six years I've been contributing, no one at Huffington promised that I would ever be paid, so I never carried any delusions about piles of Huffington cash in my future. And no one there coerced me with false promises of cash as means of tricking me into contributing.
That said, most of my contributions generate a lot of traffic (and comments) and I hope someday to expand what I do as a paid job, though I'm not holding my breath. Meanwhile, I'm using my visibility there to generate flow-thru traffic to this blog and to the Bubble Genius Bob & Elvis Show -- both of which generate small "beer money" revenues.
This is what I assumed would be the case, so I've operated under those assumptions. So maybe one day I'll get to do this as a fulltime job. Who knows. But the Huffington Post hasn't promised any such thing, and I participate there with my eyes wide open.