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According to a profile in yesterday's USA Today, The Huffington Post has raised a total of $10 million of venture capital.
As we noted previously, entrepreneur Alan Warms was skeptical whether the VCs would get a good return on the earlier $5 million. (See the post for hard numbers that mesh well with other sources we dug up.) Looks like it just got twice as hard.
What's their trick? Well, it's hard to ignore this tidbit from the end of the article:
As the Huffington Post looks to its own future, co-founder Lerer says it has no plans to begin paying bloggers. Ever."That's not our financial model," he says. "We offer them visibility, promotion and distribution with a great company."
Hmm.... If the distinctly left-wing Huffington Post were reporting that information about a "corporate media site", would they call it exploitation of labor? We report, you decide.
P.S. More data from the article; "The staff has grown from three to 43 full-time employees. And Huffington's list of bloggers has grown to 1,800." (The editors and reporters get paid, just not the bloggers.)
P.P.S. From a commenter on Mashable's coverage:
Ignoring the "small" detail of having 43 FT employees and the $10M in funding, I don't think The Huffington Post is a blog anymore. I mean, look at it. The thing is more crowded than AOL's home page!!
Hat tips: Rafat Ali at paidContent.org, Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider and of course TechMeme.
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