Digg This, Huffington Post: What’s $200 Million Now Worth?

Now maybe the Huffington Post could be worth more if it further cut its burn rate. For instance, rather than not pay its bloggers, it could charge them — for the privilege of getting to help maintain the jetsetting lifestyle of the Great Arianna, of course. As for some of the people the site does pay, like its tech staff? Those jobs could be offshored to, I dunno, Third World child labor. If HuffPo takes such steps, I could see the site being worth maybe $4 mil. (Then again, there’s always the karma risk of exploiting workers. If a disgruntled work-for-free blogger or a slave-driving HuffPo middle manager ended up, say, inserting ground-up melamine into HuffPo blog posts in an attempt to trick people into thinking the content was more substantive than it really is, that might save Arianna some money in the short term. But what if a reader or commenter got poisoned? — Simon Dumenco