…they probably wouldn’t be bloggers.

(I can say this because, well, you know.)

Now that HuffPo has been valued at $315 million by AOL—a move that will prove disastrous, IMHO—the people who create the content for it would actually like to be paid, the Daily reports.

“Even $50 per blog would help out,” said Tara Dublin, an unemployed Portland-based (and how many times have we heard that before?) HuffPo contributor.

I’m sure it would! If I paid myself $50 per blog, I’d be pretty close to a millionaire. (We’re approaching 5,000 posts here on Shots in the Dark. Hooray!)

Of course, then you’d have the question of whether to pay some people more than others, and whether some bloggers were just, you know, bad. ‘Cause some of ’em are.

In any event, the point is moot: Let ’em eat liberal cake! Arianna’s not paying them a dime! (And don’t even think about health insurance.)

According to the Daily, Huffington sent her bloggers an email saying that the only real change they’d notice from the sale is “more people reading what you wrote.”

Which will surely make them feel better when they’re writing rent checks.

Full disclosure: I blogged a bit for HuffPo back when it first started. The idea was that you’d trade content for exposure. But after a while, I thought, wait a minute—the point of this exposure is to make me money, and that it isn’t. No one was calling me up and saying, “Love your blogs—how about a column in [insert name of dying print media publication here].”

Plus, since HuffPo was adding about ten new bloggers every time Arianna went to Starbucks, one’s “brand” was constantly diluted.

So I thought back to Tom Sawyer and the fence and decided that I didn’t need the exposure that much.

Props, of course, to Huffington, who I’m sure has worked her tuckus off building the site, and she certainly took a lot of shit for it in the early days. But how long can something survive when it’s based on free labor? Or is there a continuous supply of suckers in the blogosphere?