Quote of the day
by Giles Turnbull
Until recently, most Gawker bloggers were paid a flat rate of $12 per post for twelve posts a day, with quarterly bonuses adding to the bottom line; these bonuses could be used to buy equity in the company, which took two years to vest. Now, Denton is moving to a pay-for-performance system. He has always tracked the page views of each individual Gawker Media writer, thinking of them like stocks in a portfolio, with whoever generates the most page views as his favorite. If each writer was only as valuable as the page views he drew, then why shouldn’t Denton pay him accordingly?
– from this page of Everybody Sucks: Gawker and the rage of the creative underclass.
This system of paying writers is an obvious next step for the so-called blog networks. Sadly, it’s not a good thing for readers, because it rewards the writers who appeal to the commonest of mass readerships. Innovation, imagination, ingenuity, writing that has been *thought about* – these are all lost, because those writers don’t attract anything like the “right” level of traffic, and therefore don’t get paid as much, and therefore don’t write any more posts.
You’re absolutely right. There will be more John C. Dvorak (professional troll) and less Anne from ilike.org.uk (finder of wonderful underappreciated things).