Paying Bloggers based on popularity
The idea is not new; groups like ITToolbox pay their bloggers based on their popularity, and popularity alone. The bad part is that groups like that have a glass ceiling, meaning that a blogger can top out in terms of popularity, meaning no extra dollars for a great month, or even a great year.
Gawker Media though has decided that they want to do somewhat of the same thing, but without an apparent ceiling in the process. Valleywag has the dirt or full official memo to staff, with the details.
What is interesting is the idea of increasing quality in blogs, which will be hard, as the distinction between blog and media has gotten to be quite blurred, both sides of the argument are using each others on line tools, meaning bloggers can be journalists, and journalists can be bloggers.
So what about Gawker? Nick seems to believe that pay-for-performance will lead to an overall improvement in the quality of Gawker content. He uses the adjective “linkworthy” to describe content that is of sufficiently high quality that other sites will link to it. Of course, the same salacious, titillating, slanderous, etc. content can also be linkworthy, but I think Nick is less focused on the problem of offensive or “cheap thrills” content, and more on the problem of mediocre content. Source: Publishing 2.0
Publishing 2.0 though has an interesting thought, and one that can be refuted if we use ITToolbox as a case study. Since they pay for popularity, you would figure then that the idea from Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 would be in effect. Fortunately that is not the case as ITToolbox is the number 1 rated free source for technical information, and is the #3 site overall (the top two are pay wall sites) in the world for technical information.
Seriously Gawker might be trying to take the best that ITToolbox and other highly regarded communities that pay by popularity and traffic (in the case of ITToolbox it is unique IP’s per day), and adding page views into the mix. Page views are easy, since a single IP might read 10 pages of a web site, or just tool around.
The problem realistically though is how to make sure there is quality content. The content is the issue and the key. While it is easy to write content that sucks, it is harder to be a journalist, not all bloggers have gone to journalism school, have contacts in companies that are willing to play the internal memo’s game, or are otherwise willing to spill their guts.
Gawker has an idea here, and hopefully they will be somewhat public over what they find this does for them and the quality of their blog entries. You never know, but if you have writers that are passionate about something, have something to share, there is no reason to believe that quality will suffer. More money is always a good thing, but more money does not mean quality, it does not mean that writers will not have bad days.
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