This Online Journalism Review article looks at how professional bloggers are compensated and whether the tying of payment to traffic growth blurs editorial/business lines.
An excerpt:
Most freelance writers wait in dread for The Call -- their equivalent of the "Dear John" letter from an editor who is calling (or sometimes e-mailing) to say they're no longer needed. A number of years ago, The Call came to me from my editor at CNET, but with a twist. They were killing my humor column because it didn't get enough page views. I even got a rundown of the numbers, though they were meaningless to me.
The Internet has been lauded for providing advertisers with exact metrics on how their ads perform, but it also can be turned against writers and journalists, especially at sites that live and die by traffic.
About.com pioneered pay for Guides that's tied to traffic growth, and now Gawker Media is also paying a base salary for its stable of bloggers, along with bonuses for increased traffic. Plus, the new breed of "stand-alone journalists" such as Rafat Ali at PaidContent.org and Chris Nolan at Politics from Left to Right take on both editorial and business roles at their online publications. While this blurring of the Chinese wall between advertising and editorial could hurt the credibility of the nascent operations, few journalists can ignore the economic viability of their publications.
In a Q&A with OJR, About.com CEO Peter Horan explained how Guides are motivated to build traffic. "One of things we've institutionalized is that folks understand that time they put in to optimize the content is really an investment in their page growth," Horan said. "There's been enough success stories with the Guides, that basically they sell each other on the idea that this is a good thing to do."
While the Political Humor Guide pulled in $20,000 per month around the U.S. election last fall, the average Guide only makes $1,500 to $1,600 per month, according to Horan, making this a part-time freelance gig, for the most part.
More highbrow online publications such as Slate and Salon have never paid writers according to page views. Slate editor Jacob Weisberg told me he is opposed to the idea for a number of reasons.
"First of all, how we promote stories has more effect on their traffic than what the writers do," Weisberg said via e-mail. "Second, I wouldn't want to push writers to pander for hits by writing only sexed-up stories. Third, all hits are not created equal. A small number of additional readers who come regularly to a less popular feature may be more valuable to us than something that swells traffic greatly but temporarily. Fourth, it would create an unproductive kind of competition among our writers."
Salon editor Joan Walsh concurred and said the site had never tied pay to page views in any way before -- though she wouldn't rule it out in the future. But Walsh believes that letters from readers are more interesting indicators than traffic.