Earlier this year, Gawker CEO Nick Denton established a new pay system for his bloggers. Unlike a typical pay per post or revenue sharing scheme, Denton began to set quarterly payrates for bloggers based on the number of pageviews that their posts generated.
Prior to this most recent pay change, the bloggers at Valleywag were being paid $9.75/1000 pageviews. As of 4/1, they’re down to $6.50/1000 pageviews.
Portfolio’s Felix Salmon pegs Valleywag’s pageviews up around 34% from the prior quarter in this post.
Matthew Ingram takes a different approach in his post on the subject:
So all this time, Gawker Media founder and evil genius Nick Denton has been pretending to be a mild-mannered blog network CEO, when in reality he is a behavioural economist doing ground-breaking research into the mechanisms of human motivation and productivity.
We’ve discussed blogger pay previously and others have discussed unions – which is a very dumb idea in my mind.
When I was the SVP of Online Services for Problogging, Inc., the previous owners of The Blog Herald, we used a number of pay schemes for our bloggers.
Bloggers at the majority of our sites were paid on a revenue share basis that was highly tilted in favor of the bloggers. Those that did well and attracted advertising were paid quite well for the work that they did.
At the Blog Herald and a couple other sites, we paid per post. While different bloggers had different pay rates, the model held up well for sites like Blog Herald.
Both pay systems had their purpose – and both served us well.
How should bloggers be paid? What do you think of Denton’s pay system?
More information: Valleywag: It’s April 1st and I don’t know what my salary is