Gawker Editorial to Compensate Big-Traffic Bloggers with Big-Ass Bonuses

Sassy bloggers, take note: Gawker might be down to drop you a few thou if you can raise traffic amongst its sites, which include Gizmodo, Valleywag and Defamer.

Jason Calacanis, the golden child of Weblogs Inc., looks at the compensation process as whoring for ratings. And we know from experience that whoring of any kind sets blows against sector quality.

"People are coming to blogs because they are NOT playing the ratings game! What difference does it make if a blog gets 10% or 20% traffic [spikes] if it alienates the core audience by playing the ratings game?" he says.

Here's a breakdown of how the new compensation/reward process will work, straight out of Noah Robischon's Editor Newsletter:

Each site will be assigned a pageview rate, which is the dollar amount that each 1,000 pageviews on the site is worth. Although this sounds similar to an advertising CPM, this number has nothing to do with your site's revenue or advertising value. At the end of the month, if the money you earn in pageviews exceeds your monthly base pay, you will be paid the extra money as a bonus.

This chart should make it clearer. If your site has a PV rate of $5:
$2,000 = 400,000 views:
$5,000 = 1m views:
$7,000 = 1.4m views

Based on this example, if your base pay is $2,000 per month then you would need to get upwards of 400,000 pageviews to begin earning bonus. A total of 500,000 views would earn $500 bonus (or $2,500 total pay).

MarketingVox says the rewards model will apply to guest writers on Gawker sites, as well as editorial regulars.

by Angela Natividad    Comments (3)     File: Online, Publishing, Trends and Culture     Jan- 2-08