Pay for Performance
Gawker Media, a leading blog network, has decided to start paying it’s bloggers based on performance rather than production. No longer will their bloggers be paid per post, but rather by how much traffic their posts generate (although they have a guaranteed monthly income).
This move, along with several other people’s views, brings up the issue of quantity versus quality. Many blogging sites believe that success is generated through tons of material while other sites attempt to post less frequently while marketing those posts in order to bring attention (and traffic) to them.
Publishing 2.0 provides their concerns around the idea that Pay-For-Performance will improve the quality of posts on the web:
The downsides of this approach are obvious — the incentive rewards content that is salacious, titillating, slanderous, nasty, etc. — anything that appeals to the base interests of a mass audience. It rewards gaming of social news sites, i.e. creating content that appeals to the most parochial interests of users on Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc. And of course it rewards search engine optimization, writing content that is packed with keywords and that foots to the top searches, with headlines written for search engines rather than people.
The flip-side, however, is also presented:
When blog networks like Gawker paid writers based on the number of posts, they provided an incentive for writers to post even when they didn’t have any interesting information or anything interesting to say. The result of this “infinite news hole” was that blog networks generated a lot of mediocre content.
Therefore, in solving the problem of meaningless and mediocre content, Gawker and other Pay-for-Performance networks have moved towards a new problem of highly favoring posts that are meant for mass-reading. Unfortunately, not everybody wants to only read top-10 posts and slandering rumors.
It’ll be interesting to see how it all pans out. You can expect the blogging community to be thoroughly discussing this issue for weeks to come.
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