Smart people see patterns, Felix, appropriately, sees luck. Worse, he defines good as what he likes, then criticizes Gawker for defining it as what readers like.

Nothing's worse than idiots with a superiority complex.

The thing is, I agree with his conclusion. You can't say "this will be a Web hit, this won't." I mean, look at my far and away most-read post last year:

[valleywag.com]

@sample032: No one's "defining good". It's entirely reasonable for Nick Denton to say "fuck good, I want popular"; it would be silly for him to say "popular IS good".

I guess my point is that asking bloggers to be popular online is not necessarily going to make them so, just as asking them to be popular IRL is not necessarily going to make them so. Bloggers don't have some magical ability to write popular blog entries. But we'll see, maybe this'll work.

@Paul Boutin: Granted, it's hard to call.

@Felix: But what this reward system will do is reward bloggers who more people are interested in reading. Long term, I'd expect to see a trend.

Nick Douglas has a magical ability to write popular blog entries. We all hate him.

@Paul Boutin: He calls them Diggbait.

It looks like the math works out to about a penny a page view, which means as of this comment you've made $1.92 off this article.

I don't think that policy bodes well for fact checking or editing. Let's assume all that overheard comes to about 10% of revenue. Who is gonna fact check potentially libelous material for 19 cents?

This model is nuts. Are you guys going to go out on the journalistic edge for $1.92? How can we expect hard hitting blog entries in the future when a single article doesn't even cover your first grande Mochaccino of the day? I guess I thought the snark fairy delivered Valleywag to me, in my home, for free. I don't know what I was thinking. I apologize.

You're leaving out the monthly base pay. That's the real change in the system. Instead of $12 or whatever per post, writers will now get $X per month in exchange for N posts. If they manage to draw exceptional traffic, they get a bonus on top of that.

The idea is to incent writers to come up with more traffic-generating posts to add a bonus to their base pay, rather than writing a higher number of posts to run up their monthly invoice twelve bucks at a time. We can still write more posts than our base pay is for, if we want, but the only extra compensation we'll get for them is if one of those extra posts draws a lot of traffic.

In theory, I'll spend less time posting about the pay system and picking on Felix Salmon (218 views so far today) and more time posting linkworthy stuff that hopefully doesn't kill me finding or writing it.

In practice, until individual writers know what the variables "base pay" and "pageview rate" are for their own work, there's no way to evaluate the viability of the system. In fact, I'll leave commentary and evaluation to more full-time Gawker Media contributors for whom the work isn't a hobby. But right now I don't think anyone has all the numbers to make an assessment. And I'm getting sleepy still posting about it.

agree with sample032 & others: diggbait-style headlines & topics will become more prevalent (& thus perhaps less impactful too). 1/3 of nick's posts are top X or numeric lists of some type, another 1/3 are drive-by pieces about companies or notable bloggers.

neither of which are bad per se, assuming they're interesting reading (interesting = innovative, juicy gossip, salacious, saucy, funny, etc).

but i do expect there will be more potential for gaming the system. the ultimate solution: pay us commenters some graft to digg you folks up (keeding, i keed, i keed).

@DaveMcClure500Hats: As someone who has managed a staff under this system, I'll put in my thoughts.

At giz, the pay system has had the opposite effect, and we do far less viral work with mainstream appeal. Easy hits cause CPM deflation over time, making your real news posts, the core posts, worth less and less. It also rewards laziness, which I know have to slap down with an iron fist. So the funny random viral videos we loved posting so much before have become a serious problem with making sure pay is fair across the site. It forces you to be very careful, actually.

Also, everyone who writes for Giz has a talent for making traffic. Talent. Megahits are unpredictable, but making sure a post gets decent traffic is a matter of editing know-how and maybe marketing know how, too.

It is my impression that Nick wants popular and good on all his sites. In the same post, if possible.

@Brian Lam: Agreed. Here's a thought for people like Salmon who seem puzzled by why their "good" posts aren't more popular: Is it possible your definition of "good" is off?

In addition to Diggbait, obviously comment-worthy (or polls) would be rewarded under the new system. When this post first appeared, I didn't click-through because it all fit on the front page, but as the comment count has grown, I've ended-up clicking-through at least two or three times.

PS) Because this post is sort of Gawker-specific: Please count my vote for the comment preview feature to return, I think it really helps people like me be coherent.

Um, diggbait headlines, um, with hit of wag slag:

"Ron Paul Installs Latest Ubuntu to Impress New Gal Pal Julia Allison"

"Fake Steve Jobs Blends his iPhone and Blackberry to Determine Who's Tougher"

"Jason Calcanis Trashes RIAA on Twitter"

"Why Doesn't Valleywag Have a Picture Section?"

"Ten Hero Characters That Can Kick Scoble's Ass"

Other topics of interest...just mix wag with:

- anything Apple
- anything Linux or Open Source
- anything science
- anything slamming Bush
- anything slamming libs
- anything almost NSFW
- anything to do with the RIAA
- any little, lame Flash game
- etc.

I'll take my writer kickbacks now. Thanks.