"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.

rebump

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.

Magister

Owen Thomas

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

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

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.

Paul Boutin

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.

WagCurious

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Paul Boutin

@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.

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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.

Felix

[valleywag.com]

Paul Boutin

Nothing's worse than idiots with a superiority complex.

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