Gawker Media to pay bloggers based on Traffic
Valleywag posted an internal memo from Gawker Central to its army of bloggers about a new bonus program based on traffic.
Gawker has announced that incentive pay for its bloggers will now be based entirely on the number of page views that each blogger’s posts generate, rather than on the total number of posts a blogger writes.
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.
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