Still on the subject of online journalism, Tim Anderson ponders whether freelance journalists will soon be paid based on the number of unique visits their work receives. Actually I suspect it is already happening. A freelancer who has a long term contract might be fairly comfortable, but if you have to sell each article to your editor (which I believe the folks on the Guardian Book Blog do) then I’m pretty sure that the number of visits your previous posts got, and the number of comments on those posts, will be taken into account when you propose a new column.
Is this a good thing? Well, I’m always happy to be paid by results, provided that I’m happy doing what needs to be done to get those results. Tim says:
If writers are paid per view, clearly they will have more incentive to do such things. Best tread carefully though. Link seeding done badly is spamming. Encouraging comments done badly is trolling.
And therein lies the problem, because guess what gets the most traffic for your blog?
Well, yes, taping bacon to your cat. But beyond that, controversial posts aimed at winding people up tend to get far more traffic than a calm, reasoned and well-researched argument. It is a difficult line to tread. Tabloid newspapers have already proved the point. At some point I think you have to say, “I don’t care about the money, I don’t want to have to write like that just to get traffic.” Which, of course, is why I don’t make any money out of blogging.
For the column I do for AMC, I get a base rate for the column, plus bonuses if the click-through is high enough, which I think is fine way to do it as long as the base rate is acceptable, which in this case it is. It’s if the “click through” becomes part of the base rate that there are problems.
Thanks John, I thought that there would be some real examples out there already. And good to see that there are ways of tackling the problems.