Blogger Payments Tied to Traffic

Posted on April 24, 2005

For many bloggers that are getting paid their income is tied directly to the traffic their blog receives. A recent Online Journalism Review (OJR) article looks at the relatively low pay scales for bloggers from online publishers. The article says that an About.com guide makes about $1,500 to $1,600 per month. A lot of the payment for this kind of work is based on traffic. Gizmodo writer Joel Johnson told the OJR this can be irritating because editorial content is not the only thing that controls incoming traffic.

Joel Johnson, who writes Gizmodo for Denton, called the pay structure "Byzantine" but says he's happy with the amount he's paid. "The worst part, though, is that so much of the pay is based on increasing hits, but we as editors don't have any control over anything but the editorial content," Johnson said via e-mail. "That's the most important part, sure, but it sucks to think you might lose money because somebody decided to give you a retarded elf or a queer ninja as a mascot. ... I'd rather be writing than learning how to trick Google."

The OJR article also notes that Weblogs Inc., which publishes lots of blogs on a variety of subjects, has switched from its 50/50 ad revenue split model.

Meanwhile, rival blog publishing house Weblogs Inc. has ditched its original idea of splitting ad revenues 50/50 with bloggers. The company's chairman and mouthpiece Jason McCabe Calacanis admits he was wrong about the concept, and that only 1 in 20 writers went for the deal. Now he's paying a flat fee for bloggers ranging from $100 to $3,000 per month, and is signing up two to five people per blog because of the focus on part-time help.

Getting paid per the amount of traffic your blog receives is great as long as your blog traffic is increasing. What happens to the bloggers' salaries if and when rising competition from other blogs (10,000 are being launched every day) starts to slow the growth of some of these top blogs?

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