Making it pay

NYT reported Nick Denton, publisher of Gawker Media and its growing list of popular Web logs, which includes Gawker, the flagship chronicle of Manhattan news and gossip; Fleshbot, the thinking person's diary of smut; and about 10 other titles (including Wonkette, Defamer, Gizmodo (a gadget site), Sploid (tabloid-y news site), Screenhead, Kotaku, Lifehacker, Gridskipper) created his company just to be attractive to advertisers.

Tristan Louis blogged Gwaker bloggers are paid $2500 a month plus bonuses, based on the site's performance. Expectation seems to be that each site will make around $75,000 a year (that would come out to $6250 per month). The average [post] is the 100-250 word area. As a matter of fact, if I average the three sites, I get an average of 183 words for the first 12 entries and 180 words for all entries on that day. I'm going to use these numbers to make a few calculations as to the revenue model for a blogger. For the following calculations, we will make two more assumptions: on the low end, a blogger will make $2500 per month. On the high end (based on the idea that a site will make about $75,000 per year), a blogger will make $6,250 per month. With those now established as the watermarks, let's get closer to potential revenue numbers.... a word rate from 5.7 cents to 14.47 cents.... According to the National Writers Union, mainstream publication pay an average of $1.60 per word. However, if you're willing to move to Canada, you can write for averages between 30 ¢ to $2 per word for trade pubs. So, based on this, it looks like rates for bloggings are not particularly competitive.

I Want Media blogged one thing we've learned is that if we don't have a critical mass of posts done before noon, our traffic is going to suffer that day. So, the Gawker editors will usually get up around 7:30 and have their first post up by 8 o'clock. And then they update throughout the day. The idea is that this is a full-time freelance gig. They're supposed to be able to do their blogs and have enough time to do magazine articles or something else.

We pay a set rate of $2,500 a month. But one thing that's interesting about Gawker is that we've begun to incentivize our writers based on the traffic to their sites. Our bloggers can earn more money that way. They can more than double their salary based on the number of pages [viewed]. We want people to come to our sites and look at the pages. So we want each of our writers to feel a little bit like an entrepreneur. One of the ways you get traffic on the Net is to get links. There needs to be an incentive for our writers to do that. One of the things we do is to try to figure out what is going to get us highly ranked on Google. The Paris Hilton losing her phone book thing was huge for us. So, for three days [a few weeks ago], Defamer, our L.A. site, was the No. 1 Google search result for "Paris Hilton Sidekick." We got tens of thousands of visitors from Google.

NickDenton blogged shows traffic of Gawaker blogs.

Heather Green blogged Maybe it's just the early days, but after taking apart some numbers that have been bandied about what bloggers are paid, Tristan Louis writes that bloggers don't make as much as journalists. At least on a per word basis. But one more time, money doesn't seem to be the motivater for most bloggers right now.

Gwaker may be blogging for the money, but that is not what draws most bloggers to do what they do. Some might want some ads to help pay their hosting costs, but they blog because they think that they have something to say, and they want people to read it.