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Gawker: The relative value of a pageview

Posted by: Stephen Baker on January 02

I’m imagining life in the the pay-for-pageview universe of Nick Denton. No doubt, journalists, like advertisers, are increasingly going to see pay tied to measurable performance.

Even so, we’ll value certain pageviews far more than others. In Denton’s scheme, they’re all the same.

…If your site has a PV rate of $5:
$2,000 = 400,000 views:
$5,000 = 1m views:
$7,000 = 1.4m views

Based on this example, if your base pay is $2,000 per month then you would need to get upwards of 400,000 pageviews to begin earning bonus. A total of 500,000 views would earn $500 bonus (or $2,500 total pay).

If I have the arithmetic right, this translates into a half cent per additional pageview. Now, if you break news, get linked like crazy, or perhaps link (like my colleague David Kiley) to a salacious video, you can make a wad of cash. The half cents add up. But how do you value a post that reaches a small but influential readership? For blog masters, they’re indistinguishable. But from the blogger’s perspective, a single pageview from the right person could lead to far more: a job offer, a book contract, or an idea for a start-up.

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Reader Comments

Jon Garfunkel

January 2, 2008 10:00 PM

And perhaps Gawker is collecting one to two cents per pageview-- or even higher on the niche blogs.

The news here is actually this quote from Denton (which can more appropriately be called the "money quote" here):

"In short, we have repeated the bad habits of traditional media organizations: leaving remuneration to the arbitrary will of upper management; and, by treating words as if they were Soviet steel output targets, encouraging quantity over quality."

I'm not sure if the pageview-based bonuses completely will drive quality, but it's about time somebody had the sense to say this.

Yes, the "single pageview from the right person" is what everyone craves (or, the pageview that leads to your "about" page which lists your employment availability.) But sheer numbers tend to help that more than anything else.

kamla bhatt

January 4, 2008 02:48 AM

You hit the nail on the head: quality vs. traffic, which is the better option? I guess it depends on your goals and what you want to achieve through your blogging. For some quality, i.e. that single influential reader is important, while for others it might not be.

I sense that this year we will see more postings and debate over this quality over traffic issue.

Kamla Bhatt

JeremyB

January 4, 2008 11:36 AM

According to the internal memo posted on Valleywag, the change is meant, in part, to incentivize the creation of quality content. I’ll believe it when I see it -- pay-for-traffic, more often than not, is a race to the bottom. Look no further than Gawker itself, with a post from this morning: "Deranged Britney Spears Goes To Hospital." This little gem's already been viewed more than 3,000 times. Let's not confuse popularity with quality, folks.

For more, please see http://brijit.wordpress.com/

Max Kalehoff

January 5, 2008 08:18 AM

Hi Steve,

Oh, god. Not the engagement debate again. (I put that to bed here, I hoped, for the time being: www.consumerengagement.blogspot.com)

Regarding Gawker Media, it's interesting to note that the company employs so many aspiring authors. I know a number of them.
Max Kalehoff
www.attentionmax.com
(and where's the link field in your comment area to the commentors site?)

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In Blogspotting Senior Writer Stephen Baker and Associate Editor Heather Green take a look at how cutting-edge technologies are changing business and society. Whether its blogs or wikis, data crunching or data targeting, technology’s advances are reshaping the world that we live in.

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