Yesterday Gawker Media’s owner Nick Denton announced that the network is “shifting” from awarding writer bonuses based on pageviews, to basing it on unique visitors. Traffic goals are based on a site’s past performance. Basically, this means that multiple visits from a core audience will be less rewarded than visits from a newer, larger audience. Any visitor’s first look at the site will be worth more than their tenth look.
Denton is also giving site leads some authority over these bonuses, meaning there should be some leeway over rewarding good but underviewed writers.
Bloggers are obsessed with Gawker’s pay structure for several good reasons. When I left Valleywag (twice) and Gawker (once), I worked for or talked to at least a dozen blogs and networks. Not only have I seen these networks follow Gawker’s lead, but I’ve seen the general philosophy of commercial blogging shift to follow Gawker’s.
I don’t know whether Gawker Media’s major advertisers come to expect other media outlets to imitate it, or whether Denton simply adapts to inevitable industry changes more swiftly than everyone else. Either way, Gawker’s pay scheme and its seemingly constant fluctuations do affect thousands of workers and advertisers, and millions of readers. So it’s worth asking: What sort of writing will a uniques-based pay scheme reward and encourage?
The Awl, a zine run and written by former Gawker writers, Gawker readers, and people who call Slate “middlebrow,” ran the memo without comment. Its commenters, however, decided that the change would inevitably screw good journalism.
“The writer who takes a couple of weeks/months to expose a ring of terrorists with exploding underpants who live in suburban Wisconsin,” said a user named hockeymom, “will be rewarded less than the writer who happens to open an email with Tiger Woods getting a blow-job by a cocktail waitress, then posts it.”
This assumption, while not expressed by the pros at Business Insider, paidContent, or Silicon Valley Watcher, is common among laymen and the oh-so-wise commentariat. It’s also bullshit.
Yes, celebrity news brings views. But those views only come from one kind of reader. The trick is to get new visitors with each article: to appeal to several audiences.
The most common sources of instant traffic include Digg, StumbleUpon, major blogs and other online media. Bloggers have the most control over Digg and other aggregators, since they can send the link to their friends to get a story voted to the front page.
But these aggregators have a specific user base. If one Digg user visits ten articles on Gawker’s io9 in a month, that registers as one unique instead of ten pageviews. If one Tiger Woods fan visits for constant updates on the golfer, they count as one unique.
So there goes the current top strategy for cranking up traffic! Digg’s useful a couple of times a month before all the users just register as duplicates.
Now a story like a terrorist ring in Wisconsin – real news – drives uniques. Presumably the variety of people interested in a real breaking story is somewhat more diverse than the people interested in celebrity sex. Or at least it’s not any less diverse.
If I were writing for monthly unique bonuses, I’d try to expand my appeal to people who don’t normally read my blog. Obvious approach, but there are some interesting strategies contained. I’d take advantage of the extensive demographic data collected on Gawker Media’s chosen traffic measurer, Quantcast. The stats for Gawker’s gaming site Kotaku list an overwhelmingly young and male population with no kids. If I can attract older people and women, I’ll be bringing in new readers. So I’d be writing more about casual games, sexism in gaming, the Wii, and anything else I can find that tracks older, female, or family-oriented. Instead of churning the same old reliable view-getters, I’ll be actively trying to interest people without the crutch of Gawker Media brand loyalty. In fact, the people usually turned off by Gawker are the most valuable to me as a writer.
You can see the major danger: alienating the base. But since the uniques bonuses are divvied up by editors instead of specifically awarded per post, I expect high-pageview, low-uniques writers to enjoy their rewards a little longer, and that editors will make sure they keep the meat-and-potatoes around lest uniques actually fall. I also believe that hardcore readers can tolerate more variety, that the true sticklers have other places to go if they must, and that overall this will encourage a healthier, more well-rounded approach to each blog’s subject.
Damn. I’m gonna go apply to Gawker again.
