TechCrunch’s coverage of our new Fair Blogs has generated quite a bit of discussion on the best way to compensate a bloggers network.
My Page, My Ads
A popular view is that each blogger should be paid for the pages they write. Essentially, if you wrote the entry, the ads on that page are yours. It makes sense and is easy to understand. If you write great content, you are immediately rewarded.
This approach has a drawback: there is no feeling of being on the same team. You are not building a destination site together. You could almost wonder why bloggers would team up this way, since for all practical purposes, it looks like a collection of separate blogs.
Who Pays The Editors?
Taking your blog to the next level requires more than individual bloggers. Look at TechCrunch’s staff. Not everyone is a writer, but I’m sure that each is needed for a reason.
For instance, the role of a good editor is critical: shortening blog posts, forcing authors to go to the point quickly, removing spelling and grammatical mistakes, etc. Such functions are performed for all blog entries and increase the value of the site as a whole.
Hybrid Approach
Some revenue sharing of the entire site’s content thus becomes necessary. You know that at FairSoftware we are biased toward equity-based revenue sharing. If you think of your blog as a company, then it makes sense that you pay the writers from the pool of money that is coming in.
It’s smart, so of course you will pay the best writers more. But you recognize that there is some human side to the decision of who gets what. Done well, it can be extremely motivating and fair. Left to machines and pageview counters, you run the risk of people gaming the system.
Do you think a hybrid approach would be in order, a compromise between getting paid for your pages but also receiving some share of what others on the same site are generating?
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