Should bloggers be compensated based on traffic?
In a recent interview with I Want Media, Business 2.0 magazine editor Josh Quittner said that he was asking all of his writers to start blogging — and more than that, he was planning to compensate them in part based on the amount of traffic to their blog. He said he got the idea from Om Malik, the former Business 2.0 writer who started a blog at gigaom.com and recently left to blog full-time.
I loved the daily interactions he was having with his community of readers. It made him sharper and more valuable to me at the magazine. And so I thought, how can we encourage our people to do a similar thing?
Not everyone thinks it’s such a great idea, however. Dan Shanoff wrote at The Huffington Post site Eat The Press that such a focus on traffic has the potential to ruin what makes blogs — and journalism in general — great. “There’s certainly the potential that Time Inc.’s journalists will divert their attention from the quality of their writing to the quality of their traffic,” he says. Others such as Jeff Jarvis and James Robertson note that journalists are already compensated in part because of their readership (or lack thereof).
I wrote a little about this debate on my other blog here.
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