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Blogging Mogul Nick Denton has cut the pay rates of employees once again over at Gwaker Media. The reason for the rate cut is attributed to Gawker Media’s huge success, Gawker’s blogs now receive 97% more pageviews compared to the same time last year. So had Denton stick with the same $7.5 as compared to the current $5 per 1000 page impressions rate, he would have had to pay employees alot more than he paid them last year. The current rate cuts have diminished employee salaries by 33% compared to the start of the year.
The move could be argued both ways. As Jason Calacanis puts it:
Despite this change in pay Gawker is very, very competitive in terms of not only blogging jobs, but MSM jobs. Most full-time folks at Gawker are probably making 3-5k a month/36-60k a year, and some are in the 60-100k range. That’s a very BIG number for folks working from home in the journalism/editorial space, many of whom are just out of school. Most folks make 20-35k out of school.
So what he essentially wants to say is that the increase in pageviews should not have any rewards for the people who made all that happen. Looking from the organizational point of view, its a very good thing as the company would now be bagging in more of those green bucks.
From the bloggers’ perspective its not bad either. Traffic to Gawker Media blogs have increased a whopping 97% since last year, which means that had Denton cut the salaries by 97% the blogger’s would still have made the same amount. So essentially what Denton has done is just kept the salaries stable. The pay per thousand impression salary model that Denton invented is a genius as it lifts the burden of marketing and promotion from the Media company and transfers it to the bloggers.
