Paying for pageviews adds on obvious, ifcontroversial,
incentive for writers to create popular content, but in our IM
conversation, Denton described the move as “a way to reward young and
highly productive writers who might have come in at a low rate that
doesn’t reflect their real value.” He said that even without paying
bonuses, his bloggers have felt an incentive to perform because Gawker
Media displays pageview statistics alongside every post and on apage that breaks down the stats by writer.
incentive for writers to create popular content, but in our IM
conversation, Denton described the move as “a way to reward young and
highly productive writers who might have come in at a low rate that
doesn’t reflect their real value.” He said that even without paying
bonuses, his bloggers have felt an incentive to perform because Gawker
Media displays pageview statistics alongside every post and on apage that breaks down the stats by writer.
This is yet another case of print pretending it’s pure and that the Internet is filthy. Newspapers adjust their coverage all the time based on where their readers are and how many readers there are. A frequent refrain at my last paper was “We don’t have any readers there!” whenever somebody wanted to spend time covering a big story in a small town which was, more often than not, very poor. “Go out and get some readers there,” was apparently not the response they were looking for, but really. These kinds of economic decisions get made all the time. All the Internet has done is made it a little more obvious.
A.
Journalistic redlining. And, yes, it happens pretty much everywhere.