When Brian and I started Weblogs, Inc. the idea of paying bloggers--heck, even making money from blogging--was considered offensive to many. Blogging was, as the case was stated, a highly personal activity that should not be trivialized by the forces of commerce and greed. I don't have a complicated relationship with money or capitalism: I love them both and see them as simply as fuel and the process by which fuel is produced. Money to me means time, time means quality, and quality means success.
Quality. That single factor is what determines the winners in our business. Google's search is of higher quality than Yahoo, MSN, and even AOL's. Because of that Google wins. Engadget is of higher quality than Gizmodo and they are ranked first and second place in their space. Similarly, LifeHacker is of better quality than DownSquad today and as a result they are ranked one and two in their space. For background, my friend Nick Denton of Gawker fame owns Gizmodo and LifeHacker, and we (AOL) own Engadget and DownloadSquad. My point here is that in order for us to beat LifeHacker we need to increase our quality, and in order for Gizmodo to ever beat Engadget they need to increase their quality. The only way to do that is an investment of time. Time equals money, so they both need an investment on a cash basis.
Today we have around 200 bloggers on the Weblogs, Inc. payroll. Two years later John Battelle took the idea and extended it in a blog repping business. Om Malik has raised funding and stolen a Red Herring reporter, and even the nascent vlogging space is in full-blown talent war mode. What was foreboden three years ago is commonplace today.
Talented people's time in our society is primarily engaged with money. As a result we are doubling the staff of DownloadSquad and we've increased the rate we are paying our bloggers to $10 a post on that blog (much more for features). As a result I'm sure our traffic will double over the next three months--in fact I will guarantee that it will happen. Money does change everything.
Talent wins, and talent needs to get paid. I love paying talented people so they can sleep well at night doing what they love. That's my biggest joy in business: gettin' people paid.
Before launching the new Netscape I realized that Reddit, NewsVine, Delicious, and DIGG were all driven by a small number of highly-active users. I wrote a blog post about what drives these folks to do an hour to three hours a day of work for these sites which are not paying them for their time. In other words, they are volunteering their services. The response most of these folks gave back to me were that they enjoyed sharing the links they found and that they got satisfaction out of being an "expert" or "leader" in their communities.
Excellent... excellent (say that in a Darth Vadar/Darth Calacanis voice for extra impact).
That is exactly what bloggers told Brian and I three years ago when we started. Given that, I have an offer to the top 50 users on any of the major social news/bookmarking sites:
We will pay you $1,000 a month for your "social bookmarking" rights. Put in at least 150 stories a month and we'll give you $12,000 a year. (note: most of these folks put in 250-400 stories a month, so that 150 baseline is just that--a baseline).
Now, this offer is going to get a big response I know, so we're going to have to limit to a dozen or so folks. However, I'm absolutely convinced that the top 20 people on DIGG, Delicious, Flickr, MySpace, and Reddit are worth $1,000 a month and if we're the first folks to pay them that is fine with me--we will take the risk and the arrows from the folks who think we're corrupting the community process (is there anyone out there who thinks this any more?!).
We're gonna identify this people in our system as "Netscape Navigators," and they will work with our full-time "Netscape Anchors" to build a community. I see a day when we have the eight full-time Anchors working with two dozen Navigators to keep the site fresh and clean (hmm... I think I need a better choice of words here).
The concept of "free" content producers, which I think WIRED called crowdsourcing, is going to be a short-lived joke. A loophole in the content business that will be closed by savvy startups which identify the top 5% of the audience and buy their time.
If we're (DIGG, Delicious, Flickr, Reddit, MySpace, Netscape, etc) are going to make businesses out of this space we should share the wealth.
As we say in Brooklyn: everyone's gotta eat.*
* Note: Everything I know about business I learned in Brooklyn. I learned this one from my father while at his restaurant when I asked him why we didn't just buy our own jukebox and instead split the money with the "goodfella" who brought the machine in, changed the records every month, and split the quarters with us. "Everyone's gotta eat" he told me. It wasn't the last time I would hear that expression, and there are many variations of it that the 'fellas in the neighborhood would use. "Can I get a taste?" or "I need a taste" were two of many variations on the theme. This expression was a the humble--or demanding--way of saying you wanted a cut of the action (money).
Note 2: One of my favorite Knicks of all time, Latrell Sprewell, famously used a variation of this saying by stating that he had a family to feed when turning down a $10M+ deal from the Timberwolves. They wouldn't give him a better deal and he sat out last year--perhaps his final quality year as a basketball player. This is an important lesson for the talent out there: your first offer is usually your best offer. I'm just saying... :-)
Paying the top DIGG/REDDIT/Flickr/Newsvine users (or "$1,000 a month for doing what you're already doing.")
Reader Comments
(Page 3 of 5)42. My venture capital investing background gives me very mixed feelings about this concept. Your article does a fairly good job of presenting a coherent argument. You convince the intellect. However, my gut reaction is negative and many other people seem to have that same negative reaction. A lot of VC funding decisions come down to gut reaction, as I'm sure you know. Instincts usually win out over the intellect, and the crowd's instincts seem to be against this. That may change with time, but then again, the negativity might get stronger with time. Once these people get on a payroll, the dynamics change - they have to. Once the money is coming in, the simple possibility of the money stopping can influence a person's behavior or put subtle pressures on the person. The game will change and I think the crowd's gut is telling them that this change isn't one they will like. That said, I wish you luck because your intellectual reasoning seems sound.
Posted at 3:52PM on Jul 19th 2006 by David Shields
43. Completely unrelated to the post, but I just got your last 15 posts. (not new, stuff I had not see before).
Not sure if you were having problems with the RSS feed or something....
Posted at 3:57PM on Jul 19th 2006 by Tim Marman
44. http://digg.com/users/SearchEngines/homepage
However, I'm absolutely convinced that the top 20 people on DIGG, Delicious, Flickr, MySpace, and Reddit are worth $1,000 a month
Oh the perils of being #28 :LOL
But then KR is #21
Posted at 5:27PM on Jul 19th 2006 by Search Engines
45. After spending a bit of time uploading stories I followed a thread concerning gaming base.google ... nearly $200K in a month, dropping severely to around $70K. What a world!
But back to the case at hand; I thought this deserved to be highlighted:
"If Netscape really wants to beat Digg, it should leverage the advantage it already appears to have ? by comparison, Netscape isn?t littered with as many ?weird? stories. It?s already acting more like a news site that the average person could more easily transition to." ... from publishing2.com's "Netscape Could Beat Digg By Focusing on Average People".
Sounds good to me!
Posted at 5:30PM on Jul 19th 2006 by Ben Tremblay
46. I am interested, sign me up. I have sent an e-mail to jason@calcanis.com with my info. thanks
Posted at 6:13PM on Jul 19th 2006 by Wayne Welch
47. We've already been doing this for a while now (as I commented on your blog a while back).
Only, we don't have $1k budgets to throw around. Instead we're using Karma Point rewards so you can earn XBox 360s and iPods.
More info at:
http://ummyeah.com/karma
48. I am interested and fulfill your requirements, I have sent an email to jason@calacanis.com with my info and I have sent an email to Netscape Feedback with my info also.
Posted at 7:00PM on Jul 19th 2006 by Wayne Welch
49. Sorry about the double post, my first response did not show up in the comments, when I thought I followed all the instructions.
Posted at 7:01PM on Jul 19th 2006 by Wayne Welch
51. Nice ideas.
But are you sure Google gives a better search results than Yahoo? IMHO, Yahoo's search results return less "junk" site than Google's
Posted at 9:18PM on Jul 19th 2006 by Oskar Syahbana
52. I'm interested.
http://robotfuturenews.blogspot.com
Posted at 10:01PM on Jul 19th 2006 by Brandon Bailey
53. I second Dean Lowe. Please elaborate on exactly how this will work. Hopefully, there won't be sneaky strings attached.
Posted at 10:04PM on Jul 19th 2006 by Jimmy
54. Wow, saw this on Wired and it's pretty interesting. Man, I'd love to get paid to blog, but frankly pretty much all of my writings are either of the personal variety (that apparently are the bane of the Internet according to Slashdot and it's ilk) or rehashes and comments of what is at Gizmodo, Slashdot, various other news outlets, etc.
The biggest problem I see (and you mention it in how Gizmodo and Engadget compete), is that we crave to know *everything* that is going on, but struggle with finding it. I find in my day to day browsing, there is a ton of duplication. Identical posts are made on Gizmodo and Engadge, which in turn filter down to Digg and Slashdot. I don't even think it matters anymore who gets it first. Ultimately, I think a lot of the same people visit all of the sites, just to make sure they didn't miss something. And by doing that, you see the same old stories over and over. Add to that dupes on each site and you just get bored with it. At least each site usually offers some sort of unique feature that helps it stand out a bit. But still....
Anyway, good luck!
55. I guess what sends up red flags is the whole idea of "too good to be true." But, then again, I'd love to apply for the next opening on TV Squad . . . Good luck on the new Netscape. I'd love to see this work. An internet power-user can usually only hope to make a living from it.
56. Interesting concept. I do have a question though: are you limiting your offers to users of the aforementioned sites? Because some which you have missed, such has the fast growing site ummyeah.com have a handful of members which may well suit your needs.
Posted at 1:37AM on Jul 20th 2006 by Caleb
57. Sure... where do I sign?
I can easily ramp up to beyond your minimum, and add quality in unexpected areas (as my other blog: clackablog.blogspot.com covers a social focus as opposed to the tech focus of kiloseven.blogspot.com).
But, is the invite for other than current DIGG/REDDIT/Flickr/Newsvine users?
Posted at 1:38AM on Jul 20th 2006 by John Bartley K7AAY
58. I don't begrudge anyone money they make from such a scheme--whether the content creator or the content wrangler. What I do take issue with is the completely laughable notion that this will somehow put free content producers "out of business." Memo to Jason Calacanis: very few of them are in it for the money! For more in this vein, see my blog reply (http://www.dufoundation.org/blog/?p=76), and for support of my claim that they're not in it for the money, see this new study (http://citmedia.org/learn/surveys/collaborativenews.htm) or just observe Wikipedia.
Posted at 1:44AM on Jul 20th 2006 by Larry Sanger
59. Money for writing (and into whatever category blogging falls) sounds logical. In our society it is the usual measure of success.
As much as I would enjoy getting paid for what I am doing now on the Internet and previously did when I lived in the States for freelance clients; I think you are limiting yourself. Digg, though fun, and Netscape, Reddit, etc. are large and visible. There are other places where talent lurks. I write for http://www.blogcritics.org/ and for http://www.desicritics.org/ and there are people working hard there (and elsewhere) who could bring a lot to this proposed site.
The "top 20" or the "top 5%" is appropriate to your article. The concept that quality work will continue for free is, certainly, questionable. Restricting your operation to a few "crowdsourcing" sites is also questionable.
It is, however, the right direction for the blogosphere.
Posted at 2:03AM on Jul 20th 2006 by Howard Dratch
Previous 20 Comments | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Last | Next 20 Comments
Add your comments
Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry: inappropriate or purely promotional comments may be removed. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments. To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br> tags.
41. This is a great offer. Very good idea.
Posted at 2:13PM on Jul 19th 2006 by Edwin