A proposal for how Huffington Post can pay its bloggers
How The Huffington Post Can Pay Its Bloggers
The proposal is an award system for bloggers. It is not simple because if The Huffington Post were to reward bloggers based solely on page views, bloggers might be inclined to write fluffy, celebrity-focused articles and the site could devolve into PerezHilton.com. If The Huffington Post were to reward bloggers based solely on editorial quality, there would be no incentive for bloggers to send around their stories and encourage friends to bookmark them. So although the following may seem complicated, it aims to check and balance the mixture of elements that make The Huffington Post what it is, while rewarding bloggers for providing this mixture.
According to TNS Media Intelligence, The Huffington Post’s advertising revenue from January through April 2009 was $3.4 million. So let’s round down and assume that ad revenue for the year is $10 million. I propose that The Huffington Post commit to spending 20% of its revenue rewarding bloggers. For 2009, this would be $2 million.
Not all bloggers will be rewarded. There are 4,000 bloggers that contribute to the site, and this structure only rewards those who contribute the most to the site’s business and editorial goals.
$2 million a year is $166,666 a month.
Every month authors of the 200 articles that receive the highest number of page views would receive $250 bonuses.
Every month authors of the 200 articles that result in the most time spent on the site would receive $250 bonuses.
Every month authors of the 200 articles that are of the highest editorial quality would receive $250 bonuses.*
Every month authors of the 165 or so articles with the highest number of inbound links would receive $100 bonuses. (Methodology would have to be determined to ensure the validity of inbound links. Potentially the links would be weighted based on page rank.)
