Bloggasm

So says The Observer.

I published a piece at Bloggasm a few months ago detailing that Gawker’s monthly pageviews went up 40% after instituting the new pay policy.

My editor at Media Shift, Mark Glaser, also wrote about this issue, saying that such a pay system was wrong.

There has been a name floating around for “diary” sites like Daily Kos, Huffington Post and Redstate: Mullet blogs. Think about it, you have a small number of power users — the front page writers — in the front, and a shitload of shrieking monkeys (the diarists) on the back end, hidden from the popular front page. So don’t be surprised if these mullet bloggers set up their broken-down cars on cinderblocks in the back yard. Forgive me if I fail to be outraged.

Because I find such things interesting, every now and then I’ll check the job listings over at Pro Blogger so I can get a feel for the paid blogging industry. I mean, what better way to gauge how close we are to having those outside of the elite “A List” make a living blogging? How long until a journalism grad has just as much a chance of getting a full-time blogging position as being a reporter for a newspaper?

Well while I was over there today I came across a post titled “Applying for a Blogger Job? Treat it Seriously,” written by none other than the pro blogger himself, Darren Rowse.

“Today I received an email from one of the advertisers on the ProBlogger Job Boards,” he wrote. “They reflected back to me that they’d had a lot of ‘low quality’ job applications and made some suggestions for those looking to apply for a blogger job.”

A lot of low quality applications? How could this be? I mean, just look at these quotes from five pro blogger job listings that I picked at random:

1. IF WE GET PAID, YOU GET PAID MORE: Yep, it’s true, once you start getting traffic you’ll notice that you’re actually making some money from the various ad networks(AdSense, Kontera, etc.) that you add to your HubPages account. The cool thing is that you will make 60% or all generated ad revenue and we’ll make our 40% after that.

2. Writers start at $15 per article, with a $100 traffic bonus for the most popular article each month. You need to be able to contribute a minimum of 2 posts per month, but can contribute up to 2 posts a week if you have the time and enough funny stuff to say. [Simon: Two posts a week? You mean I can make as much as $30 a week????]

3. You can also write content 5 dollars and up per article if accepted. We pay a (5.00 referral fee) fee per blog so if You have another blog promote you can program and receive 5.00 per member If your tired of networks that don’t share the Revenue.Come over today and triple your earnings. Free shirt when you open a free account on Today.com

4. We pay anywhere between $5 - $75 a post depending on your experience writing, access to sources and breaking news, viral exposure (digg front page, news sources, etc) and length or post. We take pride in paying our writers on a weekly basis.

5. For starters, remuneration will be in the form of Google Adsense sharing with bonuses for exemplary performance. As the site builds up and advertising revenues increase, other reward options will be made available. This is a fresh new site.

Looks like you’ll have just as much a chance of becoming a full-time blogger as you’d have becoming a full-time poet or making a living participating in a pyramid scheme.

So I was hoping to have a new feature article published by today but unfortunately I wasn’t able to finish it last night. So it looks like it won’t be posted until Monday. In the meantime, here are some media-related links for your amusement.

1. Ever wonder what domain names Google has purchased? It’s always interesting to get hold of one of these lists because sometimes it gives you some insight into future plans for an online company. Well, now we have such a list. I shudder to think what kind of product Google Poo will be.

2. Popular science fiction writer John Scalzi posted a short story online about a week ago and based it on a Radiohead-like honor system for payment. At the end of the week, he posted how much money has been donated. It comes out to about 5.9 cents per word, which isn’t a bad rate for short fiction.

3. Media Shift has an interview with a creator of the Smoking Gun. What’s interesting is the site pulls in so many readers with only three staff members and a very simple Web 1.0 mindset. They’re only just now considering adding blogs to the site.

4. Conde Naste, which mainly focuses on magazine publications, is vastly expanding its online presence. They recently acquired some travel blogs and reportedly are poised to buy up more blogs in the future.

Rather than posting here I should be working on my state taxes (I finished federal taxes last night) but I just don’t have the energy for it tonight. Speaking of taxes, the IRS website is incredibly shitty — I know that government websites are known to be terrible but you’d think they’d take extra care with that one, considering it’s the nation’s money-maker.

Here are some media-related links for your amusement.

1. May 1 is RSS Awareness Day, which is certainly something I can support. I knew what an RSS feed was long before I actually started using them. There’s just this odd inertia that keeps you from actually getting on the bandwagon, but once you do you immediately realize it’s worth it. Signing up for RSS feeds relieves some pressure on bloggers to post around the clock because an RSS worldview doesn’t involve you having to check a website over and over again to see if it has been updated. There are some sites I subscribe to that barely ever update, and without the RSS feed I would probably never know when something new has been posted. Rather than explaining what an RSS feed is on my own terms, here’s a handy dandy link to the Wikipedia entry.

2. “Porn for the Blind is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to producing audio descriptions of sample movie clips from adult web sites. This service is provided free of charge.” The description says it all.

3. Jeff Jarvis explores the true value of his blog. Rather than focusing solely on what the blog brings in through direct advertising revenue, he also adds in the money that comes in indirectly — speaking fees, book deals, other gigs — and determines that the blog is worth over a million dollars. Not bad for a site that averages only a few thousand hits a day.

4. This is pretty huge. Gawker Media has sold off three of its blogs, including Wonkette. Gawker founder Nick Denton references the coming online advertising decline, saying he’s dumping his less profitable sites in order to ride out the storm. I still find it weird, though, that they would get rid of Wonkette, which has become some sort of symbol for the rise of the blogosphere as a powerful media outlet — it was often cited in mainstream media stories about the power of blogs. It’s especially a weird move given that it’s a contentious presidential season that has resulted in rising traffic for most major political blogs.

5. It looks like we’re seeing a new use for POD: computer generated books. That New York Times article doesn’t do a great job of explaining how the guy’s company works, but I wouldn’t be able to point to more representative example of the long-tail benefits of Print On Demand.

6. It looks like AP photographer Bilal Hussein, who was jailed for two years without charges, is definitely going to be released. Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, who led the smear campaign against Bilal, has remained mostly silent on this issue.

I’ve been on a much-needed mini vacation for the last four days and this is my first time on the internet since Wednesday. If you’ve commented on one of my posts in that time period and the comment got eaten, I apologize. I moderate all comments and whenever I’m gone for an extended period of time I’m unable to gather the motivation to read through 800 spam comments to pick out a few legitimate ones.

Anyway, here are some media-related links

1. This is pretty scary. Someone placed a hoax craigslist ad announcing an everything-must-go giveaway at a house. The only problem? It wasn’t placed by the owner — and he returned to his house to find people literally looting it. And when he tried to stop them from taking his possessions, the people showed him print-outs from the craiglist ad and refused to give anything back. I smell a pending sociological experiment that could come out of this; something based on the effects of advertising and a level of entitlement that accompanies any sort of ad.

2. We’ve seen a number of incidents recently in which some brutal crime or tragedy occurred that involved a social networking site in some way. The most recent example is a teen male who killed his father because his Myspace account had been deleted.

3. The New Yorker has a long feature article about the demise of the print newspaper industry and what its online future may entail. Scarily enough, the reporter picked The Huffington Post as the example of the future of newspapers. Why is this scary? Because The Huffington Post doesn’t pay many of its star writers. I’m not talking about user-generated content, I’m talking about professional writers who write for the site for free while it soaks of millions in advertising dollars.

4. Ever wonder what bloggers who write for Gawker websites pull in for salaries? We’ve known for some time that they’re paid in part based on the number of page views they attract. Now we have some sense of the actual figures in their pay checks.

Here are some media-related links for your amusement:

1. This blog offers 10 tips to keep your journalism job while your daily paper is being hit with tons of layoffs.

2. Porn star Ron Jeremy says that he would allow his daughter to act in porn as long as she would be a porn star like Jenna Jameson. This revelation is slightly less shocking when you realize he’s talking about his hypothetical daughter, since he doesn’t actually have one.

3. The Columbia Journalism Review on the media’s reaction to the Obama/Wright controversy

4. Michael Arrington, the blogger for the popular site Tech Crunch, argues that blogs should team up to take on big media. I think it’s plausible in some niches, but nearly impossible for stories that significantly drain resources, like war reporting.

5. An interview with a long-time writer for the satirical The Onion.

6. First there were nerdy pick-up lines. Now there are Penguin pick-up lines.