The economics of the digital world have created a cultural
shift where some publishers are figuring out ways to compensate
editorial staff based on business metrics like pageviews, visitors or
even sales.
This is tricky territory, since editorial staffers have
tended to see themselves as walled off from the grubby concerns of
making money. But the reality of media today is the pressure to make
money. Old and new media publications, from Forbes to Complex and
Gawker, deploy some type of incentive-based compensation for their
editorial staff based on metrics. The upside is a business that’s all
going in the same direction; the downside is a further eroding of the
wall between editorial and advertising.
Gawker was an early booster of this approach, and even
today it proudly touts its “big board” that keeps track of pageviews for
each writer. Forbes has monthly incentive programs for full-time
staffers based on a range of metrics, including how many new followers a
reporter gained on Twitter that month. It has an even more ambitious
program for its “contributor network,” which it calls an experiment in
“entrepreneurial journalism.” And most aggressive of all is Complex,
which has gone whole-hog with incentives, such as the one in which
editors get paid based on certain business goals, like the profitability
of their division, among other business metrics...
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