Analysing what gets read is where it’s going, but is getting paid going the same way?
Chris Green posted a while ago about how he’d spent ages sweating over the precise statistics of who clicked through to read what, and what that told him about whether he was getting value for money from his freelances.
Scary, huh?
Every few months I perform what I call a contributor/traffic analysis. This involves generating a report from the main IT PRO site stats tool that shows the page impressions (PIs) and unique user visits (UUs) generated by author, rather than by article type or section.
I then merge this data with the main contributor expenditure spreadsheet, where we record and track all our freelance spending.
The end result is that we have the traffic generated by an author alongside how much we’ve spent with them over the given period. You divide the amount spent by either the PIs or the UUs and you end up with a cost per PI and a cost per UU, based on a specific author.
It’s not a perfect system, as the PIs and UUs also include legacy content written by that author that was accessed during the given period, not just the new stuff you’ve commissioned and allocated budget for. However, it still provides a valuable metric on the effectiveness of that author’s work to bring in traffic to the site, as well as the cost of acquiring that traffic.
We can do this a bit with the Guardian’s “Most viewed” widget, which is available for any section. (Have a look at Technology’s Most Viewed, which is for the past 24 hours or seven days.)
Quite amazingly, the most-read for the past 24 hours are all from the past week. (Except the “50 best YouTube videos” one. That sort of thing never dies.) And actually, right now it’s unusual, because nothing in the most-viewed for the past seven days or 24 hours is older than a few weeks.
That’s not always the case; quite often stories from a year, two years, three years ago will pop up abruptly, and often - because of the way that “most viewed” tabs work - stick there.
This is the bit that gives me pause about Chris’s musings on paying people. Are we going to get into some weird pay-per-click model, where freelances get paid a certain basic amount, and then more if the number of pageviews goes over a certain amount? I can see that it might be worth hiring a botnet for a week or two to see if you could get around that. Or seeing Digg etc with your stories. Hell, being a freelance would be an arms race in all sorts of ways; writing the story would become the least of the challenges. Making sure it got read enough would become a prime aim.
Of course there’s all sorts of things that a site editor can do - by watching your traffic, tweaking headlines, choosing clever pictures. But something about what Chris is describing makes me …uneasy.
Perhaps though it’s just the adjustment to the world where we really can measure these things (and so ought to, I guess). They’re telling commissioning editors uncomfortable things about what subjects really get read. (I find it interesting to track how many paper-to-web clickthroughs we get from the bit.ly links we use in Technology. It’s a lot.)
What’s the feeling though? Is it only sensible to do this or is it going over the top?
Bonus link: Countervalue reckons that copy editing has about five years left before it’s made redundant by computers.
But how, ask at least a dozen copy editors, can I really expect to replace headline writing and rewriting of crap copy?
I don’t know where you guys have been for the last few years but you obviously have no idea what Google Labs has been up to or how major publishers have been playing about with text mining engines (TMEs).
I spent most of yesterday with one of the Telegraph Media Group’s major software suppliers. If you’d seen my Twitter updates you will have known that I was not expecting anything beyond yet another demonstration of an integrated web and print CMS. But what my colleague from IT and I were shown will, if development proceeds as expected, replace the sub editor, the researcher and, quite possibly, a whole load of news editors within five years.
Feeling reassured now? No? Do explain…
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- How two guys wrote the app that nearly became iTunes: the story of Audion (12 November 2004; score: 29.13%)
- If you write good software, they will come (and pay you) (15 October 2004; score: 27.72%)
- Notwithstanding iTunes.. (22 July 2004; score: 21.27%)
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September 15th, 2008 at 11:55 pm
There’s parallels here to be drawn with the future of the PR industry as all activity becomes completely trackable and an agency becomes completely measurable and accountable for all its work. I’m sure it’s already happening and clearly it works both ways. The web is indeed changing everything, as predicted by our friend Bill.
September 16th, 2008 at 12:08 am
Eh? How can software learn to recognise a factual error, or decide what is and isn’t libellous?
As for a pay-per-click model, that’s not really a freelance’s job. The job of a freelance is to deliver what the commissioning editor wants. A pay-per-click model sounds suspiciously like sites such as Helium that offer writers the amazing opportunity to showcase their writing and get three beans if they manage to generate 5 billion hits.
It’s also important to stress that some stories aren’t there because they’ll be read by everyone. They’re there because the relevant website or newspaper site will look like it’s missed a trick if it doesn’t cover X or Y. Just imagine if things did go that way, though. Say a sub makes your copy much better, do they get a cut?
As a freelance, I’m scared by reading these kinds of things. It worries me a LOT that there are people who think a machine can replace a good sub, or a news editor. These are skilled jobs, whether people believe it or not. But anyway, just imagine if news editors were computers. What happens when someone phones up with a really great exclusive - how will a computer understand that?
September 16th, 2008 at 9:58 am
Incentives must be designed to promote the desired behaviour, or they are pointless. The incentive structure you describe above would promote the behaviour of writers trying to attract the largest possible online audience as measured by pages and unique users. To my mind this raises two possible sources of unease:
(1) is this the outcome desired? Is is easy to knock a fear of pure populism as elitist or somehow anti-democratic, but there is a valid argument that newspapers have a duty to inform that goes beyond merely ladling over the content and topics the public can be most easily persuaded to click on; and
(2) as an incentive structure, it is very easily gamed. Or, more precisely, it is very easily gamed by tech-savvy freelancers if its oversight is left in the hands of less technologically astute editors, leading to a scenario where the management of freelancers is necessarily handed over to technical rather than editorial managers.
Whether any of this is alarming depends on where you’re looking from. I would expect it to alarm news content editors; it alarms me as a news consumer since it seems to ring in the very sort of content uniformity that the web is supposed to have consigned to history; but from the point of view of any given news business it would probably look, at least superficially, commercially attractive in the short term.
September 16th, 2008 at 10:37 am
With any incentive system based on metrics, you run into the law of unintended consequences. This will be amplified in the current online-publishing environment where a lot of outlets aren’t really sure what the desired outcome is. Is the aim to build readership full stop? A returning readership? Will they be ad funded or expected to pay a subscription? Is the outlet partisan or non-partisan? All of those things are going to affect how you structure the incentive system.
Gaming could be a lot more subtle and a lot more damaging to an outlet’s long-term reputation than simply renting a botnet. PPC incentives will tend to favour stories that are outrageously wrong. If you can get your story on a hoax chain email, you could rake in the royalties for years afterwards, just as long as the story agrees with some popular prejudice. On the other hand, you could argue that a lot of columnists have been using these tricks for years, so what’s new?
In a partisan newspaper, outrageously wrong stories cause little damage. You’re already, for the most part, preaching to the converted so they will cheerfully nod their head in agreement to some story about asylum seekers performing ritual sacrifices. The same story would get equal attention in a broadsheet but you’d get a bunch of readers heading for the exit.
As Seamus writes, over-using metrics would favour even more news conformity than there is today. Not only would people chase the same stories in order to gain the benefit of being at the top of link aggregators, the trend would be to cover subjects that are known to attract avid news consumers at the expense of other subjects that, although they pull in small numbers individually, help to keep the regular readership coming back.
One big problem is that, for all the people studying media, very few actually seem to bother with reading habits. There’s an entire academic subculture dedicated to bias and balance in the media yet hardly anything that analyses the attitude of the audience. The people with a good sense of that are currently working as news editors.
September 16th, 2008 at 11:08 am
I forgot about the getting-paid bit.
There is a possibility that the trend breezes right through PPC and onto full disaggregation. Working on the assumption that newspapers will link out a lot more and that they will ask writers to take on more of the risk - that is, if a story doesn’t get read, you don’t get cash - it might make more sense for those writers to work in the same way as book authors. They would guest-write on various newspapers for comparatively little (unless they were major names) but use the pieces as marketing for their own sites where they collect the ad or subs money directly. Whether that happens probably depends on whether suitable advertising-sales system and micropayment (in your dreams) systems appear but I think it’s a possibility. It’s either scary or exciting depending on how optimistic you feel about the willingness of people to read what you have to tell them.
September 16th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Chris, re this: “They would guest-write on various newspapers for comparatively little (unless they were major names) but use the pieces as marketing for their own sites where they collect the ad or subs money directly.”
Not if they wanted to make a living, they wouldn’t. How can a writer’s own site compete with a newspaper website that gets millions of hits? If a newspaper wants me to fill its pages, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask to be paid for the privilege. Writing newspaper articles isn’t an art, it’s a trade. It’s one thing for book authors to write for very little in order to promote their own book (indeed I’m not sure they should paid journalist fees if they’re plugging a commercial product, but others disagree with me) but for someone who makes their living out of freelance journalism - i.e. providing newspapers and magazines with text to fill their pages - I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect to get paid for doing that.
September 16th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Anne,
I’m not arguing that it should happen, but that full disaggregation is a possibility that people have to be prepared for. If papers were to move to a full PPC model, it would be up to the writer to decide whether they were better off taking all the money for a lower number of clicks from ads or whatever on their own sites versus what the paper will pay them on a per-click basis. In both cases, the writer is being asked to increase their level of risk which should carry an increased reward if successful. (I stress the ’should’, it could equally go the other way). Some may feel that if they are going to take on that increased risk, they might as well build up their own direct audience. Others might benefit from taking PPC from a more mainstream outlet.
It might not get that far. Full disaggregation does not necessarily benefit the newspapers: they might end up trying to compete with DrudgeReport because they run out of their own material and have to link to everything. But Matt Drudge got there first.
September 16th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Well, as BRITNEY SPEARS was saying to me just the other day as I was browsing the APPLE store looking for CHEAP IPODS, I don’t think that pay per click journalism will look too much different to what we’re doing now, right?
The point of Chris’ pay per click is that it’s all very well internally because if stories about topic X usually do well but one doesn’t, it shows the writer perhaps hasn’t captured the story well enough or the angle wasn’t right etc. All good info. But writing for clicks inevitably skews content and we’ll end up with tech sites writing nothing but Apple and Twitter stories, and newspapers full of celeb nonsense and stories about illegal immigrants and women with 25-stone tumours. Or something.
September 16th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
There’s something odd about assuming that freelance contributors will suddenly change their writing style and adapt their content to fit a new payment policy. In a theoretical world that might happen. But, present company excepted & all that, the gripe of editors I’ve spoken to is that too few contributors are able to adapt to what eds currently need and ask for. So why should your ordinary workaday freelance suddenly be able to make the right calls, ask the right questions, produce the right copy and fill it with enough link bait?
So the first question may not be, will freelances adapt and produce high-click-inducing copy and how desirable is this? It might be, can freelances start writing high-click-inducing copy? I sugest the answer is probably no. Which leaves a changed role for now-redundant subs - of skilfully introducing link bait to copy. What larks.
September 16th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
All I can say is: you don’t pay your plumber according to how many people sh*t in your toilet. You pay him for the number of toilets he puts in.
However - re PJ’s comment about how freelances dont’ adapt to what eds need and ask for - the plumber should be happy to put in the kind of toilet the, er, toilet editor asks for.
September 17th, 2008 at 1:00 am
The payment-by-popularity model isn’t hypothetical - it’s standard in the Gawker Media family, or was when this was published: http://valleywag.com/339271/denton-to-pay-bloggers-based-on-traffic
As has been pointed out above, the consequences are obvious and extraordinarily depressing. Further to the “subs are doomed” proposal, Adobe CS3 seems to be actively hurrying towards the day when the software does the basic stuff for you; the sub’s role then becomes pure sense-checking, and that’s probably far less profitable when you make more money from an inaccurate (but SEO-optimised) story being up for two hours than an accurate one being up forever.
September 17th, 2008 at 8:42 am
@ 10 Anne - Yes, that’s how plumbers are paid. Others, book writers, for instance, are paid differently - linked to sales. Are hacks more like plumbers or more like book writers?
Either way, large numbers of securely-paid journalism jobs, staff and freelance, are going down your plumber’s toilet. In a very uncertain world, hacks are being invited to share in the industry’s risks. Rewards for a few, precarious living for others.
Journalism won’t any more be a career option for bright, mischievous kids with a short attention span. It will be something that rich kids with no responsibilities dabble in before they have to earn a living. An awful lot of the copy will be provided by people employed in other jobs - book writers & plumbers included.
That’s all fine for the industry. Just bad for working hacks. Bad, too, I would say, for society.
September 17th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
“there is a valid argument that newspapers have a duty to inform that goes beyond merely ladling over the content and topics the public can be most easily persuaded to click on”
You must be over 40 or have been on another planet for the last 15 years — this is not how the news works anymore, and they don’t even try very hard to hide it. Everybody excepts that the news is there to bolster the pre-existing opinions of the viewership, and that anything that disagrees too strongly with that pre-existing base is completely ignored.
Things haven’t worked according to your valid argument in any mainstream news outlet, since the ’80s.
September 17th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
Hmm, it is interesting isn’t it? I should say upfront that there’s no suggestion of going to pay-per-click at the Gdn. Though in effect yes, Denton Media has done it.
Anne makes a good (if pungent) point. But are stories really just functional like toilets? You sort of - to extend the metaphor - want other people to talk about your toilet and recommend it to others. (Oh, dear. The metaphor has completely broken down.)
PJ’s right: it does all look precarious. In the US, it is. Is nobody reading Doonesbury?
September 18th, 2008 at 7:45 am
“Is nobody reading Doonesbury?”
Sorry, I should have said. That’s my main source of information.
September 18th, 2008 at 11:42 pm
Why are we assuming a binary world? Why not assume that there will be multiple payment models? Most publications aren’t going to want an uncertain business model where they have no idea what their labor costs are going to be every month. More likely that most cog writers will be paid flat fees, but the few stars will get to negotiate PPC contracts and gain a share of the revenues they generate. And that will happen because the guys who put bums on seats are hugely valuable and you can’t afford to have them go work for your competition.
wg
September 23rd, 2008 at 9:45 pm
I think my view of PPC is partly shaped by the crap rates it inevitably involved. Somebody rang me the other day and asked me to launch, write and promopte a new tech blog for… £3.50 per 1,000 page views. I said no. They asked if I knew any other writers and I had to say yes, but not at that price.
September 25th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Actually, there’s another reason it’s unlikely to become the predominant model in professional publishing: sites would have to open themselves up for audit by all and sundry - otherwise, how could freelances be sure they were getting paid the amount they’re owed? Especially by sites belonging to megamedia corps who are famous for the creative accounting they bring to movie profits when a share of those is due to actor/director/janitor/ABTW (anyone but the writer).
wg