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 "$1,000 a month for doing what you're already doing.")
Reader Comments
(Page 2 of 5)22. I´m the spanish CEO of the digg clone (fresqui) http://tec.fresqui.com. We can offert you my users by half prize. Yes just 500$ per month ;) contact witch me if your interest in.
Good lock
23. This sort of smacks of desperation.
Posted at 8:15AM on Jul 19th 2006 by Angel
24. It is going to take a lot more than $1000/month to get me to jump ship on digg. I honestly don?t know that you could put a price on it. The people that use digg are where the real value is for me.
Posted at 8:59AM on Jul 19th 2006 by BloodJunkie
25. I think what really needs to be examined is the social context in which many of these users become "powerful".
Although I have no doubt *some* of these users submit many stories for their love of tech (in the case of DIGG) and sharing knowledge. I would aruge that many of the "top" users submit an overabundance of stories (not all of which are noteworthy) and comment on tons of other posts for the sole purpose (whether inherently or intentionally) of being recognized as a "Power User" (PU ironically).
I can say I've seen it happen many times where one of these PUs trash or praise a post and because they are a PU to the community, the lemming-esque wannabe PUs fall in line and post similarly. For instance...just watch the flood of "DIGGS" come in for an article which Kevin Rose DIGGS first. How many of the people actually read the article and DIGG it because they like it vs those who DIGG it because KRose did and it makes them one step closer to being like Kevin (Im thinking of 3 degrees of separation).
My point is this: With the uprising of all the new Bottom-Up sites, we have to be careful to make sure that those who on face value seem like power users vs those who actually contribute real and valuable content to our sites. I would prefer a person who submits 1 QUALITY piece of information a day to someone who posts 30 ok pieces.
Of course then we have to weigh what I think is quality vs what they think is quality...
/my 3.9 cents
Posted at 9:06AM on Jul 19th 2006 by Rick Matthews
26. #380 on DIGG. Been slipping the past few months, but would be willing to put everything into Netscape. I use scores of sites for sources.
I would be willing to take less than $1,000 (based on my DIGG ranking).
Posted at 9:09AM on Jul 19th 2006 by Ryan Merket
27. I say kill the new Netscape. Go back to traditional portal which has had good traffic, but devote a % (1/2?) of the content to WIN stories. Use your editors to clean and summarize the most interesting, driving traffic to other AOL properties rather than all over the Internet. It'd be cheaper and at the same time more lucrative for AOL by exposing folks to the blog network and hopefully picking up new suscribers/visitors. I'm willing to bet the amount of Netscape portal defections will outweigh the influx of newcomers in the foreseeable future.
At the very least, if you want me looking from work I need content that scales down horizontally because I'm not going to bother scrolling left to right.
Last but not least, quantity doesn't equal quality. A lot of the top folks on Digg sumbit every story they see. They move to the top by submitting it first then monitoring related stories and posting "dupe" comments funneling people back to themselves. Using this shot-gun approach, they're responsible for a large percentage of top stories, but also responsible for a lot of noise which is what makes the voting useful... I'm not sure how a pay model benefits AOL. You could almost programatically automate what these top posters do by monitoring feeds or have the existing editors comb the net. Unless this is just a $144k (12x12) viral ploy to drive the Digg community over...
My Digg ranking is #198 with 17 stories to the front, 1/2 from my site.
28. CK, or Jason
Thus far I have limited most of my story submissions to just autos which would be really easy to increase. Over the last 33 days I have submitted 142 stories. Now having said that, after reading Jason's post on calacanis.com entitled Paying the top DIGG/REDDIT/Flickr/Newsvine users (or "$1,000 a month for doing what you're already doing.") I thought to myself, this is something that I would like to do and it would not be to hard to meet the minimum 150 stories. Hell I could probably do 4 times that many if I put more time into this. I already spend about 1 to 3 hours a day on netscape, and most of that is just reading. Right now I am the number 7 story submitter on Netscape, with not a whole lot of effort, plus I have 757 friends (do I get a prize when I reach a 1000 friends, just kidding of course). I definitely have the time to do this for you mainly because I am a stay-at-home dad (my sons are 7 and 9, and they are pretty self sufficient, of course there is the occasional "dad Jon hit me", but they are going back to school in August). Not only that I have 3 blogs I work on and it does not take that much time to do, usually about 2 hours a day.
Hope you consider me, thanks a bunch.
29. So the offer is paying the top digg users to use your site instead of digg because they won't use your site unless you pay them. In an analogy, to me it seems to me more along the lines of having to pay a hooker to get sex when something like digg already gets sex without having to pay simply because it is already desireable to the women (the users in this analogy).
Posted at 10:51AM on Jul 19th 2006 by Bob Tavano
30. Couple resources for your search
http://www.stumbleupon.com/
click on top stumblers bottom right
perhaps use this tool to also narrow down your applicants
http://wholinkstome.com/
Posted at 11:48AM on Jul 19th 2006 by christi
31. couple resources for your search
http://www.stumbleupon.com/
click on top stumblers bottom right ( happen to be one of those)
perhaps use this tool to also narrow down your applicants
http://wholinkstome.com/
Posted at 11:50AM on Jul 19th 2006 by christi
32. Let me see 150 x 12 = 1,800. $12,000 ÷ 1,800 = $6.66. Hmmm $6.66 per post. Something seems evil about this :->
Posted at 11:58AM on Jul 19th 2006 by Greg Furry
33. This offer to top submitters creates some conflict with your earlier entry about PayPerPost.com
You are paying people to blog links essentially. And you are paying them to submit content which may be diluted due to required quantity. Would you suggest disclosure that these posters were paid to find these links? Although these posters have shown themselves to be of value in the past, you cannot predict their success in the future, especially on a site with a different userbase.
Props if you make the hires,
mak
Posted at 12:12PM on Jul 19th 2006 by Monty A. Kaplan
34. Jason,
Why take the Digg users? They suck. Lots of people, like me, won't use Digg because the stuff posted is mostly uninteresting garbage.
I think you will have better luck paying non-Digg users that like to scour the web, and using them to build an aggregator with a different personality. My suggestion is to target bloggers that don't currently submit to Digg. I skim several hundred feeds/sites a day, but I only have time for a post or two at Businesspundit. However, I won't submit the good stuff I find to Digg because it will just get voted down by a bunch of techies who think business doesn't exist outside of Web2.0.
35. Jason,
Sounds great, good luck.
Looking forward to the Netscape Homepage to see the changes.
Posted at 12:25PM on Jul 19th 2006 by Richard Liriano
37. I'm #3 on Lipstick.com if that interests you. I have a nice little following over there. Hit me up if you are interested.
Posted at 12:51PM on Jul 19th 2006 by David Krug
39. I am quite interested in this offer. Please e-mail me. I regularly post on Digg (8-10 posts a day), meaning up to 250-350 posts a month. High quality ones too. I love blogging, getting the latest scoop, and interacting with the users of Digg to get them discussing recent issues and news. I won't release my username here, but will give it to you on request (via email).
I really like what Netscape is doing, and you have a very huge audience visiting the Netscape homepage, so this would be a great opportunity for people who are usually not emerged in web 2.0 to start learning about the news surrounding it. There are obviously other categories to post stories in, as well as various audiences. I just need to know what your audience is and which topics you'd like top stories for.
Please email me to discuss further. Thanks!
Posted at 1:52PM on Jul 19th 2006 by Chad
40. Considering that I spend a large portion of my day hitting piles of mobile device and technology sites as part of my job, I'd be more than happy to post a bunch of those to Netscape every day.
If you still need anyone drop me a line. I'm on the front line of the mobile device world.
Posted at 2:11PM on Jul 19th 2006 by Endroren
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21. Jason, I subscribe to 8202 RSS feeds. How can I help you?
Posted at 7:38AM on Jul 19th 2006 by Dimitar Vesselinov