Gawker Bucks vs Journalists Bucks

The New York Times has a story in today’s busi­ness sec­tion about Gawker, which is try­ing to set up a model of advertising-supported weblogs. The arti­cle talks about a story, pub­lished on Iwant­Media, which gave a lit­tle more of a view into Gawker’s finan­cial model. Blog­gers are paid $2500 a month plus bonuses, based on the site’s per­for­mance. Expec­ta­tion seems to be that each site will make around $75,000 a year (that would come out to $6250 per month). With those bits of infor­ma­tion, I decided to inves­ti­gate how blog­ging com­pares to jour­nal­ism as a career.

My method­ol­ogy was rel­a­tively sim­ple. I would take a sam­ple of sites and fig­ure out the word count for each entry, get an aver­age word count for that day and then build sev­eral mod­els. For each day, I would pick up the first entry posted on that day (in other words, the last one in the list of entries for that day), copy all the words for that entry in Word and use the Word Count fea­ture in Word (which can be found under Tools) to get a word count on that entry. I would do the same for the first 12 entries, since we know from the Lockart Steele inter­view that the Gawker require­ment is 12 entries per day. I would also count extra entries and get a dif­fer­ent word count to see what the addi­tion are adding.

Accord­ing to Nick Denton’s site, the top three blogs in the Gawker empire (beyond the porn-oriented Flesh­bot) are Giz­modo, Gawker, and Defamer. So I decided to start test­ing how the sto­ries lined up in terms of word count. As a sam­ple, I decided to use last Fri­day (May 6th), the most recent work­day. Here’s how the three sites break down.

* Word is that Gawker has two edi­tors so I am not sure whether this rep­re­sents a num­ber of sto­ries over quota

The first thing that I find inter­est­ing here is that the aver­age is the 100–250 word area. As a mat­ter of fact, if I aver­age the three sites, I get an aver­age of 183 words for the first 12 entries and 180 words for all entries on that day. I’m going to use these num­bers to make a few cal­cu­la­tions as to the rev­enue model for a blog­ger. For the fol­low­ing cal­cu­la­tions, we will make two more assump­tions: on the low end, a blog­ger will make $2500 per month. On the high end (based on the idea that a site will make about $75,000 per year), a blog­ger will make $6,250 per month. With those now estab­lished as the water­marks, let’s get closer to poten­tial rev­enue numbers.

So there you have it, some actual rev­enue num­bers for pro­fes­sional blog­gers. So how does this com­pare with what jour­nal­ists make? In order to get some com­par­isons, I decided to start look­ing at the per word rate of free­lance reporters. Accord­ing to the National Writ­ers Union, main­stream pub­li­ca­tion pay an aver­age of $1.60 per word. How­ever, if you’re will­ing to move to Canada, you can write for aver­ages between 30 cents to $2 per word for trade pubs. So, based on this, it looks like rates for blog­gings are not par­tic­u­larly com­pet­i­tive. Granted, I have not looked at the qual­ity of the work (I’m leav­ing that kind of sub­jec­tive analy­sis to oth­ers) so the argu­ment will con­tinue but, if you’re into blog­ging as a career, you now have some bench­marks you can use.