5 ms·

This comment is wrong on many levels. 1. The RPM you posted is significantly off – at least according to the websites I operate. 2. The web is not "one and do

This comment is wrong on many levels. 1. The RPM you posted is significantly off – at least according to the websites I operate. 2. The web is not "one and done." Successful websites exist because they have loyal readership that keeps coming back. 3. Say a writer spends 4 hours creating an article, and they're paid $100 for that article. (A pretty abysmal amount.) They would need 30k readers to pay 1/3 of a cent in order to break even just on the cost of the article. That is absolutely insane and impossible for most articles. Heck, even if the article cost just $5, they'd need 1,500 pageviews. This is outside of the realm of reality, and simply impossible for the vast majority of websites. If your numbers were the general rules, we'd be mostly reading $1 articles written in 3rd world countries, were people can live on $5 a day.

Namrog84 11y ago
30k readers is quite low for an article of any decent quality site though. There are a billion+ people on the internet. For articles getting 30k or less reada probably shouldn't be montizig or won't be getting much. Unless you want the cost of the articld to be paid back in 24 hours. Which is kinda anti web isnt it? I can see it becoming very quickly where someone can paraphrase or mirror the content somewhere else for cheap. I see any per article pay model as likely flawed anyways. Netflix and many others do well because flat rate. I'd hate if nytimes charged me per article. I'd likely go somewhere else
- PinguTS 11y ago
  But not, if you write in a language that is not English but a native language to the country you are living in, like German, French, Spanish, Portugeese, Italy, Polish, … Maybe with the exception of Spanish (Middle and South America) and French (Africa) you have a rather small audiance but still the same living costs like in the US. If you audience is not the general public but a specialied audience like Technology, like Astrophysics, like historic cars, then you don't have the audience like an article about Lady Gaga or some general politics.
- codycowan 11y ago
  By breaking it down to pay per article vs. flat rate, you're missing the multiple alternative payment schemes possible with micropayments and massive scale. Just for starters think of the spotify model, where users are charged a flat rate, but their money is then paid out to artists based on the number of streams (or attention paid to each song). But to your point about scamming, that is definitely a concern - but no more of a concern than aggregators and viral sites (think uproxx) are today.
Elhana 11y ago
> If your numbers were the general rules, we'd be mostly reading $1 articles written in 3rd world countries, were people can live on $5 a day. If quality is the same, that is exactly what will happen. You are already using software, iphones and TVs built in 3rd world countries for $5 a day.
- Sgt_Apone 11y ago
  So, that will never happen. The quality of writing coming out of wherever is not going to be the same as that of a native English speaker. I've seen many documentation projects outsourced to non-english speaking countries and the quality is consistently awful. The product that comes out of there is worse than nothing because its completely incomprehensible. My last quarter was entirely devoted to rewriting examples of such documentation.
  - notNow 11y ago
    its completely incomprehensible. It's not its. With love, Your non English speaking 3rd world citizen.
    - Sgt_Apone 11y ago
      We could do that all day. For example, it's "non-English" not "non English." I don't think anyone expects perfectly refined grammar in one-off comment on the Internet. I'm sure you can write English very well and there are probably many people like you (maybe even yourself) who can write far better than I can. It's just in my experience such people are few and far between where outsourcing is concerned.
  - sangnoir 11y ago
    > The quality of writing coming out of wherever is not going to be the same as that of a native English speaker Any evidence supporting your statement? Or is it just pure anecdote. To counter your point: there is a long list of writers with accolades in writing (in English) who are not native speakers. There are people who are just poor at language, native or learned. Also, there's a class of errors that only exists among 'native speakers', the most grating to me, is "would of"
Sgt_Apone 11y ago
Exactly. I used to be a journalist but now work as a technical writer. Wages for content writers are already in the basement, with such a low compensation scheme it would kill online journalism entirely.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
Jacob, you are conflating a couple of things in my comment. So there is "RPM" for a web site and there is RPM for a web page. No doubt you run analytics on your site to track who goes to which pages and which pages generate the most advertising revenue. In my experience the "landing" page gets a lot of traffic, the "spokes" pages (typically branches to a bunch of related content) come next, and then there are the articles, some of which get a lot of traffic and some which get only a few page views a day/week. You also probably track dwell time so that you can recognize people who land on the page, probably from a Search engine result, and then "bounce" off because it wasn't what they wanted. Or stay and read. Or the unicorn of the bunch, stay, read, and then read a bunch of other pages. I've also been an author in both the print and web world, my columns on JavaWorld continue to get page views and I continue to get various folks popping over to my poorly maintained web site to grab a copy of the sources. While I'm sure there are probably people who have read my BYTE and Dr. Dobbs articles that is harder to track long term. The point being that I'm pretty familiar with the space and if you're looking for median values for revenue for a given article, its "large" and it became small enough to result in folks like Dr. Dobbs dropping out entirely. Web page revenue, which generally represents one article for a journalist, is "good" if it has $3 RPMs and that is super great if it is getting a lot of traffic. Number 2, the web is often times "one and done" for articles, not web sites but web articles. So if you're a journalist or an author that has a loyal following, folks will come back and read new articles that appear, but they don't generally read the same article again and again.[1] Given that you're running a site, and no doubt you have analytics on that site, how many times does the same person come back to an article? What is the 25th, 50th, and 99th percentiles? If you're 99th percentile breaks 1.15 I'm going to be super impressed. So lets unpack #3, the money shot (no pun intended) Lets start with your writer who was paid $100 to create an article[2]. Setting aside the unreality of someone doing their best work in 4 hours, you have to consider how information gets "value" to consumers, there really is only a few ways, it's "rare" (which means few alternate sources), it's "timely" (which means alternate sources don't have it yet), or it's "enriched" (which means the information contributes to a bigger understanding). So how much value is your author creating here? Do they have the inside scoop on a big deal? Or maybe they are the first with the complete picture, or maybe they have been following a topic for years and can put it all in perspective for people just coming into contact with this thing or concept. That is what creates value in the piece. If they are paraphrasing an AP press release? (or any press release for that matter), or adding a bit of irrelevant trivia to a bigger story, or regurgitating something which has been covered by 16 other authors already in different ways, there is very little in the way of "value" in that writing. Information can demand a price commensurate with its value. While people complain that the NYTimes is a "paywall" they have reached 1M digital subscribers today. Those are people who have paid them money because they expect the value of the information they will get out of the NYTimes will be high relative to the price. So let us look a bit critically at your numbers. "They would need 30k readers to pay 1/3 of a cent in order to break even just on the cost of the article. That is absolutely insane and impossible for most articles." Fred Langa, who was the Editor-in-Chief at BYTE advised me as follows when I wrote for him, "Chuck, the idea article for us would interest all our readers, but that only rarely happens, you should shoot for being interesting to 1/2 to 3/4ths of the readership." Their subscription base was a couple of million readers, so that was targeting 1.5M people. There are over a billion people who use the Web today, a large fraction get most of their information from it. If you're unable to get 30K page views for an article, then I would suggest that either the information it contained was not valuable, or that nobody knew of its existence. The second thing working in your favor today is that the Web never forgets. If you want to read an article of mine in BYTE you have either find a reprint or find some kind soul who has scanned it into the web. But if it was online to begin with (like my Javaworld columns) then people find them again and again and again. Some of those have over 5 million page views. And that is over 20 years. So you write something today, and then it can live forever for pennies a day (a Digital Ocean web server to serve it up is $5/month which can be amortized over all the things you are keeping alive on the web). If you're going to write on the web to make money, make it something worthwhile to a million people. Not three or four thousand. If you are just passionate about something feel free to spend all your time writing about it, that is its own reward and any remuneration is just bonus. [1] The exception for fan fiction is noted. [2] I don't think that would be a particularly good investment in time unless someone was just passionate about what they are writing about.
lkrubner 11y ago
"The web is not 'one and done.' " You misunderstand what was written. ChuckMcM was suggesting that most people only read an article once. Even if they frequently go back to the same website, they don't re-read articles that they've read from 5 years ago. That makes the economics different than buying a book or a magazine. People do save magazines. My dad saved all issues of Scientific American from 1949 to 2009, and when I was a kid I would read through old issues to get a sense of how science developed during the decades before I was born. Nobody does that with web articles. So the economics are different. You can become the owner of a magazine, but trying to claim ownership of a digital article is a subject of endless debates regarding copyright law. As ChuckMcM said, the web is 99.999% "one and done". People read articles once and never go back. They don't want to pay for things, the way they might pay for things where they are actually gaining something on a permanent basis.
- JacobJans 11y ago
  > You misunderstand what was written. Actually, I have a fundamentally different perspective. > They don't want to pay for things, the way they might pay for things where they are actually gaining something on a permanent basis. The goal of good writing is, in part, to permanently change the reader. Even if they read it once. This is true of literary content, educational content, news content, and even entertainment. But more than that, what good content does is establish a relationship that can be cultivated. Even if you read an article just once, it can become part of the greater relationship that serves a larger purpose. (Perhaps, educational, building towards expertise in a certain knowledge area. Or, perhaps, entertainment, where the reader can reliably expect a change in their emotional state.) > My dad saved all issues of Scientific American from 1949 to 2009 Many of my subscribers save all of the emails I send them. How is that different? > Nobody does that with web articles. Have you never referred back to the same web resource? How many times have you viewed this discussion? Do you wonder why there is a "bookmarks" menu button on your browser? Have you ever emailed an article to yourself to read it later, or printed it out? These are all common behaviors. Someone regularly comments on my Facebook article posts, saying "bookmarking", just so they can reference it later. Ironically, I often email the same article to the same audience multiple times, and the readership rate remains high. Yes, the web is full of low-quality content that degrades the reader, the writer, and the entire culture of the internet. Maybe that content earns 1/3rd of a cent per view -- and deserves it. But is that really what we want to be supporting?

Namrog84 11y ago

30k readers is quite low for an article of any decent quality site though. There are a billion+ people on the internet. For articles getting 30k or less reada probably shouldn't be montizig or won't be getting much. Unless you want the cost of the articld to be paid back in 24 hours. Which is kinda anti web isnt it? I can see it becoming very quickly where someone can paraphrase or mirror the content somewhere else for cheap. I see any per article pay model as likely flawed anyways. Netflix and many others do well because flat rate. I'd hate if nytimes charged me per article. I'd likely go somewhere else

PinguTS 11y ago
But not, if you write in a language that is not English but a native language to the country you are living in, like German, French, Spanish, Portugeese, Italy, Polish, … Maybe with the exception of Spanish (Middle and South America) and French (Africa) you have a rather small audiance but still the same living costs like in the US. If you audience is not the general public but a specialied audience like Technology, like Astrophysics, like historic cars, then you don't have the audience like an article about Lady Gaga or some general politics.
codycowan 11y ago
By breaking it down to pay per article vs. flat rate, you're missing the multiple alternative payment schemes possible with micropayments and massive scale. Just for starters think of the spotify model, where users are charged a flat rate, but their money is then paid out to artists based on the number of streams (or attention paid to each song). But to your point about scamming, that is definitely a concern - but no more of a concern than aggregators and viral sites (think uproxx) are today.

Elhana 11y ago

> If your numbers were the general rules, we'd be mostly reading $1 articles written in 3rd world countries, were people can live on $5 a day. If quality is the same, that is exactly what will happen. You are already using software, iphones and TVs built in 3rd world countries for $5 a day.

Sgt_Apone 11y ago
So, that will never happen. The quality of writing coming out of wherever is not going to be the same as that of a native English speaker. I've seen many documentation projects outsourced to non-english speaking countries and the quality is consistently awful. The product that comes out of there is worse than nothing because its completely incomprehensible. My last quarter was entirely devoted to rewriting examples of such documentation.
- notNow 11y ago
  its completely incomprehensible. It's not its. With love, Your non English speaking 3rd world citizen.
  - Sgt_Apone 11y ago
    We could do that all day. For example, it's "non-English" not "non English." I don't think anyone expects perfectly refined grammar in one-off comment on the Internet. I'm sure you can write English very well and there are probably many people like you (maybe even yourself) who can write far better than I can. It's just in my experience such people are few and far between where outsourcing is concerned.
- sangnoir 11y ago
  > The quality of writing coming out of wherever is not going to be the same as that of a native English speaker Any evidence supporting your statement? Or is it just pure anecdote. To counter your point: there is a long list of writers with accolades in writing (in English) who are not native speakers. There are people who are just poor at language, native or learned. Also, there's a class of errors that only exists among 'native speakers', the most grating to me, is "would of"

Sgt_Apone 11y ago

Exactly. I used to be a journalist but now work as a technical writer. Wages for content writers are already in the basement, with such a low compensation scheme it would kill online journalism entirely.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

Jacob, you are conflating a couple of things in my comment. So there is "RPM" for a web site and there is RPM for a web page. No doubt you run analytics on your site to track who goes to which pages and which pages generate the most advertising revenue. In my experience the "landing" page gets a lot of traffic, the "spokes" pages (typically branches to a bunch of related content) come next, and then there are the articles, some of which get a lot of traffic and some which get only a few page views a day/week. You also probably track dwell time so that you can recognize people who land on the page, probably from a Search engine result, and then "bounce" off because it wasn't what they wanted. Or stay and read. Or the unicorn of the bunch, stay, read, and then read a bunch of other pages. I've also been an author in both the print and web world, my columns on JavaWorld continue to get page views and I continue to get various folks popping over to my poorly maintained web site to grab a copy of the sources. While I'm sure there are probably people who have read my BYTE and Dr. Dobbs articles that is harder to track long term. The point being that I'm pretty familiar with the space and if you're looking for median values for revenue for a given article, its "large" and it became small enough to result in folks like Dr. Dobbs dropping out entirely. Web page revenue, which generally represents one article for a journalist, is "good" if it has $3 RPMs and that is super great if it is getting a lot of traffic. Number 2, the web is often times "one and done" for articles, not web sites but web articles. So if you're a journalist or an author that has a loyal following, folks will come back and read new articles that appear, but they don't generally read the same article again and again.[1] Given that you're running a site, and no doubt you have analytics on that site, how many times does the same person come back to an article? What is the 25th, 50th, and 99th percentiles? If you're 99th percentile breaks 1.15 I'm going to be super impressed. So lets unpack #3, the money shot (no pun intended) Lets start with your writer who was paid $100 to create an article[2]. Setting aside the unreality of someone doing their best work in 4 hours, you have to consider how information gets "value" to consumers, there really is only a few ways, it's "rare" (which means few alternate sources), it's "timely" (which means alternate sources don't have it yet), or it's "enriched" (which means the information contributes to a bigger understanding). So how much value is your author creating here? Do they have the inside scoop on a big deal? Or maybe they are the first with the complete picture, or maybe they have been following a topic for years and can put it all in perspective for people just coming into contact with this thing or concept. That is what creates value in the piece. If they are paraphrasing an AP press release? (or any press release for that matter), or adding a bit of irrelevant trivia to a bigger story, or regurgitating something which has been covered by 16 other authors already in different ways, there is very little in the way of "value" in that writing. Information can demand a price commensurate with its value. While people complain that the NYTimes is a "paywall" they have reached 1M digital subscribers today. Those are people who have paid them money because they expect the value of the information they will get out of the NYTimes will be high relative to the price. So let us look a bit critically at your numbers. "They would need 30k readers to pay 1/3 of a cent in order to break even just on the cost of the article. That is absolutely insane and impossible for most articles." Fred Langa, who was the Editor-in-Chief at BYTE advised me as follows when I wrote for him, "Chuck, the idea article for us would interest all our readers, but that only rarely happens, you should shoot for being interesting to 1/2 to 3/4ths of the readership." Their subscription base was a couple of million readers, so that was targeting 1.5M people. There are over a billion people who use the Web today, a large fraction get most of their information from it. If you're unable to get 30K page views for an article, then I would suggest that either the information it contained was not valuable, or that nobody knew of its existence. The second thing working in your favor today is that the Web never forgets. If you want to read an article of mine in BYTE you have either find a reprint or find some kind soul who has scanned it into the web. But if it was online to begin with (like my Javaworld columns) then people find them again and again and again. Some of those have over 5 million page views. And that is over 20 years. So you write something today, and then it can live forever for pennies a day (a Digital Ocean web server to serve it up is $5/month which can be amortized over all the things you are keeping alive on the web). If you're going to write on the web to make money, make it something worthwhile to a million people. Not three or four thousand. If you are just passionate about something feel free to spend all your time writing about it, that is its own reward and any remuneration is just bonus. [1] The exception for fan fiction is noted. [2] I don't think that would be a particularly good investment in time unless someone was just passionate about what they are writing about.

lkrubner 11y ago

"The web is not 'one and done.' " You misunderstand what was written. ChuckMcM was suggesting that most people only read an article once. Even if they frequently go back to the same website, they don't re-read articles that they've read from 5 years ago. That makes the economics different than buying a book or a magazine. People do save magazines. My dad saved all issues of Scientific American from 1949 to 2009, and when I was a kid I would read through old issues to get a sense of how science developed during the decades before I was born. Nobody does that with web articles. So the economics are different. You can become the owner of a magazine, but trying to claim ownership of a digital article is a subject of endless debates regarding copyright law. As ChuckMcM said, the web is 99.999% "one and done". People read articles once and never go back. They don't want to pay for things, the way they might pay for things where they are actually gaining something on a permanent basis.

JacobJans 11y ago
> You misunderstand what was written. Actually, I have a fundamentally different perspective. > They don't want to pay for things, the way they might pay for things where they are actually gaining something on a permanent basis. The goal of good writing is, in part, to permanently change the reader. Even if they read it once. This is true of literary content, educational content, news content, and even entertainment. But more than that, what good content does is establish a relationship that can be cultivated. Even if you read an article just once, it can become part of the greater relationship that serves a larger purpose. (Perhaps, educational, building towards expertise in a certain knowledge area. Or, perhaps, entertainment, where the reader can reliably expect a change in their emotional state.) > My dad saved all issues of Scientific American from 1949 to 2009 Many of my subscribers save all of the emails I send them. How is that different? > Nobody does that with web articles. Have you never referred back to the same web resource? How many times have you viewed this discussion? Do you wonder why there is a "bookmarks" menu button on your browser? Have you ever emailed an article to yourself to read it later, or printed it out? These are all common behaviors. Someone regularly comments on my Facebook article posts, saying "bookmarking", just so they can reference it later. Ironically, I often email the same article to the same audience multiple times, and the readership rate remains high. Yes, the web is full of low-quality content that degrades the reader, the writer, and the entire culture of the internet. Maybe that content earns 1/3rd of a cent per view -- and deserves it. But is that really what we want to be supporting?