Gawker Media ties bonus to page views

Tech journalist and blogger Paul Boutin used his part-time gig at Gawker Media's Valleywag to post an internal memo on a new bonus system. (It's not clear whether he got permission or is using the "ask forgiveness" model.)

Key point:

On top of your monthly base pay, you will be eligible for a bonus based on the number of pageviews your posts receive each month. This total includes any pageview on any story with your byline that was read during the month, even if the story is months or years old.

(Assuming the pay stops after a blogger leaves, there's a built-in reward for sticking around.)

And an example:

This chart should make it clearer. If your site has a PV rate of $5:
$2,000 = 400,000 views:
$5,000 = 1m views:
$7,000 = 1.4m views

i.e. an average of more than 13,300 page views per day are required to earn a bonus (at the sample rate).

The motivation:

Where there was a shortage of attitude and commentary, there's now a surfeit. And what's in heavy demand, and short supply, is linkworthy material, by which I mean a secret memo, a spy photo, a chart, a well-argued rant, a list, an exclusive piece of news, a well-packaged find.
...
We need a mechanism to reward hard work, and stardom -- to dispense pay increases automatically, if you will.

They include one big caveat:

The view count does not reflect attention paid to the posts on the front page

And, in a comment on CenterNetworks' post, Marshall Kirkpatrick adds another:

It just kills me to think that RSS subscribers mean nothing in this equation. Put some damn ads in the feeds and reward writers for winning new readers.

My take: I can see the benefit of having writers get paid in more-or-less the same way the company gets paid -- but it's not for everyone.