Who ever said the future of media was going to feel great? With the current traffic success of Gawker—70+ posts a day, amazing SEO results, and relentlessly hammered-home top stories to maximize numbers—comes a downside. The company, which hands out blogger pay on the traffic for each writer's own blog posts, has been paying out bonuses each quarter to nearly all the regular editorial staff of Gawker. "We've broken the site budget," Gawker Media owner Nick Denton told the staff in an email yesterday. The only answer, from the company's perspective? To keep getting more traffic—but to pay the producers of that traffic less for each pageview. So for the second and now, according to a new memo regarding the pay rate for the quarter that began this week, third quarters of 2008, the company has reduced the rate of pay per pageview. Other Gawker Media sites, including Jezebel, also had their pageview rate cut.

At the beginning of the year, the pay rate per pageview on Gawker was $7.50, according to Portfolio's Felix Salmon; it went to $6.50 for the next quarter and it is now $5. (Other sites vary, based on overall traffic and ad rate.)

It could have been worse! Denton wrote: "[Gawker Media Managing Editor] Noah [Robischon]'s calculations would suggest a rate of $4.15. I've got it up to $5.00 per 1,000 views. Not as bad as it could have been, and you would still all have been in the black if this rate had been applied retrospectively, but it will still demand higher targets for each of you. As the site continues to grow, that's going to happen again, but I hope that this is the last such substantial adjustment."

This means that, for Gawker writers, a million pageviews a month to an individual writer's blog posts will now net that writer $5000. Just back in January, a million pageviews would have gotten a writer $7,500. The reduced pageview rate means that writers must do more—or, of course, more popular!—work to even receive the same rate of pay.

In June, the top traffic-getter was Richard Lawson, with 1.5 million pageviews (under the new rate, that's $7500). Sheila McClear, who writes about books and publishing and downtown, narrowly missed beating her personal best month, coming in with 653,000. (Uh oh! That's just $3200, under the new rate.) Update: Actually, McClear has two login names! Whoops. So she actually got 975,000 pageviews in June. Phew! Weekend editor and weekday editors (respectively) Ian Spiegelman and Alex Pareene did do around 700,000 each.

New part-time contributor Michael Weiss came in with just 50,000 pageviews in June. That would be, uh, $250—presumably he is guaranteed more. (Former Gawker media reporter Doree Shafrir and at least three other staff members who also left the site late last year got better Gawker traffic to their posts this June, thanks to Google and on-site archives, than Weiss did.) Update: Weiss was only doing a test week on Gawker, and contributing infrequently.

But! Overall, with the exception of Lawson, the per-employee traffic isn't that much higher than it was a year ago. And yet the site traffic is up more—meaning the site is receiving more income that the company doesn't have to share with a writer. The site received 16.7 million pageviews in June. Only about 6 million pageviews of that traffic is attributable to writers currently being paid. So why is the company cutting the costs of staff pay, when it isn't forced to cut in writers for 10 million pageviews in the month?

(Update: A note: Those numbers compare the site's internal numbers with the site's Sitemeter tracking; they use different methods and it may not be fair to compare them directly. According to Quantcast, as well, which directly collects data on the site, Gawker received a bit more than 15 million pageviews last month.)

The ultimate flaw in the company's logic regarding its pay scheme seems obvious. The website's income should escalate when the site's pageviews rise—unless, for instance, some high-end advertisers regard it as too tabloid a product, and ad rates have dropped. (Unlikely.)

You could also insert here a predictable statement about anxieties in the online ad market, often expressed by Denton—though Gawker doesn't look at all unsold.

So more ad inventory—actual pages served—should mean more income for the company—particularly since Gawker seems to be mostly increasing in pageviews not attached to any writer. At the same time, reducing the cost of the creation of that inventory also gets the company more of the income that is attached to a writer. Kicking down less money to the workers seems, at best, cheap.

Update: Nick Denton notes that this item is missing the "To Be Sure" paragraph, in which we fairly note that his young writers are paid more than other young writers at other print and web outlets. To be sure, that is really true! He also questioned a lack of disclosure: that I used to work at Gawker. No knowledge from my previous employment there was used.