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.)