Nick Denton and Gawker Media are wrestling with the problem of subject matter quality on the web — specifically, how to give bloggers incentives to create composition that drives traffic based on quality rather than quantity. Gawker has announced that incentive pay for its bloggers will now be based entirely on the number of page views that each blogger’s posts generate, rather than on the total number of posts a blogger writes. (Vallewag has posted the entire

internal memo, which anyone interested in the economics of publishing on the web should read and re-read.)

The downsides of that approach are obvious — the incentive rewards composition that is salacious, titillating, slanderous, nasty, etc. — anything that appeals to the base interests of a mass audience. It rewards gaming of social news sites, i.e. creating composition that appeals to the most parochial interests of users on Digg, […]

Orginal post by Scott Karp