Chris Mooney has an interesting article at the Columbia Journalism Review on the economics of blogging, and the disparities in pay that bloggers at major sites get. While some bloggers are creating real value for website publishers, they are often getting little or nothing in return. On the other hand, bloggers at ScienceBlogs get paid on the basis of traffic. (I have always wondered about that – while I know that SBers get paid, I have always wondered whether it was a fixed amount, a function of traffic, or a share of ad revenues. Now I know.)
Mooney suggests that a Bloggers Guild of America might be part of the solution. Interesting idea…but why just “of America”? The internet has no national boundaries.
Filed under: Blogging
There’s too many semi-pro bloggers who would use the opportunity of a strike to just move in and become A-listers. It’s not like they could effectively get 50 million bloggers to stop writing. It would just propel more obscure bloggers into the spotlight. It’d be an interesting way of creating a whole new A-list.