I was reading Felix Salmon’s article about Gawker Media and how Nick Denton is continuing the blog lord scheme of paying his bloggers based on performance.  It appears that Denton only cares about the almighty page view.  I know what Denton faces when he looks for results.  I too have that same problem as clients want to see their return on investment.  Denton sees the check the blogger gets for a salary and then matches that against the number of page views that blogger has generated.  The salary is the investment for the page view. The page view is what the advertiser is investing in as they pay Denton.

I face the same problems each month as I send out my invoices.  The client is paying a monthly contract for the blogger.  They look to me to drive traffic, raise readership of the blog and ultimately that has to turn into sales or customers.  It is not unlike the problem Denton faces.  His clients are advertisers and the return on investment is page views.  This is a very basic understanding of professional bloggers and I don’t discount the other benefits of generating quality content for companies.  This is a basic difficulty I face when dealing with the clients and their idea of our service.  I must continue to educate companies as to why  a blogger provides more than words on a page.

Bloggers are doing their jobs by providing quality content and other outreach to gather readers.  Not all blogs are easy to create large page views and create large communities of readers.  A blog that has thousands of readers a day because they talk about celebrity gossip and the latest crotch shot of Britney Spears, is not as difficult to get readers as portable toilet company that is talking about the latest breakthrough in environmentally safe chemicals and toilet paper.  The problem is that portable toilet company expects the world to be as interested in toilet paper as they are in the latest celebrity in rehab and crotch shots.

I always discuss this with companies and how they expect the blog to perform for them and their expectation of their return on investment.  They want to see thousands of people a day lining up to read what the blogger wrote.  They then equate that to some magic way of selling the reader on their service or product.  Readers equate to buyers in their mind.  This is not always the case but that is the expectation.  They figure the blogger salary into their Cost Per Acquisition (CPA).  In order to justify paying a blogger or hiring a blogger, they use this formula.  What they don’t understand is blogger is no different than any other employee in their arsenal.  They have to have employees that perform certain tasks.  They have not bought into the idea that a blogger is necessary.  Until companies become comfortable with that doctrine, I continue to try to justify the expense every month I send an invoice.  Blogger salaries are part of a marketing budget and not part of a budget for employee salaries.  Until that crosses over bloggers are always going to be judged by the “what have you done for me lately” idea.  They need to understand that 50 readers a day that are sold 50% of the time is better than 5,000 readers a day that purchase only 1% of the time. 

[photo via UC Merced]