You will get paid 30% of the monthly blog subscription price for every subscriber to your blog. As for pricing of the subscription fee, Amazon will be the one putting a fair value for it.

There’s a catch though — even if you publish your blog on Kindle, payment options only allow EFT and check to a US address. Nevertheless, it would be good to have this additional distribution channel even without the payback.

Check it out.

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However, there were a lot of allegations flying around that this will affect all the millions of bloggers, forum posters, Friendster users and YouTubers in the Philippines if the NTC will require them to pay a license fee (amounting to Php6,300). So, I took a second and third look and re-read the definitions.

And while the definition of Content Developers was very broad (”persons or entities creating contents“), NTC’s definition of Content (”all types of contents delivered to/accessed by the users/subscribers such as music, ring tones, logos, video clips, etc.“) was obviously focused on mobile content and not content over the internet.

However, we can also make an argument that with the proliferation of mobile 3G, blog content and video clips from YouTube are also accessible via mobile phones. That holds true with email (iPhone Mail, GMail for Mobile, Yahoo! Go). The most prudent course of action was to ask the proponents of the circular what they meant by all these and who are specifically covered by it, which, Romeo Rabajante Jr. did (I applaud him for doing so):

I e-mailed NTC asking regarding this issue and Mr. Edgardo V. Cabarios director of Common Carriers Authorization Department of NTC replied to my e-mail. He said:

“Sir,

The proposed rules apply to those who offer contents, information, applications and/or electronic games to the public for compensation. If the contents, information, application and/or electronic games are free, then the providers are not covered by the proposed rules.

Edgardo Cabarios”

That explains the line in the memo that says “further encourage the development of contents, information applications and electronic games, the prevailing access charge regime between the contents, information, applications and electronic games providers and the networks providers which is revenue sharing should be replaced by fixed access charge” (emphasis mine).

Going back to the memorandum again, it also states that those are applying should provide the following documents:

1) Valid registration from the Securities and Exchange Commission or from the Department of Trade and Industry and Articles of Incorporation
2) Facilities lease agreement with duly enfranchised and certificated public telecommunications entity

Unless some blogger out there has applied a business license with the DTI and incorporated their blogs as a business entity with the SEC as well as signed facilities lease agreement with a telco, no one here is eligible. That supports the clarification that only those who are directly charging for their content are covered. I have yet to see a blog in the Philippines that follow the paid/subscription model although I’ve once talked somebody out of doing so.

About a year ago, a mobile content and service provider approached me and proposed a syndication deal for my blogs. The set up was something like that of the Amazon Kindle model — provide unlimited access to blog content via mobile device at a monthly flat rate. That rates were something like Php10 to Php20 a month to be able to read a blog via the mobile phone without additional access charges (i.e. free 3G connection).

It was a sound business model actually — instead of paying Php10 per 30 minutes (Php5/15mins), you only pay a one-time monthly fee to get unlimited access. Of course, there’s some sort of profit sharing there.

In that situation, the blogger becomes the Content Developer; the other party being the Content Providers as per the definition and therefore be covered by such proposed rules.

In its current form, I don’t see the proposed memorandum to gravely affect bloggers and publishers in general. What may need some more clarification would be professional bloggers charging their readers for reading their content. This might actually be more relevant to those people selling ebooks, online learning courses, web seminars and the like since they charge for access to content or gets a fee for providing services and the like.

Back in 2007, there was actually a draft memo by the NTC to regulate all forms of Internet content by classifying it as a value-added service (VAS) and charge fees accordingly. I supposed that memo was scrapped (see Unlawyer’s explanation here) altogether. Now that one could have direct effect to all bloggers.

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The pay — AUS$150,000 for 6 months. Now that’s one way to break the buzz for tourism.

Apply here if you’re interested.

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Denton himself published the internal memo on the Gawker blog the other day, revealing plans to chop off 19 writers across his network. What’s interesting is that aside from the lay-off, he’s also planning to hire 10 more people.

• Trim down the editorial staff assigned on less-trafficked blogs like ValleyWag, etc. Each blog has to sustain operating itself and the fastest way to get to that is to cut labor cost.
• Focus on highly-trafficked blogs that attracts the ad money. Add more people to these blogs, like Gizmodo, to ramp up more pageviews.
• Suspend paying off bonus payments (by 2009) as they eat up a lot of extra cash (something like $50,000 a month!).

Denton basically admits it’s all about the recession — he’s just preparing the network for the big crunch time.

On a related note, the Pinoy-packed b5media blog network also sent out notices to all its bloggers about they pay adjustments. The whole internal memo was leaked and published by Mike Arrington on TechCrunch.

The overall gist of the pay restructure was that b5media was actually overpaying bloggers in the last 2 years because of an inaccurate metrics they’ve been using. On top of that, the new tier-based payment scheme allows for more offline bonuses instead of just traffic stats.

• Tier 1: 30,000 pageviews/month and up – $4 CPM
• Tier 2: 10,000 – 29,999 pageviews/month – $100 flat
• Tier 3: 5,000 – 9,999 pageviews/month – $50 flat
• Tier 4: 4,999 pageviews/month or less – $25 flat

There will be monthly and quarterly bonus pay as well ranging from $25 – $50 (b5 has always had bonus pay in the last 2 years). The top tier blogs will get a $4 CPM rate which means if your blog has 50k pageviews a month, you get $200 (50k*$4/k).

Blogger pay structures have been a constant debate and this is not the first time we talked about it here (Going Pro: Network or Indie? & What’s the perfect formula for blogger payouts?).

In the previous payment scheme, there’s a minimum base pay of $50 depending on how long you’ve been a member of b5media. It’s something like this:

New b5media blogger: $50 base + $0.75 per 1k pageviews
A year-old b5media blogger: $100 base + $0.75 per 1k pageviews
Veteran b5media blogger: $150-$200 base + $0.75 per 1k pageviews

So, for a veteran blogger with 60k pageviews, one can get somewhere around $195 – $245 per month from the old scheme. The new scheme guarantees you at least $240. Of course, both schemes have their bonuses as well.

However, those who will be affected are really the new bloggers. A new blogger with 3k pageviews a month now gets just $25 flat. Before, it’s $52.25. For a new blogger with 3 new blogs, that’s a total of $75 compared to $156.75 which is more than a 50% drop. Let’s say that the traffic stats before was wrong and that the 3k pageviews was actually just 2k. That’s still $51.50 for the old and $25 for the new system.

Likewise, if there are two of you on a single blog, the rates become lower. Let’s take the 60k pageviews a month with 2 bloggers as an example.

Old Pay Scale: $150-$200 + (60k * $0.75/k) / 2 = $172.50 – $222.50 each

New Pay Scale: 60k * $4.00/k / 2 = $240 / 2 = $120 each

I think this is where the contention of the argument that the new pay scale is a downgrade. In essence, it becomes less attractive to join b5media now as a new blogger.

Another area of concern would be the niche of the blogs assigned to a blogger. Obviously, a showbiz blog has much higher probability to grow in traffic compared to say a gardening blog. Growing a gardening blog from zero to 30k may take a year while a showbiz blog can drive that same amount of traffic in less than 6 months. Given that both bloggers are great writers and make the same effort, the inequality of the niche/industry makes it harder for less popular niches to make the same money.

The bonus schemes may compensate for the drop in base pay but it’s just that — a bonus. It’s not going to be stable. Still, it’s way better than nothing.

My suggestion? Expand the metrics for computing the tiered payscale.

• Add RSS subscription to the equation. Some blogs will have RSS-savvy readers and they’re not counted in the pageview formula. A blog my only have 10k pageviews a month but could have as much as 500 RSS subscribers. That has got to account for something. Assuming that there’s a daily blog post, the 500 RSS subscribers can convert to 15k pageviews (500/day x 30days).
• Adjust the CPM rate for different niches. In my book, a blog on gardening with 100k pageviews is more successful than a showbiz blog with 300k pageviews. It just follows the industry’s ad pricing — business blogs charge higher CPM rates than gossip blogs.
• Offer seniority pay. Loyalty still has got to count for something. When I was working for MS, we get 1 month additional salary for every year of service. So on your 3rd year, you get 3 months additional pay. This is capped to 5 years. Consider this a Christmas bonus to your team.

At the end of the day, the company has to survive. It’s like sacrificing a few for the good of everyone. It’s just that for the last 12 months, the trend has been always pointing down instead of up. Hopefully, the day will come when a blog network announces a pay increase.

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Gawker Media alone saw at least 3 successive pay cuts of its bloggers since January. They started out at about $7.50 per 1,000 pageviews, then it was reduced to $6.50. Then, another cut brought it down to $5.00 per 1,000 pageviews.

Sites like the ValleyWag, Gizmodo, Consumerist and LifeHacker are under Gawker Media. It has recently pruned off lesser performing blogs like Wonkette, Gridskipper and Idolator.

On July 22, erstwhile Editor of Engadget Ryan Block announced his resignation from the network. On July 24, AOL was reportedly making budget cuts on some of its blogging properties. Several blogs were ordered to stop posting until August 1, 2008 so not to exceed budget allocation. Several blogs affected were The Unofficial Apple Blog (TUAW) and LifeHacker.

On July 25, b5media CEO Jeremy Wright wrote an open letter to the founders and bloggers of Know More Media offering them of a buy-out or something after hearing that the KMM network will be closing down in the following weeks.

These blog networks are the ones being emulated by dozens and probably hundreds of other smaller blog networks as well. Is it the slowing economy in the US? Is it the online ad spending space? Is it the internet advertising industry? Or is the blogging business model already failing?

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• If you’re interested in earning some extra money, you might want to check out the Asia Century Affiliate Network. They’re an Ortigas-based European company doing affiliate campaigns in the Philippines. The network pays a minimum of Php0.50 per ad click and up to Php100 per lead. They own the Halo-halo.ph brand and I’m sure you’ve seen those contest banner ads for some time now. You can register here to join.
• If you want to inject banner ads into your RSS feeds, you can try the Feed Footer Plugin (download). It allows you to put up to 10 random ads into your feeds. That’s one way to maximize your affiliate revenues from Asia Century.
• If you want to self-manage ads, you can try Google Ad Manager (though a little complicated and bulky). A more simple plugin for Wordpress is Max Banner Ads (download here) which is easier to use as it allows you to rotate multiple banners in one spot.
• If you are in the Tech, Entertainment, Auto, Business/Finance, Sports niche, you might want to checkout Direct Ad Sales from Performancing. They’ll represent your blog and find advertisers for you. You just need at least 100,000 pageviews per month to qualify.

And for those who thinks they have problems with their site/blog going down, check out “Down for Everyone or Just Me?”

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• Dominic Rivera is looking for several bloggers to write for his new blog project, Blogging Pinoy. Blogging Pinoy is a multi-authored blog that provides a view on being a Filipino and the Philippines in general. We are currently looking for bloggers who are Pinoys by heart and and can share just about ‘anything under the the Philippine sun.’ Anybody with good English writing skills and has a passion for blogging can email him at editor {at} bloggingpinoy.com.
• Ka Edong on the other hand is looking for a Student Research Assistant Blogger. Details and requirements can be found here or email edongskey {at} gmail.com for further information.

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Technorati Media (TM) will be serving huge flash and video ads across the network following the CPM model:

Every website can offer advertising, but how many can offer influence? Technorati is the hub of the Live Web. We’re the world’s gateway to the most current citizen media on the Web, including blogs, videos, vlogs, podcasts, photos, games, and much more. Our audience is comprised of global, savvy, and energetic users who love to know what’s popping on the Web, right now. That makes Technorati the place to reach the trendsetters and tastemakers who will maximize the value of your campaign.

Early advertisers on the ad network include Honda, Acura, Toyota, t-mobile, Adobe, HP, Sandisk, MSFT, Verizon, Sun, Sony, Visa, Nike, Scion, Chevrolet, Paramount, Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Best Buy.

Publishers (bloggers) can now sign-up with Technorati here. They will serve CPM ads which might have the ff. dimensions: 160×600, 120×600, 300×250, 300×600, 728×90, pop-ups, and video pre-rolls.

Application is open to personal blogs, professional blogs or social media sites. An email will be sent to you if you qualify for the network. Technorati has not disclosed how will the revenues be split between them and publishers.

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Let’s put the CPM into a mathematical formula so we can explain how it can be increased or manipulated to your advantage:

For those running on AdSense or other similar pay-per-click network, this is the formula to compute the revenue. Multiply Cost-Per-Click by Click-Thru-Rate and Pageviews.

Now, let’s go back to the formula of CPM:

In effect, to increase CPM, you need to increase Revenue while Pageviews remain constant. OR, decrease your total pageviews while making your revenue constant. Now, we’re in a pickle, right? We all want our pageviews and revenues up as well.

So, what do we really need to do? Here are some scenarios: You earn $500 every month for 100,000 pageviews. Your CPM is $5.

1) If that $500 a month is via direct ads, get more direct ads. The more flat rate ads you get for the same total pageviews, the higher your CPM.

2) You can also ask for a higher flat rate. In essence, you can directly affect your CPM by charging for higher CPM from your advertisers. In this case, instead of selling ads for $5 per CPM, tell you advertisers the rate is now $8. So, even if your pageviews is flat at 100,000, at the end of the month you get $800 instead of $500.

3) If you have a mix of ads (AdSense, TLA, Direct, Chitika), check which ad units have the lowest CPM. Say if the 336×280 AdSense unit at the bottom of your content only gives you $1 CPM, replace it with Chitika and see if it will get a higher CPM after a week or so. Even better, get a direct advertiser and tell them you can give them $2 CPM for that spot.

4) If you run pay-per-click ads, just optimize them to get higher CTR (see Formula #1 above).

5) If you have run-of-network ads as well as pay-per-click ads, put the PPC ads where it will get maximum exposure (thereby getting more clicks) and put the run-of-network ads where it will likely get less clicks (since your revenue from there is based on ad impressions not, ad clicks). The clicks you lost from run-of-network could have went into the pay-per-click to increase your CTR.

Increasing CPM level is tricky actually. Getting more ads is not always the solution, unless they are direct ads and will not affect performance of other ads.

If you can get more ads, get the ones which will not affect the other ads (esp., not competing with clicks-thrus). Explore other avenues that have not been monetized — RSS advertising, Link Advertising, WAP/Mobile Advertising, etc.

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There will be niche or industries that will draw more ad dollars than others. There will be highly converting demographics and cashless age groups. I recently learned that the lifestyle and business niche are more attractive than say technology; or a niche that targets women than men have higher ad value per eyeball (women are shoppers); or sites that attract visitors with age range of 18 and below converts very low (which is obvious since they don’t have credit cards).

Beyond that, there’s the topic on effective CPM (eCPM). The Inside AdSense blog recently published a series on “Diagnosing & Treating Revenue Fluctuations” which explains CTR, CPC and eCPM. However, for those who are running campaigns other than AdSense, the effective page CPM will be totally different.

In essence, effective page CPM is the total revenue derived for every 1,000 ad impressions of a blog or website. That constitutes all CPC ads (AdSense, Kontera, Chitika), all link ads (TLA, TLB), all direct ads, affiliate ads and all other ads that are dependent on your traffic.

Here’s a rough example:

I have 3 AdSense ad units per single post/page. Let’s say the top 468×60 ad unit has an eCPM of $1.50, the bottom square (336×280) has $1.00 and the link ad units at the sidebar gets $0.50 (your eCPM values are taken from the AdSense reports). My total page CPM for AdSense becomes ($1.50 + $1.00 + $0.50) $3.00, which means for every 1,000 page views, I am expected to get $3. The other 2 are ad sources from Kontera ($0.50 CPM) and Chitika ($0.125).

Now, I also have ads from TLA and they give me $200 per month in total. If I get 200,000 pageviews per month, that takes my CPM to (200k/$200) $1.00. Then, there are direct ads which goes around $800 per month so at 200,000 pageviews, that boils down to a $4 CPM. (Note: numbers do not reflect actual figures and are just rounded estimates.)

In order to get your effective page CPM, all you need to do is add all these CPM figures and the sum total is your overall eCPM. In our example, that should be ($4.00 + $0.50 + $0.125 + $1.00 + $4.00) $9.625. Meaning, if your monthly total pageviews is 200k, expect to net $1,925 (200k * 9.625/1k) per month.

Each ad placement (esp. AdSense, Adbrite, Chitika) will have their own respective CPMs (as pointed above) and their total for that page is the one we computed ($9.625). There will be fluctuations in your net revenues as explained by the series on Inside AdSense — mostly dependent on Cost-per-Cick and CTR values. Nevertheless, you now have a good idea on how to price your direct ads based on these existing CPMs.

Likewise, the next time you try out an ad campaign or test a new advertising model, you’re a little more knowledgeable to evaluate them. This is also one way to determine if switching from YPN to AdSense to Kontera to Chitika (or whichever combination) is more profitable on a per eyeball basis.

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• An ad program promising tons of dollars based on just your Alexa rankings is shooting itself on the foot. When you promise a hard number, you better deliver or all you’ll get are disappointed publishers at the end of the month.
• Automatic audio playback on a web page is so 1998. Reminds me of Geocities, Angelfire and Tripod. if you do that now, most visitors would immediately hit the close button of the browser (especially in office or school environments where it could draw a lot of attention).
• Even loyal readers using RSS feeds will get the same treatment once they try to leave a comment on your blog. And unless you can find a way for RSS readers to comment via their feed readers and not visit your page, I’m sure they’ll think twice next time they attempt to leave a comment on your blog. You’d be trading some usability and appeal for revenue (of course, many publishers also do that with PPC ads too).
• Not all visitors have sound cards in their PC or actually turn on the speakers when they read. if they did have the speakers on, they’d prolly be playing some music or listening to a podcast. I doubt advertisers will be very happy to pay for audio ads nobody can hear. It’s almost a dole out already.
• Other than number of audio ads played, there are no other measurable way of determining the ROI of the ads (no metrics for CTR or conversions). If advertisers cannot determine how successful an ad campaign is, they’re running blind and are lavishly paying for something they don’t know is actually working.

But that’s just my opinion. A couple of probloggers called me up and asked my opinion about it so I thought it was good I’d just write about it here. Nevertheless, you can still try them out and see how your readers react to it. There’s what I call good monetization and over-monetization — it’s up to you where to draw the line.

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Without divulging too much information, I compared the performance of the ads on my blog to four (4) other sites which I know carried the same advertising. Coincidentally, the other sites were news sites, a forum and a portal so we have a nice mix of online media to compare.

Of the top 5 referring sites, my blog was the 3rd highest referrer with 19.33% of the total traffic contributed by all five. The first two were the news sites that sent in 39.05% and 23.88%, the forum site sent only 11.56% and the portal 6.19%.

To think that one of the news sites had (at least) 192 times more number of monthly pageviews than this blog, placing 3rd in terms of referrals ain’t bad at all. Too bad, I couldn’t get any click-thru-rates.

What surprised me more were the results of the other metrics:

New Visitors

Site A – 80.5% new visitors
Site B – 69.5% new visitors
Site C – 64.5% new visitors
Site D – 78.0% new visitors
YugaTech – 45% new visitors

Depending on how you look at it, either this blog doesn’t refer more unique visitors or visitors keep clicking on the ads more than once (which is good right?).

Page Views per Visit

Site A – 2.17 pageviews
Site B – 2.06 pageviews
Site C – 1.78 pageviews
Site D – 2.64 pageviews
YugaTech – 6.12 pageviews

Average Time on Site

Site A – 2.24 minutes
Site B – 2:38 minutes
Site C – 1:35 minutes
Site D – 3:07 minutes
YugaTech – 10:17 minutes

It only means one thing — the blog drives more quality traffic because they actually use the referred site more. The figures above shows us 3 to 5 times more site usage by visitors coming from the blog.

Bounce Rates

Site A – 60%
Site B – 60%
Site C – 75%
Site D – 56%
YugaTech – 34%

Bounce rates indicate the percentage of people leaving the referred site right away. So the lower the bounce rates, the better since it means visitors are sticking to the site. Here’s two words to describe that — targeted traffic.

I do not know how much advertising money was spent on all the 5 sites (including this blog) but from the limited data I gathered, this blog only got around 2% of the total ad spendings (I’m pretty sure it’s lower).

If we just go by the raw number of visitors, spending 2% of your ad budget to get 19% of the traffic (and high quality traffic at that) is a great ROI.

The hard numbers above will show you that blog advertising has a much higher Return of Investment (ROI). So next time you’re thinking of doing online advertising, do consider blogs in your budget. =)

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Blog brokering (and this is my own made up definition) is the creative use of a blog to market products and services online to gain revenue. This is like affiliate marketing with the main difference that the blog brokering involves making sure that the sale pushes thru offline. This is not like CJ or Share-a-Sale where you just drive traffic to the affiliate network in the hopes that it will convert.

Let me share to you these blog broker stories.

I met these guys after they called up and said they needed help in moving their WordPress.com blogs into a hosted blog. We offered them our services at plogHost and set them up right away. After a few rounds of drinks at the Pier One in Mall of Asia, they told me how they got into blogging. Basically, they had a car blog and it was mostly all about second hand cars for sale.

And even if they only had just around a hundred visitors a day, they were able to rake in hundreds of thousands of pesos in monthly revenues from their blog.

How? Well, they get commissions between $200 to $1,000 per car sale. How’s that possible? Instead of putting AdSense or Chitika on their blogs, they prominently placed their names and contact numbers on their blogs. People call them up as far as Canada wanting to buy second-hand cars (the high-end models). They help broker the sale and once the deal pushes thru, they get their commissions. All that from a few phone calls here and there. No ad network whatsoever, just people network.

With an average of 2 to 5 sales a month for a fairly new blog, it’s already an impressive feat. And these bloggers don’t like AdSense because it drives the customers away. In fact, they like AdWords instead. Classic entrepreneurial feat truly worthy of being called six-figure bloggers.

In the Philippines, I only know of a few ones doing this purely online. I believe IslandRose has an affiliate program so if you want to try your hands in affiliate marketing, this coming Valentines day would be great time to practice those blogging and seo skills.

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In the last 10 months that I was on the FAN, I think I’ve only made just around $40 or so. Now that there aren’t any advertisers via FeedBurner and the RSS Feedvertising on TLA is too expensive, another player in that arena would be more than welcome.

Fortunately, Bidvertiser has announced this week its going into feed advertising as well. The ads will appear at the bottom of your feeds and will look like the screenshot below:

If you don’t have a Bidvertiser account, you can sign up here (aff). Add you blog and also apply for the feed ads separately.

You will be given a verification code which you need to publish in a blog post. Mine is BDV-645239-BDV.

Update: My main concern with Bidvertiser is that they will re-process your feeds and give you a new feed URL (mine’s http://feeds.bidvertiser.com/yugatech) which means you will need to get everybody re-subscribe to that one again. Big hole in their ad system IMO.

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Blog networks pay their bloggers with varying pay scales and salary modes:

• Know More Media used to pay its bloggers somewhere between $5 to $7.50 per post plus a $1 incentive when making comments on other blogs.
• Weblog Inc. used to pay their new bloggers a flat $500 a month for 120 posts. A $4 differential is subtracted for every post below the quota.
• b5media used to pay 40% of monthly revenue (after the first $100) to its bloggers. That’s $100 + 40% of (total blog rev – $100). They now changed that to $50 (for new bloggers) plus $1.50 for every 1,000 pageviews. This formula may have been tweaked a bit by now.
• Other networks for the revenue sharing — the tip of the lever ranges between 20% to 80%.

Last February, I wrote an entry “What’s the perfect formula for blogger payouts?” over at the Blog Herald. As a follow-up to that, I also wrote here “Going Pro: Network or Indie?” and discussed the advantages and disadvantages of problogging for a network vis-a-vis being totally independent. Also read “Problogging: Business or Career?“.

The leaked memorandum from Gawker Media explains the new pay scheme for the entire blog network and I’ll sum it up like this: Base Pay Rate or “Author Pageview Traffic x Pageview Rate“, whichever is higher.

It goes like this. A regular bloggers gets a base pay of $2,000 a month. However, he may get a higher salary at the end of the month if the total pageviews he got for the month, multiplied by the pageview rate, exceeds that amount. Let’s say the pageview rate for his assigned blog is $5 and his total pageviews for the month is 700,000. That nets him $3,500 ($5/1k pageviews x 700k pageviews).

What does this mean for the blog and the blogger?

• This would encourage bloggers to write better and more interesting blog posts. Engadget churns out 24 posts a day and Gizmodo only has 12 posts/day. Gawker wants more of quality over quantity so Gizmodo might actually have lesser, but more interesting, posts per day.
• Bloggers who are already veterans on the blog will get more as their archives will continue to pull in more pageviews for them. Newer ones will have to do some catching up. It will also be harder for a veteran blogger to leave as his archives are still raking in some dough.
• Expect more scoops, exclusives, top 10 lists, and link baits to Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon.
• For gadget blogs, expect more posts about commercially popular topics – Apple, iPods, iPhones. Oops, same company.
• Bloggers will link more to their previous posts in order to push more pageviews in the archives.
• As Nick Denton would have it, expect more high quality posts. No more factory-style entries, at least for the Gawker Media network.

But Denton might have overlooks a valuable segment of his network’s readership. It’s the hundreds of thousands of RSS subscribers who are loyal to the blog and who are actually the ones who consist of the baseline readers. Should they not count as a bonus to the bloggers? Well, unless you put out partial feeds (as opposed to full feeds) in order to romp up the pageviews, they don’t count at all.

It’s by no means a perfect formula. Nevertheless, I still think this salary scheme is still a good move. No more posting quotas. No more half baked posts. No more keyword-rich titles, two pictures and a caption post. Just quality content. Hopefully.

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Does your blog fit the following description?

- 50k+ pageviews/month (via Google Analytics) from the United States, Germany or France

- well written blog in English or German

What CW offer you in return:

- We’ll integrate your site into the existing network of 135+ blogs.

- We plug you into the group of editors and give you help from the team on how to build your site further

- Pitch your site to our audience and advertisers

- We pay per article (around $7 per post) or depending on your blog, could be more

- A pageview bonus of $1 per 1,000 page views (as reported in Google Analytics).

- Fully redundant hosting, nice layout and structure of your blog plus some great extras like email newsletters and ratings.

- We pay for all marketing and guest bloggers if you wish to bring them on

The lease term is for a minimum of 36 months but could extend. You will then regain full ownership after that and it’s up to you if you sell it or take it back.

I have to say this is a really nice and tempting offer. If you post 100 entries a month and getting 50k pageviews, you could be earning $750 from them. And no expenses from your end. Haven’t seen any blog network that can match that. Tempting huh?

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