The most recent piece of web finance news is that Gawkers Media, the company behind Gizmodo and Lifehacker is changing the way they pay their blogger. Instead of compensation being tied to the quantity of posts, it will be tied to readership.

The short version. The more pageviews an article gets, the more money the blogger will be paid.

Traffic vs. Quality

Nick Denton (owner of Gawker’s) hopes that this will increase the overall quality of his blogs by encouraging writers to produce good, focused content instead of just slinging together throw away pieces to get a quick buck. This sounds great, except it ignores the fact that good content and “popular” content is rarely the same thing.

By tying compensation to pageviews, Gawker’s properties will see more traffic. If I knew that every eyeball who sees one of my posts meant a salary bump, I would certainly do a lot more legwork to market by content. At the end of the day, it’s much easier to squeeze a few more pageviews out of an article than to write a better article.

This move, therefore, will be great for Gawker’s ad sales team. Their inventory should shoot up in the coming months.

Unfortunately, it will probably do little to nothing to improve the quality of the publications themselves.

The question becomes whether “quality” should be the be all and end all for a media company. Also, what is the best way to measure “quality.” Both of these answers depend on how that company sees itself.

If your biggest concern is spreading a message, then quality is complex. In that case, the only coherent way to measure it is the way that traditional media has always vetted itself — editorial intervention. The line that separates quality from fluff is so fine that using a single metric to describe it is just asking for trouble.

On the other hand, if your biggest concern is advertising inventory then quality is exactly what Nick describes. It’s whatever gets the most people to view your content. It’s whatever speaks to users the most and whatever speaks to the most users.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Will this move change Gawkers? Not hardly, but it does raise the question — how do we in the blogosphere properly define content quality?

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