Weblogs Inc., pay rates revealed by disgruntled potential recruit
August 26, 2005 | By Duncan | Filed Under General
A potential recruit to the new Weblogs Inc., food blog Slashfood has posted a full copy of a contract she was offered to write for the site on a competing food blog “Food Blog ’scool” after “recruiters” for the Jason Calacanis managed company (I believe Deidre Woollard) refused to discuss parts of the contract with her that precluded her from writing at other sites.
Kate Hopkins writes on the contract:
“[the] money wasn’t the reason I didn’t sign with Weblogs. The issues I had dealt with section 10 (Covenant Not to Compete) combined with section 11 (Acknowledgements). The contract could be easily interpretted that I could not involve myself with any other food and travel publications (not just web sites) until 6 months after we parted company. I felt very unomfortable with that…Add to that that posts on their sites means less time I can put on my own. I didn’t like that idea at all. So I passed on their offer.”
The contract, since removed from the site, reveals a lot of things previously not in the public sphere (although I’d note rumoured for a long time) such as pay rates and conditions.
According to the contract, writers for Slashfood are paid $500 USD per month and are expected to write “125 monthly blog posts, along with monitoring of comments, responding to readers in comments, and deleting offensive comments. Posts under the goal of 125 will be pro-rated at $4.00 per post”
The site also reveals Weblogs Inc’s recruiting tactics that should please bloggers who aren’t writing for the network but want to: Weblogs Inc “recruiters” email blogs currently blogging on topics that they’re looking to start up a blog on and ask them if they know anyone who might be interested in writing on the topic.
Update: I’ve posted this in response to some of the reaction on this one:
Time for a long cold shower on blogging pay rates
(thanks to Patrick Grote for the tip/ via Metafilter)
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$4 per post? I had been paid $5 for a post before. I thought Weblogs Inc should pay more than it!
[…] to discuss parts of the contract with her that precluded her from writing at other sites. Weblogs Inc., pay rates revealed by disgruntled […]
looks like a lame contract to me. the pay is not that great too
That seems to be the going rate. Nick Denton’s Gawker Media is reported to pay bloggers $2000 per month for writing 12 posts a day. That works out around $5 per post for 460 odd posts per month. I know one potential applicant who is coming from a food blog which is a family business. The restrictions are going to cut out a lot of knowledgable writers.
part of the pay is ‘being seen’.
I would just like to say that the food blog scool is not a ‘competing blog’. The scool exists to assist food and wine bloggers in all aspects of blogging and writing. It does not, unlike slashfood, publish posts regarding the actual food and drink. Just thought I should make that clear ;-)
I write on both by the way and maintian my own wine/food blog - spittoon.biz
i had heard nick was paying 4k-6k (that includes bonus), so i think that works out to $10-15 per post, at least for lead editors. but this was probably for contributors- i’m not sure what’s the going rate for that.
“Being seen” is good, but the non-compete clause, which stipulates that the author may not write for any competing publication (including offline), meaning anything about the same topic, for six-months after the termination of the contract means that most of the momentum gained by name recognition would be lost.
Holy crap, I pay Kevin more than that per post over at my gadgets blog. I’d pay him more if I could, considering the quality of his writing.
Just to add some perspective to this pay rate discussion, Adrants reported recently that Weblogs, Inc. will pull in a million dollars in Google Adsense revenue this year.
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Was verdienen (unselbständige) Blogger in den USA
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Damn - that’s sweatshop rates. We get much more than that for the blog entries we do.
$4 is pathetic, but food is not a topic that can be easily monetized. If someone pays me this money for personal finance topics, I’ll be laughing.
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Weblogs Inc Pays $4 per Post to Bloggers
Duncan has an interesting post that sheds some light on t […]
$4 per post ?
Why is anybody willing to work for Weblogsinc.
Better start your own blog, show Google ads and you will eary much much more.
Plus, you aren’t working for anyone.
Does the average blogger earn over $500 a month from their blog? Probably not. And if they do, the time and effort it takes to maintain that might make writing for WIN very attactive. I don’t think $4.00 per post is as bad as everyone is making it out to be.
The average blogger doesn’t earn close to $500 a month from their blog. They also probably put a lot more hours into their blogging than would be required to make 4 posts a day per this contract.
Plus as someone else mentioned, Food is not a topic like gadgets which brings high adsense revenue.
Not only that but it’s a new blog so the traffic must be low (by Weblogs Inc. standards) which will also reduce revenue.
I would suggest that people don’t assume the contract is the same for all positions in all the Weblogs Inc. blogs.
At $4 a post, earning from $500 - $1000 a month, one can live very well in some countries. Argentina is one example, where university professors earn only $300 a month. There are a lot of highly educated people in places like Argentina who know English that would glady work for these wages. Perhaps there is an untapped market for writers that some blog network should explore. Hey, one can probably get people to blog in both English and Spanish for the same price.
[…] e clauses in the contract that may not be acceptable to other writers. The good thing is, nothing in the contract is “hidden.” […]
I agree with Jeff… people here (in the Philippines) would go for it.
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I really have to say that this is really a lot of work for those guys to do for four dollars per. @ $500 per mo. can they even eat let alone get some kind of pay day? Lets up the price for these people and pay them what their worth.
It really is wrong when a person slaves over their laptop yielding out great information and doesn’t even get compensated properly for it while the recipient gets all the margins and benefits.
Shame Shame,
D.
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Even though it is low for American standard, it’s not that bad. I mean, food is not easy to monetize and there are lots of people that willing to blog for $4 per post. People in India perhaps? Heck, people from my country would do that too.
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I don’t understand. Somebody pay money for you for writing blogs like in on this site?
I recently posted a link to a story about Weblog Inc bringing in $1 Mil per year in AdSense revenue. It was a popular story circulated by many other bloggers too because people love to hear about people making money online especially bloggers making m…
I really have to say that this is really a lot of work for those guys to do for four dollars per. @ $500 per mo. can they even eat let alone get some kind of pay day? Lets up the price for these people and pay them what their worth.
It really is wrong when a person slaves over their laptop yielding out great information and doesn’t even get compensated properly for it while the recipient gets all the margins and benefits.
Shame Shame,
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