I’ve been yakking (here and here) about how bloggers are frequently offered “exposure” instead of money for their work. What “exposure” really means, of course, is “We could help you become famous.” Hard for the average human to resist. Very hard. But exposure doesn’t buy the groceries (at least not in the immediate). So we need to figure out a way to get cash into bloggers’ pockets, especially if the sites they’re blogging for can’t or won’t pay them.

Another part of the equation is the readers, who are very free with their likes (easy to be generous when it costs you nothing), but likes don’t pay the rent any more than exposure does.

Speaking of readers, permit me to draw your attention to Flattr, which I affectionately refer to as “likes with balls.” It’s a revolutionary idea, though most people don’t seem to have grasped that just yet. (Or maybe they have, and they’re just selfish and lazy. Or maybe they’ve lost their jobs and homes and are living in their vans and eating uncooked Top Ramens every day. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.)

With Flattr, content creators add buttons to their sites and/or individual posts (there’s one at the bottom of this post). When you, the reader, click a Flattr button, the creator of the content you just enjoyed gets cash. Real money!

Where does this money come from, you ask? Well, initially, you put it into an account. Then you tell Flattr how much of it you want to spend each month. If you’ve specified a budget of €3 a month, and you Flattr one blog in a month, that blogger gets €3 (minus a minuscule fee). If you Flattr two blogs, those two bloggers get €1.50 each. Get it? If you Flattr nothing, your money goes to charity.

If you put Flattr buttons on your own site(s), then, theoretically, your account could just be filled up with money from Flattrs others have given you, and you wouldn’t have to put more money in. You could even withdraw extra money and buy ramen with it.

Flattr can only work if enough people are doing it, of course. It’s caught on in Germany, I hear.

So what does Flattr have to do with group blogs that don’t pay their bloggers (like The Huffington Post)?

Well, Flattr is in a good position to do something to change the situation. It would be super cool if Flattr could develop a system whereby Flattrs on individual posts on a group blog directed the payment to the specific bloggers’ accounts rather than to the main site. (Chances are sites would want to share Flattr revenue. This could be an option, and the site owners could be allowed to configure the split themselves.)

[Aug. 8: Vincent saw a tweet go by that said the Flattr WordPress plugin supports multiple users. Great minds, right?]

You can go to the Flattr site and look for people who are using Flattr (keyword search). I discovered Mimi and Eunice (the cartoon above) on the Flattr blog today. I found a poet I really like searching Flattr for “prose poetry” a few months ago.

What exposure really gets you

I was whining to a (non-blogger) friend and colleague about blogsploitation the other day, and she asked me if what I had gained from blogging for free had been worth it. I had to admit that it had. It’s opened a lot of doors. I’ve had press passes to pricey events I couldn’t have attended otherwise. These events provided material about which I wrote and for which I (sometimes) got paid, and lots of contacts. It’s helped me put together a significant professional network here in Paris and online, which has led in turn to more paid work. Having content on major blogs that I could point people to has gotten me some very interesting and lucrative projects. So maybe the exposure myth is not all myth.

In fact, in between the first and second of my blogsploitation posts, another friend and colleague, who was about to be hired as a blog editor, asked me if I’d be interested in blogging for her. The site? HuffPo.

I have to confess I’ll probably do it. I’m only human. And you never know what it could lead to…

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large — I contain multitudes. -Walt Whitman

I've been yakking (here and here) about how bloggers are frequently offered "exposure" instead of money for their work. What "exposure" really means, of course, is "We could help you become famous." Hard for the average human to resist. Very hard. But exposure doesn't buy the groceries (at least not in the immediate). So we need to figure out a way to get cash into bloggers' pockets, especially if the sites they're blogging for can't or won't pay them. Another part of the equation is the readers, who are very free with their likes (easy to be generous when it costs you nothing), but likes don't pay the rent any more than exposure does. Speaking of readers, permit me to draw your attention to Flattr, which I affectionately refer to as "likes with balls." It's a revolutionary idea, though most people don't seem to have grasped that just yet. (Or maybe they have, and they're just selfish and lazy. Or maybe they've lost their jobs and homes and are living in their vans and eating uncooked Top Ramen

There was a lovely young couple living upstairs for the first few years I was here, and by lovely I mean when they walked by you could only stand there gaping in wonder at their sheer splendor (especially in combination). One Brazilian and the other Welsh, they had both undoubtedly been models at some point.

My neighbors were high-fashion photographers at the beginning of their careers, with a full studio set up in their apartment (probably illegally), and there were always gorgeous, exotic six-foot-tall stick girls knocking on our door. Vincent would answer and smile and point to the sky to indicate they were one floor short (no names or numbers on our apartment doors in typically efficient French fashion).

One day the Perfections and I were chatting on the sidewalk and they told me that fashion magazines, even the big ones, didn’t want to pay them for their work, claiming the exposure they’d get and the portfolio they were building should be adequate compensation. However, landlords don’t take payment in magazine spreads any more than they do in blog posts, so the Lovelies were forced to move out of this neighborhood, all the way to the outskirts of Paris. Shame.

Evidently graphic designers have the same problem. Designer Ben Crick created a manifesto for designers…

There exists an unfortunate cultural history of exploitation in Visual Communication, and indeed the arts in general. Designers, especially young designers, are expected to work for little or no money, either to prove themselves, gain exposure, or provide spec work.

…and a charming set of posters to illustrate its four main points:

Read the rest of the manifesto and see the other posters…

In a discussion I had with a writer friend the other day on the topic of blogsploitation, I tried to pin down for her why some people (like me) have a problem with being asked to blog for free and maybe why others don’t, and why many websites don’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with not paying their bloggers.

I think part of the problem is the concept of “blogger.” The general consensus (among the kind of people who think Amazon and Facebook are the Internet) seems to be that bloggers are ordinary people — pilots, housewives, nurses, mechanics — who just decided to start writing about whatever popped into their heads. People tend to place blogging in the hobby rather than the profession category, and they write off bloggers and blogs as amateurish and not to be taken seriously. I think traditional media and big online media capitalize on this perception to keep bloggers in a journalistic underclass.

At a certain point, though, if a blogger has been writing enough, and well enough, to have some significant content on the Web to point to, whether or not he or she’s ever been paid for any of it, that blogger should be taken seriously as a writer or a journalist (depending on what he/she blogs about and how).

Blogging is essentially self-directed OJT for writing and/or journalism.

Another part of the problem is related to what a blogger’s profession is in the first place. While a nurse might be excited to blog for a large platform for free (at least at first), a writer might be more indignant about being expected to do so. In my case, I was getting paid to do tech writing, translation and many other kinds of writing for years before I started blogging, so it irks me to write for free unless it’s for a good cause, or to help a friend, or to share something I’m passionate about.

Ideally, if you end up writing for free for a website, there should be a time limit to it. Give ‘em a free sample of the milk, but not a lifetime supply, ya know? Companies should have the courtesy to define trial periods after which they agree to pay for the content you’re producing, vest you in the company, or offer some other arrangement.

For example, after you’ve written X posts per month for X months or years, you’ll be paid X per post (or maybe X to start, with increases down the line), or own X shares of the company.

If your writing’s no good, or you’re flaky, or not a good fit, the company should send you on your merry way before the trial period ends, which can only improve the quality of their site’s content. In fact, if it’s true that bloggers don’t draw that much traffic to HuffPo, maybe it’s because HuffPo doesn’t actively separate the wheat from the chaff. I stopped reading it about three years ago, when I saw a celebrity gossip blog post about Tom Cruise…

If you are good, and your content resonates with the site’s audience, it’s easy to quantify your value based on the number of comments you get (and “Likes” and tweets) as well as your stats. The site you write for is tracking stats, and should tell you your “popularity” ranking relative to other bloggers, or the ranking of your posts, and should share your stats with you (number of views, external links to your posts, etc.), so you can judge just how much “exposure” you’re actually getting for your efforts. If it’s clear your content is popular, the company using you should recognize and reward your contribution in some way.

It’s just a question of doing the right thing.

I may continue this discussion. Might talk about the open source philosophy (Vincent thinks I should), intellectual property, Flattr, faux celebrity, and the reality of the situation, which is that most of us do write for free, despite everything I’ve said. Or I might not. We’ll see.

**********************

*Shit my pre-Sexual Revolution mom said.

Read the first post on this topic, Give me equity or give me a break.

There was a lovely young couple living upstairs for the first few years I was here, and by lovely I mean when they walked by you could only stand there gaping in wonder at their sheer splendor (especially in combination). One Brazilian and the other Welsh, they had both undoubtedly been models at some point. My neighbors were high-fashion photographers at the beginning of their careers, with a full studio set up in their apartment (probably illegally), and there were always gorgeous, exotic six-foot-tall stick girls knocking on our door. Vincent would answer and smile and point to the sky to indicate they were one floor short (no names or numbers on our apartment doors in typically efficient French fashion). One day the Perfections and I were chatting on the sidewalk and they told me that fashion magazines, even the big ones, didn't want to pay them for their work, claiming the exposure they'd get and the portfolio they were building should be adequate compensation. However, landlords don't take payment

The other day I see a tweet from this chick blog with a spunky name saying they’re looking for writers “to join [their] editorial team.” Sounded serious. I checked it out.

The blog looks professional (but there’s no guarantee it is, given the plethora of polished prefab blog themes out there). It wants to be edgy and aims to cover a wide variety of topics from high tech to high art to high fashion. So far, so good. The writing is fair in terms of style and personality. I get the impression that the owner has been seduced by the quantity-over-quality siren, which is not uncommon among group blogs (a response to the world’s shrinking attention span and voracious appetite for bread and circuses). In the end, I conclude that this blog is neither an unscented pantyliner of a blog, nor a communal blogorrhea receptacle, so I send a message indicating interest. A few days later, I get a response asking me to fill out an online application form and a “by the way, our writers are volunteers.”

I love to volunteer! It does wonders for the soul. Whenever my single friends are moaning and groaning about how they can’t meet anybody decent, I tell them to volunteer, that they’re sure to meet generous people who care about the same things they do. I was a volunteer “buddy” to PWAs for AIDS Services of Austin in 1990, shortly after I lost my best friend to AIDS. I did some graphic design and other work as a volunteer for an educational nonprofit in Paris when I first got here. I’ve done pro bono translation for Kiva to help get micro-loans to people in francophone Africa. And so on.

But somehow, dear blog owners who keep expecting to use my work for free, I am not inspired to volunteer to help you build a business! Do you see the difference between your blog and the examples above? And the fame and fortune blogs great and small dangle before people like me (“exposure” and maybe a few pennies of shared ad revenues here and there) just don’t cut the mustard.

The very least you can do is give me a piece of the pie.

What blog owners can learn from startups

I’ve spent the last few years immersed in and blogging about the Internet startup scene, and there is one thing everybody in that world knows: you may have an idea for a startup, but without a developer your idea is worth jack shit. And if you can’t pay your developer, you damn well better offer him equity.

So you have an idea for a group blog! Good for you. Who’s going to fill its pages? Writers. It’s the writers who are going to furnish the erudition and gravitas, or humor and hipness, or sexiness, or snarkiness, or whatever magic ingredients you need. And if you’re serious and have a clear vision for your blog, you’ll choose your writers carefully. (A startup founder doesn’t want just any hack building his/her platform.)

But if you let anyone who’ll work for free fill your blog with his blather, you’re screwing yourself right off the bat. You’ll get crap writing and a crap audience and crap advertisers (if any). Eventually, your dream of creating something special will die because your blog won’t be in the least bit exceptional because your content isn’t because your writers aren’t.

You don’t (usually*) get something for nothing.

I’m pretty sure Michael Arrington was the first person who decided to call his group blog, TechCrunch, a startup. He certainly got what you, dear blog owner, are likely hoping for when AOL recently bought TechCrunch for millions. But though he considered TechCrunch a startup, something tells me he wasn’t doling out chunks of it to his bloggers. Based on my experience, I venture most of them weren’t even getting paid.

So vest me, baby

I know what it’s like to try to launch an online company without a lot of cash. You can’t afford to hire anybody, even part time. So if you can’t pay me to write for your young group blog with a strong vision and lots of potential, then offer me a piece of it.

I know, I know, you aren’t even a real company yet because then you’d have taxes and fees and all manner of hassles to deal with. That’s OK. An agreement in writing will do.

If you offer me equity, I’ll look at what you’re all about to see if what you’re doing turns me on. I’ll check out the competition. I’ll scrutinize the other members of the team to see if they’re strong or weak links. And then I’ll decide if your blog is worth the investment of my time and effort. If I go for it, I’ll be excited and motivated, and it’ll show in my work. I’ll be dedicated and I’ll evangelize for you. You’ll be able to count on me to get you that post when I’m sick.

Good and evil

I’d like to thank GigaOm, a great big tech blog, and Galavanting, a tiny startup (when I first wrote for them) for having the decency to pay me for my work.

As for the rest: shame on you.

****************

*The Huffington Post doesn’t pay its bloggers and the content sucks (for the most part), but that didn’t stop it from recently surpassing the NYT in page views or being bought by AOL for over $300M. The latter prompted the legion of HuffPo bloggers to start raising Cain about getting nothing out of the deal, to which HuffPo essentially said “bloggers don’t do that much for our traffic anyway” and “let them go on strike, there are plenty of people who’d be happy to replace them.”

The HuffPo bloggers’ class action suit probably won’t get them anywhere, in part because there was no contract and in part because there’s no solidarity: half the bloggers are OK with working for free for a multi-million dollar company.

I’m not.

****************

The Newspaper Guild: Communications Workers of America.

The other day I see a tweet from this chick blog with a spunky name saying they're looking for writers "to join [their] editorial team." Sounded serious. I checked it out. The blog looks professional (but there's no guarantee it is, given the plethora of polished prefab blog themes out there). It wants to be edgy and aims to cover a wide variety of topics from high tech to high art to high fashion. So far, so good. The writing is fair in terms of style and personality. I get the impression that the owner has been seduced by the quantity-over-quality siren, which is not uncommon among group blogs (a response to the world's shrinking attention span and voracious appetite for bread and circuses). In the end, I conclude that this blog is neither an unscented pantyliner of a blog, nor a communal blogorrhea receptacle, so I send a message indicating interest. A few days later, I get a response asking me to fill out an online application form and a "by the way, our writers are volunteers." I love to volun