There was a small story we found on a website called ‘bigleadsports’ the other day that really got us thinking. According to a source at leading stateside publication, USA Today, they’re considering a move whereby they pay their writers annual bonuses dependant on how many page views their stories get.
Of course, search engine optimisation is all about helping to increase search visibility, but we feel this is one of the greyest areas we’ve ever come across, both when it comes to content optimisation and in a journalistic sense. After all, how are journalists supposed to be impartial when they’ve got one eye on their page views and other statistics to generate vital revenue?
The journalist with experience should have no problems at all, using their experience and contacts to break a scoop before anybody else and attract massive volumes of traffic. But that’s incredibly difficult for one person to do alone on a daily basis. What happens to the quality of their work when they realise that most traffic-drivers are celebrity gossip, photos of stars at their worst and top five lists?
Because of falls in advertising revenue, publishers are still making the transition online and are in direct competition with other websites. Their content simply has to succeed from a popularity perspective to help with revenue, but is it worth it if that affects the quality of the overall publication? There are so many writers stranded on an island at the moment because of the economic downturn, publications as large as USA Today are more than able to cherry-pick people to create content according to whatever strategy they decide.
If they do decide this is the way forward, they’ll have to be incredibly careful and create a balance that provides their users with fascinating content whilst also giving their writers assurances that they won’t be missing out.
