During a recent interview with Podtech's Maryam Scoble, Mary Jo Foley revealed that ZDNet has a payment scheme in place that rewards its bloggers based on the number of clicks their posts get. Foley recently left Ziff Davis to become a free agent. Her primary gig involves writing a well-read blog on Microsoft for ZDNet, which CNET owns. (Microsoft is an Edelman client.)
Foley says she likes the pay-for-performance model because "It rewards people... who do a lot of work to make sure that their blogs are popular, which is what I do." Foley's writing has long been a must-read for keeping up with all things Microsoft.
ZDNet's pay-for-performance blogging system raises some interesting questions. For example, will a blogger favor writing a sensational post that is likely to get more clicks over one that perhaps is less sexy and is based on, say, a press release? News value and clicks often go together, but as we've seen on collaborative sites like digg, sensationalist rumors sometimes are more popular.
Many of the ZDNet blogs are written by veteran journalists turned bloggers. So, I don't anticipate that the performance based compensation changes their ethics one iota. Bloggers such as Foley, Dan Farber and David Berlind have been around a long time and they are highly ethical. They have a nose for news. And news is often what gets clicks. The newer voices on the site may have a taller trust hurdle to climb given this revelation.
Still, the fact that ZDNet bloggers are compensated based on traffic raises an eyebrow for me. If you look at their list of the most popular posts, so far there's nothing out of the ordinary. However, this system may make it harder for smaller players to get coverage on ZDNet. One hopes they have a set of standards in place that distributes the editorial beyond to the big brands, such as Apple.
ZDNet would be wise to help shed some more transparency into this test to ensure that they are completely divorced from efforts like PayPerPost.
