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Comment by JacobJans | Hacker News Reader

This comment is wrong on many levels.

1. The RPM you posted is significantly off – at least according to the websites I operate.

2. The web is not "one and done." Successful websites exist because they have loyal readership that keeps coming back.

3. Say a writer spends 4 hours creating an article, and they're paid $100 for that article. (A pretty abysmal amount.) They would need 30k readers to pay 1/3 of a cent in order to break even just on the cost of the article. That is absolutely insane and impossible for most articles. Heck, even if the article cost just $5, they'd need 1,500 pageviews. This is outside of the realm of reality, and simply impossible for the vast majority of websites. If your numbers were the general rules, we'd be mostly reading $1 articles written in 3rd world countries, were people can live on $5 a day.

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Jacob, you are conflating a couple of things in my comment.

So there is "RPM" for a web site and there is RPM for a web page. No doubt you run analytics on your site to track who goes to which pages and which pages generate the most advertising revenue. In my experience the "landing" page gets a lot of traffic, the "spokes" pages (typically branches to a bunch of related content) come next, and then there are the articles, some of which get a lot of traffic and some which get only a few page views a day/week. You also probably track dwell time so that you can recognize people who land on the page, probably from a Search engine result, and then "bounce" off because it wasn't what they wanted. Or stay and read. Or the unicorn of the bunch, stay, read, and then read a bunch of other pages.

I've also been an author in both the print and web world, my columns on JavaWorld continue to get page views and I continue to get various folks popping over to my poorly maintained web site to grab a copy of the sources. While I'm sure there are probably people who have read my BYTE and Dr. Dobbs articles that is harder to track long term.

The point being that I'm pretty familiar with the space and if you're looking for median values for revenue for a given article, its "large" and it became small enough to result in folks like Dr. Dobbs dropping out entirely. Web page revenue, which generally represents one article for a journalist, is "good" if it has $3 RPMs and that is super great if it is getting a lot of traffic.

Number 2, the web is often times "one and done" for articles, not web sites but web articles. So if you're a journalist or an author that has a loyal following, folks will come back and read new articles that appear, but they don't generally read the same article again and again.[1] Given that you're running a site, and no doubt you have analytics on that site, how many times does the same person come back to an article? What is the 25th, 50th, and 99th percentiles? If you're 99th percentile breaks 1.15 I'm going to be super impressed.

So lets unpack #3, the money shot (no pun intended)

Lets start with your writer who was paid $100 to create an article[2]. Setting aside the unreality of someone doing their best work in 4 hours, you have to consider how information gets "value" to consumers, there really is only a few ways, it's "rare" (which means few alternate sources), it's "timely" (which means alternate sources don't have it yet), or it's "enriched" (which means the information contributes to a bigger understanding). So how much value is your author creating here? Do they have the inside scoop on a big deal? Or maybe they are the first with the complete picture, or maybe they have been following a topic for years and can put it all in perspective for people just coming into contact with this thing or concept. That is what creates value in the piece. If they are paraphrasing an AP press release? (or any press release for that matter), or adding a bit of irrelevant trivia to a bigger story, or regurgitating something which has been covered by 16 other authors already in different ways, there is very little in the way of "value" in that writing.

Information can demand a price commensurate with its value. While people complain that the NYTimes is a "paywall" they have reached 1M digital subscribers today. Those are people who have paid them money because they expect the value of the information they will get out of the NYTimes will be high relative to the price.

So let us look a bit critically at your numbers. "They would need 30k readers to pay 1/3 of a cent in order to break even just on the cost of the article. That is absolutely insane and impossible for most articles."

Fred Langa, who was the Editor-in-Chief at BYTE advised me as follows when I wrote for him, "Chuck, the idea article for us would interest all our readers, but that only rarely happens, you should shoot for being interesting to 1/2 to 3/4ths of the readership." Their subscription base was a couple of million readers, so that was targeting 1.5M people.

There are over a billion people who use the Web today, a large fraction get most of their information from it. If you're unable to get 30K page views for an article, then I would suggest that either the information it contained was not valuable, or that nobody knew of its existence.

The second thing working in your favor today is that the Web never forgets. If you want to read an article of mine in BYTE you have either find a reprint or find some kind soul who has scanned it into the web. But if it was online to begin with (like my Javaworld columns) then people find them again and again and again. Some of those have over 5 million page views. And that is over 20 years. So you write something today, and then it can live forever for pennies a day (a Digital Ocean web server to serve it up is $5/month which can be amortized over all the things you are keeping alive on the web).

If you're going to write on the web to make money, make it something worthwhile to a million people. Not three or four thousand. If you are just passionate about something feel free to spend all your time writing about it, that is its own reward and any remuneration is just bonus.

[1] The exception for fan fiction is noted.

[2] I don't think that would be a particularly good investment in time unless someone was just passionate about what they are writing about.

> If you're going to write on the web to make money, make it something worthwhile to a million people. Not three or four thousand. If you are just passionate about something feel free to spend all your time writing about it, that is its own reward and any remuneration is just bonus.

Wouldn't that just create more content that appeals to the least common denominator? Why would you want to focus the efforts of a professional writer toward creating that?

A million people out of a population of 1.5 billion is 0.07% of the web population. In most places that is a very select group and not the common denominator. Something that is some times missed is just how big a group you can reach with the web. Finding all of them can be a challenge but such groups tend to self organize around seeds.

There is economic value in an article which acts as a seed to attract an audience. This value may not be fully reflected as a multiple of inbound page views, and may need to incorporate interactions among the self-organized audience and content that is "related" to the original article.

"The web is not 'one and done.' "

You misunderstand what was written. ChuckMcM was suggesting that most people only read an article once. Even if they frequently go back to the same website, they don't re-read articles that they've read from 5 years ago. That makes the economics different than buying a book or a magazine. People do save magazines. My dad saved all issues of Scientific American from 1949 to 2009, and when I was a kid I would read through old issues to get a sense of how science developed during the decades before I was born. Nobody does that with web articles. So the economics are different. You can become the owner of a magazine, but trying to claim ownership of a digital article is a subject of endless debates regarding copyright law.

As ChuckMcM said, the web is 99.999% "one and done". People read articles once and never go back. They don't want to pay for things, the way they might pay for things where they are actually gaining something on a permanent basis.

> You misunderstand what was written.

Actually, I have a fundamentally different perspective.

> They don't want to pay for things, the way they might pay for things where they are actually gaining something on a permanent basis.

The goal of good writing is, in part, to permanently change the reader. Even if they read it once. This is true of literary content, educational content, news content, and even entertainment.

But more than that, what good content does is establish a relationship that can be cultivated. Even if you read an article just once, it can become part of the greater relationship that serves a larger purpose. (Perhaps, educational, building towards expertise in a certain knowledge area. Or, perhaps, entertainment, where the reader can reliably expect a change in their emotional state.)

> My dad saved all issues of Scientific American from 1949 to 2009

Many of my subscribers save all of the emails I send them. How is that different?

> Nobody does that with web articles.

Have you never referred back to the same web resource? How many times have you viewed this discussion? Do you wonder why there is a "bookmarks" menu button on your browser? Have you ever emailed an article to yourself to read it later, or printed it out? These are all common behaviors.

Someone regularly comments on my Facebook article posts, saying "bookmarking", just so they can reference it later.

Ironically, I often email the same article to the same audience multiple times, and the readership rate remains high.

Yes, the web is full of low-quality content that degrades the reader, the writer, and the entire culture of the internet. Maybe that content earns 1/3rd of a cent per view -- and deserves it. But is that really what we want to be supporting?

Both ChuckMcM and I were remarking on how people actually use the Web, whereas when you write:

"But is that really what we want to be supporting?"

you are instead remarking about how things should be. Maybe there is some alternate universe where utopia has been established and people pay a lot of money to support good content. However, I would suggest that you read Clay Shirky's remarks on the death of print:

"When you have an audience mostly made up of nostalgists, there’s not much market demand for unvarnished truth. This kind of boosterism wouldn’t matter so much if it were only reaching weepy journos whose careers started in the Reagan administration. But the toxic runoff from CJR and Nieman’s form of unpaid PR is poisoning the minds of 19-year-olds."

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2014/06/nostalgia-and-newspaper...

There was a long time, during the 1990s and early 00s, when it seemed it might be possible for newspapers to gain revenue by publishing on the web, but we now know that is impossible.

See also "This is why the news media is dying: global online ad revenue is $40 billion"

Combine that with “Google Controls 44 Percent Of Global Online Advertising“.

That leaves at most $25 billion for every content site in the world. Pathetic. Consider that television advertising in the USA is $160 billion a year.

http://www.smashcompany.com/business/this-is-why-the-news-me...

Again, my comments are more about how people actually use the web, rather than how they should use the web.

> Again, my comments are more about how people actually use the web, rather than how they should use the web.

Which is why I addressed each of your points, before adding a new point.

> whereas when you write: "But is that really what we want to be supporting?"

In this case, I was adding a new point.

People DO go back and engage with content more than once. The assertion that people don't do that is wrong. Your reply alone is evidence of that.

The additional point I was attempting to make is that bad content is "one and done." Not only does bad content leave the reader unmoved, it is quickly forgotten, usually anonymous, and does nothing to build a relationship with the reader.

I'm not sure why you bring up newspapers. 1/3rd of a cent for a newspaper article "view" is in no way sustainable.

The content on a comment page is each individual comment. Why would I come back to reply to a comment more than once?

As for newspapers: today's Sydney Mornig Herald is a few dozen pages, with multiple articles per page. Let's call that 100 articles (current affairs, technology, finance, sports). It costs about a dollar per day. So each article is worth about a cent, for a paper newspaper delivered to your house.

The same articles on the web at 1/3 of a cent each read doesn't sound beyond the realms of realistic pricing for a sustainable distribution.

Of course I would prefer to spend my money on a non-Murdoch paper. But that gets into politics rather than economics.

> As for newspapers: today's Sydney Mornig Herald is a few dozen pages, with multiple articles per page. Let's call that 100 articles (current affairs, technology, finance, sports). It costs about a dollar per day. So each article is worth about a cent, for a paper newspaper delivered to your house.

> The same articles on the web at 1/3 of a cent each read doesn't sound beyond the realms of realistic pricing for a sustainable distribution.

That demonstrates perfectly how the micropayment model is fundamentally different than the subscription model.

The assumption with micropayments is that you're paying only for what you view – not for everything the website produces.

With a subscription, you're paying for everything, whether or not your read it.

Say you 10 read articles in the paper each day. That works out to $0.10 an article, not $.01 an article, if you're being charged just for what you read. A huge difference. $0.10 would possibly be sustainable for micropayments, especially if you guaranteed the publisher a minimum payment each month. 1/3rd of a cent is simply out of the realm of reality – unless you're agreeing to pay, in advance, for all of the articles they produce. In which case, I don't think you're talking about micropayments anymore.

The newspaper still paid for those articles to be written even if I didn't read them.

Thus $0.01/article is still a fair pricing.

> People DO go back and engage with content more than once. The assertion that people don't do that is wrong. Your reply alone is evidence of that.

I would like to see the the empirical support for this.

Indicated by data collected from advertisers, internet content consumption is driven largely through social media platforms and mobile direct messaging. Shareaholic's report from the beginning of this year [1] indicates Facebook drives a quarter of hits to sites.

Social platforms and mobile applications thrive on new content. If people are getting to their content through social / mobile apps, and those places maintain eyeshare by presenting fresh, new stuff, it would lead that those platforms de-emphasize old content, not pushing users to return to it.

https://blog.shareaholic.com/social-media-traffic-trends-01-...

> The goal of good writing is, in part, to permanently change the reader.

This is a lofty goal. Very little on The Web comes within shooting distance of it. What's more, it has little to do with the fact that paying for access to soft copies of material is -unfortunately- [0] quite a bit different than paying for hard copies of the same thing.

> > Nobody does that with web articles.

> Have you never referred back to the same web resource?

Unless it's a reference manual or similar such thing, almost never. Even the issues of SciAm that I did save were saved for the sections that could be used as reference manuals. Frankly, I'm not one for sentiment. :)

> Have you ever emailed an article to yourself to read it later...

I've emailed the URL to an article to myself to read later because I was either

* too busy with another task at the time to read it, but it looked like it was related to another one of my projects

* on a smartphone, which is often terrible for reading idea-heavy material

[0] I say "unfortunately", because it seems that "most" people don't understand how to save complete copies of online resources to their local machine.

> If your numbers were the general rules, we'd be mostly reading $1 articles written in 3rd world countries, were people can live on $5 a day.

If quality is the same, that is exactly what will happen. You are already using software, iphones and TVs built in 3rd world countries for $5 a day.

So, that will never happen. The quality of writing coming out of wherever is not going to be the same as that of a native English speaker. I've seen many documentation projects outsourced to non-english speaking countries and the quality is consistently awful. The product that comes out of there is worse than nothing because its completely incomprehensible. My last quarter was entirely devoted to rewriting examples of such documentation.

   its completely incomprehensible.

It's not its.

With love,

Your non English speaking 3rd world citizen.

We could do that all day. For example, it's "non-English" not "non English." I don't think anyone expects perfectly refined grammar in one-off comment on the Internet.

I'm sure you can write English very well and there are probably many people like you (maybe even yourself) who can write far better than I can. It's just in my experience such people are few and far between where outsourcing is concerned.

> The quality of writing coming out of wherever is not going to be the same as that of a native English speaker

Any evidence supporting your statement? Or is it just pure anecdote. To counter your point: there is a long list of writers with accolades in writing (in English) who are not native speakers.

There are people who are just poor at language, native or learned. Also, there's a class of errors that only exists among 'native speakers', the most grating to me, is "would of"

30k readers is quite low for an article of any decent quality site though. There are a billion+ people on the internet. For articles getting 30k or less reada probably shouldn't be montizig or won't be getting much. Unless you want the cost of the articld to be paid back in 24 hours. Which is kinda anti web isnt it? I can see it becoming very quickly where someone can paraphrase or mirror the content somewhere else for cheap.

I see any per article pay model as likely flawed anyways. Netflix and many others do well because flat rate. I'd hate if nytimes charged me per article. I'd likely go somewhere else

But not, if you write in a language that is not English but a native language to the country you are living in, like German, French, Spanish, Portugeese, Italy, Polish, …

Maybe with the exception of Spanish (Middle and South America) and French (Africa) you have a rather small audiance but still the same living costs like in the US.

If you audience is not the general public but a specialied audience like Technology, like Astrophysics, like historic cars, then you don't have the audience like an article about Lady Gaga or some general politics.

By breaking it down to pay per article vs. flat rate, you're missing the multiple alternative payment schemes possible with micropayments and massive scale. Just for starters think of the spotify model, where users are charged a flat rate, but their money is then paid out to artists based on the number of streams (or attention paid to each song).

But to your point about scamming, that is definitely a concern - but no more of a concern than aggregators and viral sites (think uproxx) are today.

Exactly. I used to be a journalist but now work as a technical writer. Wages for content writers are already in the basement, with such a low compensation scheme it would kill online journalism entirely.

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