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Comment by spamizbad | Hacker News Reader

For a meritocracy to work there must be consequences for both good and bad actions.

A pundit's merit is judged by their page views; not by their correctness. Their salary is based off their readership. If their readership wants to be fed convenient lies that reenforce their world view that's their perogative.

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And a CEO's merit is judged by their company's market value. Has this hurt their market cap?

That's the interesting thing about non-public companies from management's perspective. There's no direct way for the public or journalists to really tell if they're succeeding.

The best way to know would be to ask Google if they'd still offer $4 billion. I suspect they'd make a lower offer right now, but it's hard to tell.

I recently heard Sarah Lacy say they ensure their writers do not know the pageview count.

Presumably they still reward good performance though, so writers are still incentivized to attempt to get good pageviews, even if they cannot know the exact numbers themselves (and they can probably get reasonable estimates by watching mentions in social media)

Page view is just a proxy for reader engagement. There are other, better metrics that measure engagement.

Such as?

What better measure is there for selling ads than the number of ads you sell?

demographics and dwell time

They get a really high CPM for the ads they place, so it's not all about the pageviews. If you wrote a bunch of linkbait or put a few slideshows up there, they might not have the same audience, and therefore wouldn't get the same CPMs they're getting now.

So not knowing the pageview count might actually help in the case of PandoDaily.

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