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Could a time be coming when journalists are rewarded based on their traffic or other online measures of attention?

Business 2.0 bloggers have been getting paid based on the traffic generated by their blog posts in the first part of this year. The bonuses (I’m presuming none of them plumped to go for basic on this) were pegged at $2.50 per 1,000 page impressions.

Before we get too excited about the idea though, the pay out for all of the blogs would be somewhere in the region of $10,000 for the first quarter of the year, an average of six hundred bucks each. Talking Biz News says:

The second tier of bloggers, which includes Quittner, received checks in the “hundreds of dollars,” he said. Further down were bloggers who received checks for less than $100. Each of the writers was allowed to pick the topic of their blog, but those who received small checks also got the suggestion that maybe they needed to pick a new topic, said Quittner.

Even with my blog at Brand Republic on the go now, I’m not sure I would be able to move to blogging full time on that kind of payscale :-)  

While working in search engine marketing I’ve seen various payment models based around performance. I wonder if soon marketers will need to be thinking about getting paid for their content based on the links, traffic or ratings their clients’ customers give it… Just a thought.  Certainly it would help focus minds on creating content that was useful..

Via Talking Biz News via Martin Stabe