Denton Cuts Valleywag Bloggers Pay 33 Percent

Nick Denton, the puppet-master behind some of the most trafficked gossip blogs, has rejiggered the page view rate he pays his bloggers. Writers for Valleywag, which snipes at Silicon Valley types, will get $6.50 per thousand page views, down 33 percent from last year’s $9.75 ppv amount.

The news follows Valleywag’s Jordan Golson protest earlier this week Denton had not told him what his payrate would be. Gawker Media has switched from per-post compensation to bonuses based on page views. But not knowing how much he’ll earn had Golson irate.

“We’re working in the digital equivalent of a sweatshop, effectively being paid based on how many views we can drum up — and now the goalposts are being moved mid-kick. This is unnerving and a slap in the face to the “creative underclass” that writes for Gawker’s blogs,” Golson wrote.

Portfolio’s Felix Salmon writes Valleywag pageviews increased in the first quarter of 2008 to 12,234,604 - a 34 percent jump from the 9,132,723 pageviews the Gawker Media site saw in the fourth quarter of 2008. But to stay in the same place, Valleywag writers will have to produce 50 percent more page views.

“There’s an extremely high probability that Valleywag’s writers will make quite a bit less money in Q2 than they did in Q1, even if they maintain the stellar present growth rates. That’s got to hurt,” Salmon writes.

Will these shifting sands bury Denton? Gawker writers may not push themselves as hard if they see Denton intends to pay less but demand even greater output.