Capturing Chaos

The economic downturn is beginning to hit writing sites, and people are running scared. Forums are filled with moans and groans about changes that clearly indicate there is less money to go around. Back in September, Shared Reviews stopped paying for reviews, and announced that members could now compete for prizes. Now Ciao has done the same thing, after first reducing payments from $1.00 a review to .25. Understandably, not too many people are happy about having to settle for what is being promoted as fun and games as a substitute for being paid for their content.

Among the wails and complaints is one that misses the point entirely. Don’t the site owners realize that they will lose members? That’s the point, of course. If you can’t afford to pay people, change the setup so that those who are least likely to win any competitions will leave. This is a two birds with one stone solution. With luck, many of the leave-takers will be among those who are owed money. If you’re promising to pay back wages when the economic turnaround comes (if ever), it helps to reduce that pool.

The other possible benefit is an increase in the quality of what’s contributed. Most sites that pay primarily for page views don’t have the money for an editorial staff, and depend on users’ ratings to keep quality from descending to the very lowest possible levels. But the same people who write crap (to be perfectly blunt) are going to vote on the basis of their own ignorance about content value and the quality of writing. Helium has discovered this little problem and is making changes intended to overcome the problem. But the bottom line is that if you want high quality content on a site, you can’t depend on the members for editorial judgments; you have to hire people capable of recognizing it.

One little noted feature of many writing sites is that the members are in competition with each other. The pay may be a mere pittance, but everyone has a chance at it, no matter how badly they write. If an editorial staff is in place, the bad writers get weeded out fairly quickly. But these sites do the equivalent of throwing coins into the ring and watching people scramble for them, any way they can. The result is plagiarism, rating circles, and on sites where downrating is allowed, driveby downrating.

Sites benefit financially when members are forced to climb over each others’ backs in order to make a little money, but it’s a formula that probably can’t survive a serious economic crisis. Most of these sites will disappear because they’ve boxed themselves into a corner, and they no longer have the money necessary to get themselves out of it by hiring competent staff. The web isn’t just about content; it’s about valuable content, a point that the site owners shouldn’t have ignored.

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