Writer’s Dues
Bloggingnetwork.com is a fascinating idea - it’s, as you’d imagine, a collection of blogs for which any writer can sign up. The schtick is that readers pay $3 a month for access to the network - and writers get paid according to their blogs’ popularity from those subscriber fees.
I have a couple of faves already - Confessions of a Porn Writer by Cliterati’s Emily Dubberley (who has her own, free, blog here too) is good fun, as is Naughty Bits. The reason why both these blogs are good fun to read is that they’re both written by journalists, so they’re brief, funny and informative. By contrast, all the literary stuff on the network at the moment seems pretty awful - dreary novels-in-progress and the like.
The upshot here is readers vote with their feet and bloggers only get paid if they’re any good. Good blogs (i.e. well-written and regularly updated) get rewarded with some pocket money whereas bad blogs get nothing. The money becomes an incentive to make a blog better but doesn’t actually dictate the blog’s substance or become a reason for self-censorship. Indeed, I imagine the more outrageous a blog is, the more readers it will get. And given that there doesn’t seem to be any restriction on either a) who can blog for the network and b) what they can blog about, it’s open to anyone to have a go.
The downside is that unless the Blogging Network attracts hundred of thousands of readers willing to sign up, blogging will never make a blogger rich. Equally, it puts blogs in a walled garden, which means they lose out on most opportunities for self-promotion and so gaining readers. It’ll be very interesting to see how the Network pans out and which writers decide to stick with it
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Paid To Blog
- Blogs Sell Books
- Blog on Been enjoying surfing round blogs recen…
- The Blogs That Bind
- Paid Blog Review
