content is king.
def agree
No you don't or you wouldn't be looking for writers that are willing to work for free. Instead you'd be paying a premium for top-of-the-line content.
Those kinds of writers don't work for pocket change, let alone for free. If they are doing something for free it's typically for a non-profit or family/friend to use as a portfolio piece. And even then working for no compensation is something that almost no good writer ever does because it only gives the impression that they don't value their own talent.
I'm first looking for free writers.
But those consistent, I am designating 40% of project profits and sale to writers .
100 updates per day is goal. If done, by next year, as long as nothing with internet bombs out, out the blue.. I'm selling ..
Site is almost 10 years old and has been on google news since before any those majors you see now.
This is not just a job..... this is about building something a large company can acquire and I can transition out of. All the while, training each writer individually into what I've discovered in last 11 years blogging.
Team Power into a project like this is FAR MORE BENEFITS TO YOUR LIFE TERM than a short term payout.
A few old buyers showed me how they sold a project for $350MM+ through Red Point Ventures and i want to attempt a much smaller scale model that's still very financially beneficial for everyone involved. Way more valuable than the average US salary right now ($35k)
Not selling a Dream. Not promising anything in the beginning however. I just need writers that are interested in being recognized for their craft.
This is all fine and well, but you are selling a dream. Whether the expected outcome for these writers is a fat payday when you sell, or the "exposure" that they can get from your site.
The exposure that they get from some old, yet random, google news site that no one has ever heard of is worth exactly what you're paying your writers. Nothing. People don't eat and pay bills with exposure, they pay them with money. For all the bitching that went on about HuffPo not paying their writers, the people who wrote for free aren't what made that site. And they certainly weren't what made that site at the start. HuffPo was backed by millions of dollars, and more importantly, they were backed by some major players in traditional and new media. They had the connections and advertising spend to get traction easily.
On top of that, they had a small, but well-known staff of writers who were paid fairly from the get go. Add in the fact that they also gave celebrities a place to share their, often retarded, views and you have the making of a near perfect storm.
For every non-paid writer that added anything of value to the site there were 25 others who wrote complete garbage that garnered less than 50 page views in total for everything they contributed. The most important non-paid contributors to the site were the commenters.
And fuck that Team Power into a project like this bullshit. The only way something like this offers more benefits than a paid byline gig is if you happen to get lucky and set the internet on fire and you get a book deal out of it. Otherwise all that you're getting is a portfolio piece. And that's nice, but it's not as nice as getting a portfolio piece from a site with enough prominence and funding to actually be able to pay you.
This type of shit drives me nuts. "I have a great idea that can make me a ton of money, and maybe I'll throw you a bone someday when I sell it. But in the meantime, please do the most time consuming and important part of the project for me. Oh and do it for free. Oh and another thing, if you aren't a daily contributor of spectacular writing for the next 37 years you can forget about me throwing you a bone. But hey, at least you have all those portfolio pieces and all that exposure."
Fuck this noise and this shitty, shitty, fucking business model. Any writer with a modicum of talent is stupid to enter into this type of agreement. And that's the thing about good writers, they may not always be business smart, but they're often smarter than the people trying to push this shit. And that means anyone accepting this type of "gig" is probably not the kind of writer you want writing for a million dollar project in the first place.
