This is the very definition of selling a dream. You have a project that is currently worth approximately ZERO dollars. You believe that it's going to be worth a million dollars, lolz.
Your offer to people who are your not-employees employees is that if they agree to follow your terms, you'll divvy up 40% of the sale price. But in order to get that portion of the sale price many things have to happen.
Fist you need to actually sell the site.
Since it's going to be very lucrative (more than the average american salary of 35k) the site also has to sell for a significant amount of money.
So let's look at this and assume you sell the site for a million bucks. We won't even figure in taxes and what not. That means 400K goes to your writers.
You want at least 100 posts per day.
In order for your offer to be as lucrative as you anticipate, you can only hire 11 writers. That puts them at just a little over 35k when you sell the site.
In the meantime they are writing for free. and to reach 100 posts a day they each have to write between 9 and 10 posts each day. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say that you'll only run 100 posts a day Mon-Fri. So that's roughly 50 posts a week per writer. Over the course of a year that means that they would need to contribute around 2600 posts. That works out to about 13.50 per post.
You MIGHT find a good writer who will do a post for that small of a fee occasionally, but certainly not 10 of those a day for months on end, all the while not making any money, but relying on a)your word and b) that the site actually sells.
If that isn't the definition of selling a dream, I don't know what is.
None of this means anything. I have friends that work at 'The Times' and the 'Chicago Sun' and 'Google'. That doesn't mean that I know how to run any of those places.
The vast majority of the writers at HuffPo never saw a dime and that site sold for significantly more than your goal. So I don't see how your insider POV is even remotely relevant in this conversation when it comes to the writers you want. i totally understand how it's relevant to your interests, but pointing out the fact that most of your writers are unlikely to ever see a dime in the event the site sells doesn't seem like a strong selling point when attempting to acquire quality writers. Maybe that's just me.
You want US/UK born, educated, rock star writers to work for free. For up to a year. I don't know if you've ever been to either of those countries, but it cost money to live there. This isn't about a short-term payout. You wouldn't go work at a factory for free on the promise of profit sharing when the company sold, why would you ask someone else to do the same. Shit, at least at a factory you can pretty much just pull someone off the street and train them, they didn't spend tens of thousands of dollars on an education.
As for my POV prevailing or not. Don't care. I do hope that any writer considering your offer reads this and realizes what a shit deal it is for them. But by all means, if your site sells for a million dollars in a year on the back of free labor, come back and rub it in my face till the cows come home. Until then, I won't hold my breath.
Bottom line: Your proposal isn't a civil one, therefore I see no reason to keep it respectful and peaceful.
Now, you want my advice and suggestions? Go get some backers with money to burn and then you'll be able to hire the kind of writers that you're looking for.
