SB Nation Payscale

Like trips to Burma?

 

For the person who mentioned Bleacher Report, you need to think differently about that site. It recognized years ago that it had a credibility problem and has since hired a lot lot of top-notch writers.

 

For the person who writes for Bleacher Report, you need to realize that there's still an extraordinary amount of riff raff "working" alongside those "top-notch writers"

 

Unrelated to the pay scale, their comment threads have become borderline useless because they can't keep the spammers under control.

 

Didn’t SB Nation start by creating a network of preexisting fan blogs? That seems like a good deal for those original writers to get technical support, better access to advertising, and more promotion.

 

Burma, back-packing through the American West, driving race cars at the Super Bowl. It pays to not pay!

 

The guy in question who ended up with the Bucks was doing technical analysis, not narrative storytelling. For someone like him, why shouldn't he want to make the leap and watch his theories come to life?

 

Yeah, I think calling it a pyramid scheme is a bit harsh. Ya think the guys at Grantland all got paid the same from the get go? The guys like Klosterman and Chris Jones, who had the name recognition, were getting x, and the people like Katie Baker were getting y. She got to build her brand by being associated with them, in the same way I'm sure she makes more at The Ringer now than some of the people who were hired there from lesser known places. No one is forcing these guys to write these blogs. They're offered the opp to have their content shared on a platform alongside better known writers. If they don't like the model, go do something else.

 

Here's somewhat on an "answer" as someone who has written for both SBN and Fansided.

-The majority of SBN "team blog" writers work for free. There is no stipend issued to anyone other than the editors. Their regular writers range from people trying to "make it big time" and buying into the hype that some of their writers have gone to ESPN, and people who truly love it. Most of the "staff writers" contribute 3-4 articles per week for absolutely nothing. Every once in a while someone works up to an editorial position, but most times you end up wasting a year or two working for free.

-SBN "team blog" editors get a fixed monthly stipend as long as the site meets certain requirements. It depends on the site, the more popular the site, the larger the stipend. All in all, it's nothing more than just extra cash, all of them have day jobs.

-The writers who write for SBNation.com, the main site, make a decent wage. The exact figure I do not know, but I do know their larger writers like Matt Weaver and Grant Brisbee do SBN full-time.

For Fansided, it's pretty much a similar structure, if you're a "staff writer" you get paid in "experience and exposure" and that's all you get. The exact figure for a FanSided site Editor is $50 or $1.00 per 1,000 page views whichever is more.The catch is, the site has to have 50 new articles on it a month. If you write 49, you don't get a single penny from them. The site I ran had one other staff writer and was a small market pro sports site. After one month of writing 35 articles for $50, I pretty much had enough of it. That's the main reason those sites become populated with low-quality clickbait, they don't want to pay enough to get any sort of quality on their site.

So that should answer your question. Do I have the exact figures for SBN? No, I don't but that's all I can offer in term of numbers.

 

I don't care if it's harsh. It's reality. I'm sick of outlets run by wannabe tech iconoclasts who know nothing of and care not for journalism using exploitative wage models that fuck up the market as a whole. As easy as it is to say, "Go do something else," the cheapened cost of labor has made it a whole helluva lot more difficult to just "go do something else" in the industry.

Newspaper owners killed the business at the turn of the millennium, and these low-paying blog networks are vultures circling the carcass.

 

i meant harsh as it not wholly accurate. name an industry where the guys who come into it aren't paid a shitload less than the guys at the top of the industry? the market sets the prices. the best writers still get paid really well. It's just that the market has decided there aren't that many great writers and that most people's content -- gamers, reaction pieces -- can be done by automation or aren't so distinct as to necessitate a better wage.

Does SB Nation's wag scale affect the wage models for the beat writers in those cities? I certainly read the NY Post or the Daily News for their Giants coverage before I read Big Blue Nation.

 

You are missing my point. The guys who started the fan blogs (and some were good blogs, IIRC) that got picked up by SBNation weren't making a living out of it before SBNation came along. But joining it provided benefits. The benefits didn't lead to a living salary, but maybe it was better. Now writers can step into an established blog without having to pick up webpage design, figuring out ads, and gaining an audience, but there is no reason the pay should be any better than what the original bloggers were getting. The value is in the aggregation, not necessarily in the separate blogs and that it what the creators of SBNation figured out.

How is SBNation using "exploitative wage models that fuck up the market as a whole"? Do you think the majority of the writers, the editors were ever going to go into or, if they did want to, get a job in 'regular' journalism? Why did the segment of the writers who wanted to write for a paper not get a job at a paper? Because it wasn't there. The cost of labor is in part driven by the supply of the people wanting to do a particular job and if there aren't jobs for those people, then the cost goes down.

These places produce jobs that wouldn't otherwise exist. If the wages are shitty, that's up to the person who never was going to be covering a beat for a daily. SBNation's wage model has nothing to do with what some guy in Kansas is making. SBNation, blogs, and the internet in general destroyed the value of the product. As the value of the product went down, there was less money to pay for labor, which means fewer jobs, fewer raises.