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Over the past couple of years, several popular websites have incentivized their writers with a compensation plan that sounds reasonable: If your stories generate more clicks, we’ll pay you more.
But think about the real-world implications of that for a moment. If a writer / aggregator / reporter / blogger (let’s shorten that to the acronym “WARB”) has a direct incentive to generate more clicks, do you think they’re going to go with a straightforward headline or a more sensational one? Do you think they’ll look to exploit inadvertent “mini gaffes” more than they otherwise might?
I want to be careful not to suggest that all WARBs with a financial incentive would sensationalize their reporting. Perhaps the needle of public interest and popularity can be threaded, in some cases, simultaneously. And this overall trend of writing with traffic in mind is far from new. But, even with all of those caveats, it’s yet another troubling trend that makes a spokesperson’s job that much more challenging.
You’ll find a few examples of this trend below. Some of the sites listed in these news articles have since gone defunct, while others may have subsequently altered their revenue models....
Brad Phillips looks at the impact of pay per click journalism.