Seth Godin recently wrote a post titled Everyone gets paid on commission. The post started with the following story:

The Washington Post recently laid off a columnist because his blog posts didn’t get enough web traffic.

Of course, in the old days, the newspaper had no real way to tell which columns got read and which ones didn’t. So journalists were lulled into the sense that it didn’t really matter.

Godin’s point is that now that newspapers can measure how much traffic a column or even a single article gets, writers are working purely on commission. If we can’t produce content that gets readers banging down the door, we’ll quickly go the way of the Washington Post’s ex-columnist.

For web writers, this conclusion is not news. The number of websites that pay purely on the basis on how much traffic a writer can bring in have been around long enough to make it very clear that writers work for a commission. We may not approve of those sites, but the high turnover rates at many blog networks and other online publications ensure that writers who can’t produce consistently good content need not apply.

We don’t have it quite as bad as car salesmen and other folks traditionally paid on commission — the fact that most reputable web publications pay at least some sort of base rate helps significantly — but the situation still creates certain issues for writers. We’re getting paid for results and we have to figure out how to consistently provide those results.

That requires creativity and great writing day in and day out. It’s a taxing proposition that seems to rule out working for the lowest paying sites: most writers I know have a limit to how many good words they can pound out in a day, making it only worthwhile to try to write that number of words. We have to find the best pay rates for those words, making it impractical to work for any site unable to make it worth our while to craft good content. The situation has taken the problem of low-paying publications to the extreme.