Astronomy Buff

I Have to be Interesting Six Times a Week

by Tony on January 6th, 2008

Being a part of a network has, for the most part, been very good for me. If I were doing this alone, my posts would have been unacceptably infrequent and the blog would probably have died.

Having expectations, ones where people expect you to post content and pay you for it, has been a good formula for me. I have posted many times when I would otherwise not have done so.

But I’m also very independent minded. That leads me to try and stay outside of norms. What that means in the context of this blog is that if many bloggers are posting on a certain topic, and I really don’t have anything to add, I won’t post on it. On the positive side, it means I try very hard to give you stuff you won’t read anywhere else.

I’m telling you this because I have a contract that mandates six posts per week. For the past year, I’ve rarely met that mark, but I’ve always felt that the length and quality of my posts were more than enough to make up for the frequency.

b5 Media has now decided to enforce that policy rather stringently. If I don’t post six times per week, I won’t get paid. I’ll get money that is paid based on pageviews, but the base pay won’t happen.

I’m tempted to blow this off because I strongly disagree with the idea of posting just to meet a number of posts. All bloggers are different and some of us have personalities and writing styles that can’t always fit into strict guidelines like this. I can usually say interesting, meaningful stuff in a few posts per week. I also have a job, family and I wanna go observing several times a week.

The posting frequency of the past year has shown that I can get a decent readership at 3-6 posts per week. Every month this year has shown a growth in traffic and while I could probably get more by posting more, that will only happen if the increased posts have something to say and meet the needs of you guys.

I guess ‘decent readership’ means different things to different people.

So, I’m annoyed and conflicted. Blogging takes a lot of my time and effort, and I don’t do it for the money anyway. If I did, I’d be living in a refrigerator box near a diner with free wifi. The money involved here is tiny, I usually use my blog pay to buy a dinner out at the turn of the month.

I’m going to do my best to step up the posting frequency on this blog. Not because they are making me, but because I imagine from the emails and comments I get from you, that you’d appreciate it if I did, so I’ll use that as my motivation. You guys matter more to me than a network, that goes a long way to suppressing my knee-jerk reaction to rebel.

I just hate being told what to do, blogging is not something one should try to set controls on. I understand why b5 is doing this. They know that more posts mean more traffic (in the short term at least, until people find that the blogs aren’t necessarily interesting and leave), and they have venture capital interests to answer to.

It’s hard to be interesting six times a week, I’m not sure I have that much interestingness to go around, but I’ll give it a try.

I’ll count on you guys to let me know if I’m slipping up. If I write a post that says “BlahBlah Blogger has written a nice post on the BlahBlah Galaxy, go here to read it…” That you’ll hold my feet to the blogging fire and tell me to stop it.

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