Metro Sweden to pay bloggers for content
Last month Metro Sweden announced its blog service metrobloggen.se where bloggers get paid about half a cent per page view (0.03 SEK per page view).
Metrobloggen claims that Metro the newspaper will write about “talented and interesting” Metrobloggen bloggers once a week, which sounds a bit less ambitious than Metro Boston’s rival BostonNow’s strategy to publish numerous excerpts from blogs every day (Metrobloggen’s domain name was registered November 13, 2006, and I’ll leave it to others to discuss whether BostonNow had any influence on Metro’s move, though I’m guessing it didn’t).
Obviously, a compensation-per-view system requires sufficient revenue with which to compensate content writers. Metrobloggen stopped accepting registrations only 3 days after the site launched on June 18. By that time a reported 2,300 bloggers had signed up, perhaps because page views outpaced revenue. Swedish blogger Hans Kullin has some thoughts, in English, on Metrobloggen’s early travails.
I’m not overly impressed by these writer-centric schemes. Blogging isn’t particularly cutting edge, either. I’d like to see something that puts together 10-20 minute video/photo/podcasts through aggregation that has a detectable professional editing component as well as performance-based revenue sharing.
