I spotted a quick note on paidContent yesterday morning about the Swedish newspaper Metro Nordic’s decision to start paying bloggers:
Metro Nordic, part of the Metro International commuter newspaper chain, will start putting bloggers on the company’s payroll but not in the usual way. Rather than hire the bloggers for its site, the company has set up an automatic system that will activate payments via MasterCard once a blog has attracted a pre-agreed number of monthly pageviews.
The press release offers a bit more information, but it manages to avoid telling you anything useful. I can’t tell if the company is just going to pick random news-related bloggers to start compensating, or if they’re going to seek out and “hire” bloggers than will only get paid if the reach a certain traffic quota.
Either way, it’s an interesting approach to paying bloggers. And the system seems horribly skewed, because as a blogger once you reach a certain traffic gateway point, they put your posts on the Metro homepage, which will boost your traffic, which will get you paid more…
I can’t decide if it’s a victory for the blogosphere for blogs to have paid inclusion on a major news web site, or if it’s just an opportunity for a major newspaper to supplement its normal content at an inexpensive rate.
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