Calacanis explains how Denton rips off his writers with "best pay in the business"
The week's not complete until bulldog-cute Mahalo chief Jason Calacanis writes in. Today JC emailed twice to call out a gaping hole in the much-discussed New Dentonomics of our 2008 Valleywag pay scale. His numbers are out of date; our new pageview rate for the second quarter is in, and it's $6.50 per thousand pageviews. But Calacanis spotted a bigger slap to the face than the CPM, one so big that Portfolio blogger Felix Salmon will have to do a whole 'nother post now to say he knew it all along. Can you guess what it is?
From: Jason Calacanis
put some math your 9k blog post..... if you're going to bust my chops about something please don't let it be revenue, because i got that on lockdown for a decade.
http://valleywag.com/376042/tipster-mahalo-revenues-are-around-9000-a-month
respek!
best j
ps - Denton is probably losing 2-3k a month on you guys so don't be surprised if he pulls the plug if you can't get to 10m pages. unless of course Valleywag is his own personal way of breaking chops in the valley, which i think it is. then you guys got a gig for a long time.
the biggest part of Denton's scam... i mean business model... is that 90% of traffic to Gawker sites is to the homepage or RSS feeds where you guys get nothing.
so, you can basically take the $7.50 rate and assume 10-20% of that is your actual cut of the posts value.
that being said, it's the best pay in the business... prob. on par with or better than Weblogs, Inc. depending on the blog/person.
Denton was plotting the pay system for two years... it's really amazing that it's come to pass. It's inspiring to see someone cut the business down to it's core and i'm loving watching the results. Some brands will be destory by folks like Jordan who know how to game pageviews, others will boom and make denton sick margins and tens of millions when he sells the brands out from under you guys.
best j
