How is the plumber a customer? He didn't sign up for the service and he doesn't want the service, but he's forced to have it 'provided' to him for free by HelpHive.
Measurement is important to HelpHive, not to the plumber (who doesn't even want the service, let alone the metrics).
Word count is not an indication of the effort involved. Itg's not merely a matter of typing in words like a monkey. You have to know about which you write. The more you know, likely the more time it took you to learn it. Time is money, words are just words.
Word count is not an indication of the effort involved.
If it's for writing small news bits, it can be. Let's say you're a total expert with using GMail and you have to write a couple of posts linking to GMail news, the occasional tip, etc, each day - you can probably bash short posts out in no time.
You have the many hundreds of hours invested in actually become the expert in the first place, but I doubt anyone becomes an expert so they can write $50 a pop pieces - so that cash is extra value, not a payback for the time you spent learning (as is the case with a professional's fees).
Well, OK, but that's an awfully narrow example. What happens when you are asked, or want, to write of something about which you know only a little? Or something you sort of know well but which requires a modest degree of fact-checking and verification?
Put another way, how much do you expect to earn per hour for this sort of work? How long does it take you to write an informative 300 words?
Most likely Wired didn't do anything based on a press release. The P.R. industry would like you to believe they are able to drive the news agenda, but when it comes to the Wireds and The New York Timeses of the world, it's rare for a press release to lead to a story of this magnitude.
Most likely, Demand Studios' P.R. people freaked out when Wired inquired.
This story likely took weeks to report and write. A graphic artist probably spent at least a week preparing the chart. Good journalism takes a lot of effort, and so few people realize that.
As someone who has been paid to write and edit news for 30 years, this article was pretty depressing, but I already knew about Demand Studios. And you know what? It looks like they take good care of their writers, at least in the karma department. These seem to be folks who have always wanted to be paid to write but never had the opportunity to get paid for it, enjoy surfing the Web, and can bang out three or four of these articles in a day and have some good walking-around-money.
They seem to be mostly American, but at some point I'm sure the Third World will be recruited to drive the price down even further. Seen what they are paying on Mechanical Turk?
I wonder if we'll ever know, factually, who wrote to whom first?
I don't mean to slight wired; but I'm sure that many technology companies would like to be covered by wired, and if they have any sense, they'd prepare an article in the most convenient form for wired, and send it to them - and the guy running Demand definitely knows how to make things happen at this point. They wouldn't have any control over what Wired did with it, of course.
I wouldn't worry about it too much - it's just a drop in the ocean, and there are lots of other sources of information on the web. Probably, it's fair to say that having a crappy $20 video is quite a bit better than nothing. And if there's a few results to a google search, most people will look at more than one.
Example: I had a blocked toilet yesterday, google came up with a several excellent hits on it. I tried the suggestions in order, and problem solved. The internet is pretty cool.
I guess the depressing part is that higher quality can't be supported by adwords alone - it would seem, anyway. I think quality is often best rewarded in niches audiences and uses, where quality really matters.
It doesn't help that many writers and publications use clever and cryptic headlines that often are the sole way of judging whether an item is worth clicking or not.
while our CEO has conniption fits over Microsofties sporting iPhones.
This would drive me nuts. The CEO should focus on fixing the things that makes their own employees not want to buy Windows Mobile phones, not fix the employees that don't want to buy them.
OpenID in its present form will never really catch on because it's too involved and complicated for normal people to use. I am not a technologist but I'm a pretty savvy user, and I have never really understood how to use it.
Both principals' original and rebutting words are at once smart and sloppy. This speaks to the complexity of discussing the economics of knowledge and taste.
For example, neither writer seems to have tackled the role of advertising revenue and other intangibles in assessing the value of content.
There are comparatively few ads in an edition of The Economist, which might explain why a subscription is so much greater than that of Time. And that should be factored into any newsstand-price-per-page analysis.
And some weekly trade publications, delivered by mail at no small cost, are monetarily free to the readers because subscribers pay with other currency -- information about themselves, their companies, and their spending plans.
I would also point out that the popularity of a fabric pattern or the life story of Sarah Palin are related more to taste and fad than to the value of any elusive wisdom, such as that derived from The New York Times or The Economist.
Mr. Graham is correct in noting a demarcation between conveyance and content, but as Mr. Weaver points out, it's not all that simple to proceed from there.
In any event, I've really enjoyed reading both sides of this, and I am impressed by the overall quality of the comments.
