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Flexos Goatee
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Get paid to write satire
www.glossynews.com is coming up on it's third anniversary, and what better way to celebrate than by offering warm, soft cash for the best articles possible?
Glossy News shows 5,000 to 10,000 pages a day, steadily climbing over past months (and years). It's a fully automated site. Most importantly, it's updated constantly and gets its share of readership... well, a bit more than that, this is my living.
The offer is open to past writers as well as new, exclusive and non-exclusive stories, and there is no limit to how many pieces you may submit. We are currently limiting publication to three (3) articles a day, so realistically you'd be hard pressed to out-write our desire to print.
The pay is $1.00 per thousand page views for the most popular 30 pages of the month. You're good, you'll get the clicks, you'll be in the top 30. I don't pay for unpopuplar articles I'm not going to track a thousand stories to cut checks.
Write a killer article, it'll go far. Many of you know that already, and if you don't, ask the others on here. Show 100,000 pages, get a hundred bucks. Write two blockbusters in the month and you can see where it gets awfully exciting.
Full details are available by email, though I can post them if there is more than a few people here who want the whole run-down. This is a trial that is set to last three months, but will be reviewed for continuation. Now's the best time to try it out.
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1/3/2005, 4:36 am
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produce
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Re: Get paid to write satire
Great Glossy site Mr Goatee. Unfortunately nobody seems to be left here at this once flourishing satire community but me and darvijen (it's a whip). You're basically typing to the wind. And me.
And darvijen (it's a whip).
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1/3/2005, 10:29 am
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Flexos Goatee
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Re: Get paid to write satire
Not worried a bit. Everyone knows someone and this is an admittedly rare opportunity. Of the 500+ satire sites I've known, I've only seen three that claimed to actually pay for material, and I never met anyone who actually did. I'm counting on good news travelling quickly.
Besides, there's fully three months left. Surely more than just the three of us will pop on here between now and then.
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1/3/2005, 12:15 pm
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produce
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Re: Get paid to write satire
If you've not been here before
(before the funeral) this place rocked .. an incredible group of renegade ex-spoof writers united for a cause.
Life goes on it seems, things fade away. Interesting $$$-making concept you have there though. In the past we all gave away thousands of stories for FREE when we were at the "non-profit" Spoof. TheSpoof still seems to be the premier satire site out there even after ..
Last edited by produce, 1/3/2005, 12:30 pm
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1/3/2005, 12:29 pm
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Flexos Goatee
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Re: Get paid to write satire
quote:
produce wrote:
In the past we all gave away thousands of stories for FREE when we were at the "non-profit" Spoof.
That's how the industry is. Typically, a webmaster's business model doesn't leave any room to pay the writers. As a writer myself (who actually does get paid) I think it's a sad state of affairs. There's money to be made, I think it should be shared.
quote:
produce wrote:
TheSpoof still seems to be the premier satire site out there even after ..
Depends who you ask and what question you ask while you're at it, I suppose. Spoof and Glossy run comparable traffic, but we run fewer articles. That means our readership per article is statistically higher. In terms of total traffic I can name 5 satire sites off the top of my head that eclipse Glossy and the Spoof both for readership, though none of them pay and half of them won't give REAL writers the time of day.
Somebody's going to get money out of me over the next three months. I would prefer to have more high quality people in the mix, so as to actually reward the best writers, not just my own loyal pack.
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1/3/2005, 1:25 pm
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produce
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Re: Get paid to write satire
quote:
Somebody's going to get money out of me over the next three months. I would prefer to have more high quality people in the mix, so as to actually reward the best writers
Good info. Wish we'd had you as our Spoof boss back then. I'm sure you know the Onion's revenue model too. Since we've got you here as a captive audience .. what do you think of the concept of creating such a killer satire news site that you can actually get paid
(Paypal tm) subscriptions?
10000 subscriptions at just $5 per subscription ..
:O
That's over $600,000 per year!! Gates doesn't even make that in a minute.
Kidding aside though, Glossy does have good stuff. Spoof lets anybody write. Each biz model has it's advantages.
Let anyone write, get a preponderance of scrap (and a few gems).
Conversely, control and limit the process (like the onion does),
you might stagnate maybe but you've got a crack, proven writing staff. Glossy seems to accept anything but filters it .. which is what I would do trying to make money. TheSpoof will publish anything. Benefits there too though.
They're panning for gold and every now and then they find it.
Last edited by produce, 1/3/2005, 2:18 pm
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1/3/2005, 2:03 pm
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Flexos Goatee
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Re: Get paid to write satire
Good gravy Produce, you hit many nails on many heads there.
The Onion is an elitist bunch. If you can track down any interviews with their writers you'll find they have a deep love for themselves, a love incapable of extending beyond their inner circle. It's this lack of love and foresight that is their own undoing. Had they made their dream big enough to include the rest of us, there would be very, very few other satire sites, and the Onion would be what everyone wants it to be... updated often and lots of fun. The Onion's pack of salaried, committee-style writers used to dominate 80% of the online satire traffic, now it's well under 50%, and as low as 30% by some estimates.
If a writer is hoping to break into the ranks of the Onion, they need to dream a little bigger. When you said "control and limit the process (like the Onion does)" I'd swear I felt a smidge of restraint there. Controlling and limiting may just win you the understatement of the year award, but I'm not on the committee so I can't say.
If the Onion is so damn good, why do they print so many re-run articles out of their archives? How come they only run 48 weekly issues over any given year? They've got horsepower but their idling, and the idle's getting rough.
On the far end you've got the Spoof which does have gems, time to time. In the meantime, however, I've had to stop reading it because by not filtering your content you gets loads of stuff that is either not interesting or inconsistent with the site's feel. Anybody can get a few thousand visitors a day off search engines just by throwing a metric ton of crap at the wall, but how do your REAL visitors feel about having to weed through it? I don't have an answer for that. It looks less like panning for gold and more like trolling for nickels, which the search engines do indeed facilitate. As you said, it's just one of many successful business models.
I do think Glossy News is in between. We DON'T publish everything we get. We used to, but found that quality truly does trump quantity. Based on my professional experience as well as the expertise of my three other editors, we have a pretty good collective handle on what's funny, and what's funny and fits our site.
I've looked into running a paid version of the site before and everything came back opposed. There is so, so, so much satire available that nobody sees any real value in paying for it. Some readers don't even want you to run ads. Worse still, I've had writers demand that I pay them, and then tell me not to put ads on their articles... um, what? Like I'm supposed to be the one footing the bill for their hobby? Very strange.
The key to making a subscription based servic would be to have something there that you really can't find elsewhere for free. I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm saying it is going to take a level of creativity that sadly I do not possess... oh, and $5 a month is much too high, by my research, but again, depends what you're selling.
Any of this helpful yet? (I'm trying to be!)
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1/3/2005, 2:49 pm
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produce
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Re: Get paid to write satire
quote:
Flexos Goatee wrote:
GOOD GRAVY Produce
"Good Gravy".
Sounds like something my great great grandpaw paw's grandpaw's great grandpaw's paw would say back in the day when he REALLY wanted to say
SON of a !*&@^!&!!!!!
thx for the onion expose. Feel free to jump in anytime now darvijen. god. Mr Lather.
Mr C? Are you there? CVH? Mz Banks????
Mz Jenna? I know you're out there watching.
INFO wants to be free. Even MSN probably has a chore charging folks for their proprietary MSN video news. Perhaps Glossy could run a contest, giving away 5 grand. There has to be a way to make lots of money with such a talented pool of literary artists chomping at the bits to write something, as Art Bell would say,
Cosmic.
Last edited by produce, 1/3/2005, 4:38 pm
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1/3/2005, 4:33 pm
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Flexos Goatee
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Re: Get paid to write satire
You hit on something really big there, though. At the Onions inception there was only one way to do it, though as sites like the Spoof and my own Glossy News have proven, there's many ways to crack the same egg.
When you ask me about something I've done, successful or not, I hope you take my advice seriously. When it comes to something I HAVE NOT done, like a paid subscription service, I hope you look beyond my limited feasibility studies and push towards making the next web-business model. I can tell you what I know, but in terms of things I don't know, I can only make educated guesses.
In considering a paid subscription, consider sites like Fark with their TotalFark service, Madville with thier Premium service, and any others you can find with their own paid versions. I had a chance to get three months free on my local paper for home delivery and declined it. Even at a cost of zero, I found it worthless, and they provide tons and tons of exclusive, high quality, relevant content.
Do you take home delivery of your local paper, even knowing how much more content it provides? If you do, would you pay any extra to get MORE than that?
As for the 5-grand bit, oh I'll gladly pay it for an article that's worth it. All you need is to get 5 million (real, legitimate) readers. Nobody else pays like I do, I know that. I'm offering more per pay per reader than anybody else, satirical or otherwise. That Jib-jab cartoon would have brought the writer $160,000 had it been published on my site. My business model supports paying that, and so does theirs.
Oh, and Good Gravy? Yeah, Strong Bad taught me that one. He's a real wordsmith.
While we're on it, let's talk about www.homestarrunner.com. They show no ads, sell no placement, no popups, no nothing. Their popularity (however underground it may be) supports their entire livlihood off merchandising alone. I prefer to think that someday my own personal brand will be so powerful that I'll be able to live on a bear minimum of advertising... in the meantime, it just ain't so.
When I offer that pay for writing articles, understand that you'd be competing with me. I consider myself pretty proficient at this satire biz-nass, and readership tends to agree. Is it a challenge? Can any (or all) of your pieces beat all (or any) of mine? I'll bet you it can't and pay you when I'm wrong... which history shows is every single month... Good gravy indeed.
In case I don't get a better opportunity to say so, it's a pleasure bantering at you. Very refreshing indeed.
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1/3/2005, 6:12 pm
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produce
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Re: Get paid to write satire
I finally met Strong bad .. pretty funny stuff there.
"Ok, hand me the explosives"
Perhaps the future of online satire is
animation. Lycos has a flash feature called
"Almost news". It's basically current news parodied via animation.
Seems pretty simple to me .. get 5 million bonafide readers, rake in the cash. Get the readers via a toll road. Niche. Either come to you or you don't get what you're looking for.
Sometimes it helps to break huge goals down into chewable step_at_a_time bite sized pieces. Why not initially shoot for 100,000
readers, gradually work your way up to
5 million. Gotta have the killer, unduplicatable proprietary content though. If you're a Dave Berry fan you'll understand. His hits at the Miami Herald were huge. Simply because, nobody can create what he creates. His fan base, as Strong Bad would say, is .. huge.
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1/4/2005, 7:48 am
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