Economics of Weblogging...
Mickey Kaus writes:
Mickey Kaus: I had been making in the mid-90s, and then I had to take a pay cut.... I’m fortunate to make any money as a blogger. There are some who make more. Most of them work for The Atlantic...
Mickey Kaus has written 54 posts in the past ten weeks--that's an average of 5.4 posts for each week in which he makes $1,800, or $333 a weblog post. This seems to me to be way out of line--suggesting some major source of labor-market monopoly is preventing Slate from rationalizing its labor costs.
For example:
Ta-Nehisi Coates has produced 53 posts in the past 14 days--which, by my calculations, makes me think that the Atlantic really ought to be paying him $720,000 a year if it were to pay on the Slate scale.
Ezra Klein--whose existence appears to torment Mickey Kaus every waking and sleeping moment--has put up 77 high quality posts[1] in the past week, for a Kaus-scale equivalent warranted salary of $1,140,000 a year...
And Matthew Yglesias's home page at the moment has 25 posts all of which have been written in the past 60 hours--that's 0.417 posts per hour in which he makes $2.46, or $5.90 per post. Matthew Yglesias is thus 56 times more productive in a cost-per-post metric--plus there is, I believe, an enormous quality differential. Pay-for-performance would, I think, require that the Center for American Progress ought to be paying him $8,000,000 a year.
[1] Compare:
Ezra Klein: The public option: Very alive or totally dead? The public option letter in the Senate has more than 40 signatories now. That would seem to push it well beyond the point of viability. But with Nancy Pelosi saying that the Senate doesn't have the votes and "it's not in the reconciliation," it's not exhibiting many signs of life. As far as I can tell, the story of the public option's resurgence has been a mixture of smart organizing and Senate cowardice. Few senators wanted to stand against the thing. But nor did they want to bring it back into play. So a number of them signed the letter under pressure, waiting and hoping that someone else -- maybe the leadership or the White House -- would figure this out for them. The White House and Pelosi have attempted a version of that. They're not coming out against the public option push; they're just saying the votes don't exist. And maybe they don't. The letter has 41 senators signed on, which is still fewer than 50. But the proper way to decide this is with a vote. Sen. Bernard Sanders has promised to bring the public option up in an amendment to the reconciliation package. Good. And if it passes, then Republicans can take a good, long look in the mirror and ask themselves if forcing the Democrats to use a reconciliation strategy rather than compromising to make the bill friendlier to conservative insights was really such a good idea. I don't think it would be the worst thing in the world if relentless obstruction imposed policy costs on Republicans.
Mickey Kaus: Unions vs. Liberalism, Part XXIII: Obama's compromise health care plan is out, and "the impact on the politics will be tremendous," gushes WaPo's health care cheerleader Ezra Klein. "The release of this plan marks the end of the Scott Brown election and the resumption of the health-care process." It enables the Democrats to "take back control of the media's narrative," just as they did when they waited out the Tea Parties last August, then "used the president's big speech to pivot to the release and subsequent passage of the Senate Finance Committee's bill."... Remember the stunning success of the president's speech? It's right here on this graph--if you squint hard you can see the temporary pause in the seemingly ineluctable rise in public opposition to Obama's health care reform right around the beginning of September. It lasted a couple of weeks. Then opposition started rising again. Now it's over 50%, with support ten points lower.... The Dems must have lost "control of the media's narrative"! Does Klein really believe this stuff? I don't know which answer would be more embarrassing.... P.S.: It would be one thing if Klein was relaying the White House spin with an implausibly straight face, but relaying it as White House spin (saying, for example, 'Obama aides believe the plan will mark the end of the Scott Brown election, letting them take back control of the media's narrative'). Then he'd be Marc Ambinder.... Update--It's a Chait Accompli! Megan McArdle provides a useful antidote to the premature anti-gloating of Klein's fellow JournoLister Jon Chait. ...See also Barone and Hennessy. ... P.S.: Is the double-secret JournoList cocoon encouraging this misjudgment? Even reported Journolister Paul Krugman's "guardedly optimistic." I don't think he should be...
UPDATE: An Anonymous Coward emails;
According to Alexa, Kaus ranks 376,526 as compared to, say, Atrios's 59,744 and Kos's 3,665. I'm not sure these are accurate data, but it would be irresponsible not to consider them.... Once Alexa goes down beyond the big sites, the noise starts to overwhelm the signal. Kaus could be considerably above or below the 376,000 rank. But then that is the point--if you are down among the tiddlers, you're down among the tiddlers...
