After all the recent hoopla around blogger pay (specifically b5media pay), it’s great to hear Shai chime in with the perfect response.

Among her points is our core of focussing on community, running everything through our bloggers for approval first, valuing our bloggers, training and all kinds of other things. She also responds to a great post by Abe with his suggestions on how we could improve our pay structure with the following:

  • Better starting payout – b5 now has a flat fee payment that enables new bloggers to make money from the start – and not “when your blog starts to make money”. And, at the same time, rewards blogs/bloggers who’ve been around longer. 
  • Traffic Bonus – Yep, we’ve now got this in place too, on top of the flat fee payment. It’s a tough one that we had to talk about (there are more issues here than network owners would care to think about!) over and over. But, hopefully, we’ve got a scheme in place at the moment that covers different types of blogs. 

     

  • Seniority Bonus – Apart from the “natural” benefit of being around longer (e.g., more links, more content, etc. and therefore, more traffic), we’ve addressed this via our sliding flat fee scale. 

     

  • Performance Bonus – This is tougher to quantify, but we’re definitely developing systems within the network to address this. We do believe that bloggers who work harder should get more in return. We’ve even recently conducted surveys network-wide to give us an idea on how to address some of the issues and challenges here. 

     

  • Travel & Training – Nope, we’re not paying for people to go to the Bahamas or to send them to Blog Cruises just yet (Hey, I’m a VP/co-owner and I haven’t even been anywhere yet! wink). But, we’re a network that actually believe in growth so we even have a specific department for this: Training and Development, headed by no other than Darren Rowse, Mr. Problogger, himself. And, he’s now going full time for b5 too! Can’t reveal everything that’s happening here, but it’s definitely happening. 

     

  • Schwag Bags – Again, we’re right at ‘ya. wink Part of my job as a VP for Community is actually to look at all these non-monetary, non-direct network blogger benefits. We’ve been chatting – and working out plans – about b5 schwags even as I type this. No, we don’t have masses of money alloted to this. But, we’ve definitely looked at our budget seriously enough to make sure that we are on to finding ways to reward our bloggers far beyond than cheques and PayPal payments.

It’s a great read if this is something you’ve been following. Just one of a thousand reasons I’m so proud to work with Shai!