Category: Job Search & HR

Price of a Digitally-Published Word


Some topics simply cannot let you be.  They are just way too potent.  For example, some time ago, in Part I of my Arts & Entertainment by the Numbers series, I already addressed the matter of earnings one can expect to generate if he or she decides to become a “writer.”  If you recall, it was established that, with a few exceptions primarily driven by seductive (literally) subjects, or notoriety (oh, I am sorry – fame) of the authors, or some magical (again, literally) mass appeal, there is not much money in writing. 

Of course, I didn’t talk about ALL “writing.”  That post was focused on books, both fictional and not – the self-contained multi-page opuses that come into public distribution through more or less conventional channels, which in our contemporary world include not only the old-fashioned publishing houses, but also self-publishing (including web-publishing) and on-demand-printing.  The latter have been pretty much commandeered by our ubiquitous mega-villains, Amazon and Google.  

Surprisingly, the vast majority of books are still printed and bound; and pretty much all of them are digitized as AZW, EPUB, IBA, PDF, etc. publications.  From my personal experience I can tell you that royalties on e-books, being profitability based, are actually much higher than on the printed copies.  As you can imagine, distribution of files costs a fraction of physical printing, shipping, etc.

Of course, books are not the only products of the “writing” professionals.  I fitted playwrights into Theater and screenwriters into Movies.  And I didn’t want to discuss the earnings of conventional journalists, not only because I am really appalled by the contemporary standards of that trade, but also because there is nothing particularly special about their compensation.  It’s basically a pay scale – no different than the one for any back-office workers.      

According to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an average reporter or a correspondent makes about $21 per hour, or $43,780 a year.  Of course, those working in publications with household names, especially in DC or NYC, or at cable and broadcasting venues, earn above average.  But even then we are talking $53K-$60K annual salaries.  Nothing glamorous.

If famous faces of Barbara Walters, or Katie Couric, or Matt Lauer pop into your head, stop it – those people might’ve started as journalists early in their career, but that’s not what they are now – through some peculiar twists in their fates they’ve become multimillion-dollar TV personalities with roomfuls of staff who do the actual work and get paid what I said above.  Moreover, as far as I am concerned, the professional comedians Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, and John Oliver turned out to be much better newsmen than all those other smiley faces.             

But forget all that!  The remarkable thing about our electronically permeated era (as far as the writing is concerned, of course), is that the majority of the “written” words nowadays floats in the realm of computer codes; resides on some servers in the unknown to the authors locations.  The vast majority of that majority is motivated into existence by a singular intangible incentive – the writer’s desire to verbally express his/her opinions and ideas; it’s produced for no material reward at all.

This includes over 10,000,000 (that’s 10 million!) individual and collective blogs, which produce over 4,000,000 (and that’s 4 million!)  posts every day (hence, my utter surprise that my own humble entries are consistently found and read by people from different countries); online fiction publications; fan-fiction entries into various pop-culture Wikias, unpaid entries (in hopes of exposure) into a multitude of e-zines, etc., etc.  It’s all created for no pay and mostly available for free (if you don’t count the unbearable assault of advertising on more popular sites as your cover charge – I do).   

And even those who appear to be writing not on spec but on assignment or write on spec but get syndicated, possibly generating fees and royalties for their digital words at such giant contentmongers as, for example, The Huffington Post – nobody seems to know for sure how much money they make.  Well, people close to the subject probably have some scattered bits and pieces of information, but it’s so sparse and inconsistent, it’s impossible to draw any solid conclusions.  In fact, the aforementioned Bureau of Labor Statistics simply gives up on the matter, basically admitting that the new media is so, ahem, new that there are no set rates and no correspondent statistics.    

But I am not an official government agency – I am just a curious person armed with my common sense and capable of making logical conclusions.  Moreover, I have the freedom to extrapolate, speculate, and infer.  And infer I shall.    

The first fundamental truth about online presence is that the majority of people religiously believe in its powers of publicity.  Hence, the said number of blogs, shameless exhibitionism of facebook pages and personal sites, endless YouTube videos, etc., etc. – general population thinks that if anybody can “be found” today, it will be online.  A few miraculous stories of the Internet exposure actually leading to “fame” only reinforces this belief.  (And the sea of content is growing exponentially, if you catch my drift – but that’s another topic).  In context of our subject this makes me think that those who get published in popular online outlets agree to do so for next to nothing, i.e. for much  less than even conventional writers get.

The second fundamental characteristic of the Internet itself as a business is that the majority of revenues generated by non-eCommerce websites, if any, come from online advertising, at least for now (I think this situation is going to change, but that’s, again, another topic).  Advertisers, just like the general public, have their own system of the Internet faith – the click-per-view conversion.  In the web environment, the old admen rule of placement for the maximum consumer impact gets a statistical dress-up: a certain number of views results in a click on the ad’s link; a certain number of clicks, in its turn, converts into a consumer acquisition, i.e. a sale.  Everyone is invested into the same idea: the more views, the more clicks, the more sales; hence, the popular pay-per-click pricing formula.  As a result, the online content is monetarily valued on its potential viewership. 

This made me think that the most logical way for an owner of a content-driven website to compensate a contributing writer would be based on some rate-per-view (just like YouTube with its videos).  The question is how much?  What’s the digitally published word worth?  Apparently, even Labor Statistics officials don’t know – most likely because reporting those earnings is still a gray area.    

Ah, but that’s what the Internet is actually for – the information superhighway.  If something piques your interest and you know how to formulate your search, you will find what you need:  like the large UK blogging hub on everything pop WhatCulture.com (they are absolutely right – they have nothing to do with Culture, concentrating primarily on blockbusters and gossip in film, big hits and gossip in TV, mega stars and gossip in music, plus gaming, sports, WWE). 

The site’s content model is based on accepting (not guaranteed) and publishing other people’s submissions.  On their Write For Us and Get Paid page they openly solicit material from the potential contributors (Lists! Lists! Lists! That’s their preferred format – “9 Reasons to Be Excited About Arrested Development Season 5” or “10 Actors Who Really Don’t Belong in the Upcoming Movies” and shit like that).  Therefore, the “get-paid” rate is openly disclosed right there: £0.40 ($0.62) per 1,000 views. 

Aha!  With that in hand, let us entertain ourselves with some arithmetical exercising:  Yesterday, the most-read entry in the film section of WhatCulture.com was “10 Things You Need to Know About Captain America: Civil War” – it had 1.3 million views, thus generating its author $806.  Not bad, assuming he put it together pretty quickly.  Theoretically speaking, if you can pop one of this every day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year, you can actually earn $210K annual wage! 

But the probability of it, of course, is quite slim – not only because no one on their own can research and write 260 entries a year, but mainly because it’s hard to achieve such viewership: for example, the most read TV article had only 223 thousand views ($138.26) and the top one in a deeply hidden Art division (the only one in the whole site I personally found interesting – 10 Up and Coming Portrait Photographers) attracted exactly 2000 readers ($1.32 worth).  The audience’s interest is fickle. 

This site is big and popular – the effort of a full-scope statistical analysis goes beyond my level of interest (I am sure the management has all the numbers readily available to them), but my quick-glance conclusion is that the average views per post is about 50,000 or $31 value.  So, ladies and gentlemen, even if you can do three of those a week, the more realistic earnings would be a modest amount of $4,836 per year.  

I say, don’t quit your day job for this just yet – that is, of course, if you have one.

Quote of the Week: No Retirement in Your Future


  George-Burns_article_story_large"Retirement at sixty-five is ridiculous.  When I was sixty-five I still had pimples."

           George Burns

           1896 – 1996

 The Frustrated CFO's Comment:  At this point, the best my generation can do is to look for humor in our situation.

Job Search: Napoleon Bonaparte Is Hiring


This is a story my friend shared with me.  It just happened.

A headhunter, with whom she worked in the past has contacted her.  He has a client looking for someone with her qualifications.   She is always interested to hear about new opportunities, especially those with potential to expand her CFO expertise.

Surprisingly, the urgency in the headhunter’s voice was incredible.  He sounded like a 911 caller witnessing an explosion.  He rushed through the sentences, jumped from one point to another like a mad frog, even forgot to tell her what was the client’s business .  Somewhere in the middle of it,  my friend has realized that she was somewhat overqualified for the job.  Moreover,  the title and the compensation weren’t defined.  That should have alarmed her.  Yet in her vanity, and she knows it, she decided that all the hurriedness was fueled by the headhunter’s worries of her not being interested.

Actually, there were a few aspects of the job that sparked her interest.  My friend relayed this to the headhunter.   He was very excited and went about contacting the client on the next step. 

Oh, my God!  Within a couple of hours, he called her eleven times: “Setting up a phone interview; no, they are foregoing the phone interview and want to meet you in person straight away; you will meet four different people; no, just two; no, it will be two separate interviews back to back – first with the HR Manager and then with the Owner.  Please, pleeeeese, can we do it tomorrow?” 

And so, the next day my firiend went to the company’s offices and met with the HR Manager.  Talking to him, she was wondering if he would be able to make it through the meeting without falling into a panic attack.  Eventually,  he led her through the hallway to meet with the Owner/CEO.   His agitation escalated in alarming stages.  It was like playing a Liszt’s Etude, which calls for “fast” on the first page, then for “faster” on the second, “as fast as possible” on the third, and still “faster” on the next.

At the very moment she got to shake the hand of the tiny man behind the huge desk, it finally dawned on her.  It had nothing to do with my friend and her qualifications.  This miniature boss of an interesting, but relatively tiny company ($30M) exuded a sense of grandeur of Napoleonic proportions.  He had everyone scurrying like scared mice.  Even those who were not employed by him; including the headhunter, who works for one of the top 3 international recruitment houses.

The first thing he told her was, “I need a second in command who can keep the troops under control.  There were two before you, who were dismissed.”  Funny guy!

Hard-Working CFO Is Not a Don Quixote


As we already discussed, people like me (not only CFOs and Controllers, but anyone of the same makeup) work hard because they cannot operate any other way.  We do it out of self-respect. If we undertake a job with its multitude of functions we try our best to adhere to our own high standards of work ethics.

Does this mean that we are idealists of the Don Quixote persuasion?  Will we sacrifice merit-based rewards for the sake of doing the job that makes us proud?  Will we let our bosses to take advantage of our self-drive and pay us peanuts?

No, no and no.  If that what you gathered from Why Do I Work So Hard?, you grossly misunderstood me.  Don’t forget that we first accept a job, but once we do, we start working hard.  And the compensation should be adequate.

The thing is, though, we know this about ourselves.  We know that we will do our best for the employer and we know that, unless something we cannot control ourselves happens, the company will benefit from our efforts tremendously.  So, don’t forget that: reflect it in your resumes, your cover letters, your conversations with hiring managers.

And if you made a conscious choice of working in a privately owned business, you actually have an opportunity to present yourself to the people who care about the company’s well-being the most – the owners.  Let them know that you adhere to high level of work ethics.  It will make a difference and it can be used as a negotiating point.

{Side note: my experience shows that stressing these points with recruiters or HR managers will be wasteful and frequently detrimental to your ability to move to the next level of interviewing process.  These people are employees, you don’t know their attitudes towards the job and they may feel threatened.}

A quick word of warning: never say, “I am the best thing that will ever happen to your company.”  First of all, you cannot guarantee that because there are a lot of circumstances that can negate your diligent efforts.  Secondly, I was told by many a psychologists that these types of statements are classified as “over-compensating” and usually signal lack of confidence.  Instead, present your case based on your prior achievements and relate them to your dedication.

Of course, the salary negotiations are tricky and influenced by many circumstances: the job market conditions, whether you are currently employed, whether this job is a real stepping stone in your career, etc.   Nevertheless, that would be true for all applicants, but if you are indeed a naturally hard-working person like me, you have an edge.

Hopefully, by the time a raise and/or a bonus discussion comes up, your reputation will be solidified and you will be rewarded for your efforts.  If you still need to negotiate, you will have a chance to talk about your present, not past, achievements.

And here I would like to refer you to the following The Ladders article, which directly addresses the issue of Salary Negotiation.

 

 

Legal Expert’s Rundown on Employers’ Rights to Discriminate


ImagesI frequently write (and talk) about the distortion of bill of rights in the workplace and other similar perks of employees' existence.  Hell, I even have a separate category for posts devoted to nepotism. I always stress out that small-business employers can pretty much define their own rules, as long as they put them in writing and notify new hires of how things are done in their domain.  Not only that labor authorities don't look into employment conditions of companies with less than 50 employees, but, even if one or another wrong-doing is brought to their attention, they will take the corporate side as long as there is a correspondent written policy in place.  And think a hundred times before suing your former employer – you may end up staring at a defamation law suit filed against you. 

Now, I have an opportunity to direct my readers to an expert's list of legally permissible ways employers can discriminated both existing employees and job applicants in a business of any size – big or small.  I have previously quoted a veteran employment law specialist and award-winning writer Donna Ballman on the issues of workers' rights.  And, as you can see, her popular blog Screw You Guys, I Am Going Home is a single proud member of my Blog Roll.  I highly recommend for everyone to follow the link below and read her latest contribution to AOL Jobs – the characteristically concise summary of legitimized discriminatory practices.  I guarantee that at least some of them will surprise you.

8 Ways Employers Can Discriminate Against Workers – Legally by Donna Ballman