Posted by Eugene Volokh:
Splitting the Proceeds:
Some people asked us how we split our (quite modest) income from this
blog. I thought for a while about this. One obvious answer was to pay
by the post, but there are obvious bad incentives there. (I doubt that
these incentives would affect our judgments consciously, but these
things sometimes have a way of subconsciously influencing even
well-intentioned people. And I worried about bad incentives for me as
much as the bad incentives for others.)
Another was to pay by the total word count, but I don't want people to
fall into a "we're getting paid by the word" mentality. We law
professors are loquacious enough as it is; no need to encourage us. My
sense was that longer posts did tend to be more valuable to readers,
up to a certain word count, and excluding block quotes, but not in
proportion to their length. I also thought about factoring in the
total number of links to our posts, but I decided against this,
chiefly because most of our visitors don't come through links to
specific posts, and because links end up being hard to measure.
So the formula, which we cobloggers agreed to, is this (and thanks
very much to Chris Lansdown of [1]PowerBlogs for implementing the code
that supports this): Each person is paid in proportion to the sum of
the square roots of their post lengths, with the proviso that the post
lengths are in words, exclude blockquoted text, and are capped at 900
words (so one gets no extra credit for words past 900).
My favorite response to this was Dave Kopel's:
Most of all, I'm thrilled to be paid by a system involving the sum
of square roots. Maybe I can use the money to buy a slide rule, a
pocket protector, and some more black socks.
Yes, the geek chic factor of a sum-of-the-square-roots formula is
indeed one of the reasons I chose it . . . .
By the way, no need to suggest alternative schemes; it took us enough
time to settle on this one that I doubt we'll reconsider it any time
soon.
References
1. http://powerblogs.com/
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