If You Don’t Click on This Story, I Don’t Get Paid

by The Awl

If you put it all together, at the very least, freelance online work can be a significant part of a viable freelancer success story, the connective tissue supplemented by occasional print work. Break your writing down on an hourly wage rather than a per word basis, which is math any smart freelancer does, and you learn that the five-hundred-dollar opinion piece you write for a website that took three hours makes more financial sense than the six-thousand-dollar piece you spent sixty hours reporting, writing, and re-writing over the course of a month for a national magazine. “The notion that you get paid more to do something that’s deeply reported for print and you get paid less for opinion on the web [isn’t entirely true],” freelancer, podcaster, and newsletter creator extraordinaire Ann Friedman said. “It all bleeds together for me. Those categories that people use to describe different types of content is not how I see my work breaking down.”

The question is, how long will the relative good times of getting paid to write on the web last?

Read the rest at The Awl.