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L.A. blogger and author Susannah Breslin blogs for money these days at Forbes, writing about living in a pink-slip world. Her most recent post talks about how the blog, which started at True/Slant, came to be at Forbes and how that works there. Essentially, bloggers for Forbes aren't rewarded financially for improving their writing, breaking some hard-to-get news or making an especially salient or persuasive argument — on anything about putting out a quality product. They are rewarded strictly for attracting unique visitors each month, which is not the same thing at all.
These days, it’s not enough to be a good writer online. You have to be a smart marketer, your own content factory, your own publicist. If you can do it all, you are golden. If you cannot, you are screwed.
* By the way: I should have noted that this isn't about Breslin — she just did a good post on the realities of blogging for money. Forbes also isn't anything special: lots of publishers tie their bloggers' pay to how many eyeballs they lure, regardless of how. It's an industry-wide issue. After all, the chase for easy ratings turned out so well for local TV news.