Do 1.8 million monthly page views equal $60,000 annually?
A recent New York Times Magazine article tossed out a set of numbers that has stuck in my mind: “in order to earn back a $60,000 annual salary, an online journalist needs to generate a whopping 1.8 million page views a month.”
The article does not say how the number was reached, but I did some calculations. 1.8 million views equals 1,800 CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) per month or 21,600 a year. Divide that into $60,000 and you get the equivalent of a CPM rate of about $2.80.
So if you want to publish serious journalism you are probably going to have two choices. Choice one: run the equivalent of an exclusive risque picture of Sarah Palin a couple of times a month to drive the numbers and then use the rest of the time to do the journalism. In fact, hire someone just to come up with the kind of trash people like to read and then surround that with real journalism.
The other choice is to ask people to pay for high quality journalism with no sleaze and no CPM worries. At this point, that’s my choice.
