Football Blogging Salaries

Want to make money writing about football?

You mean they’re going to pay me for ranting and raving like a moron? Sign me up!

Blogging and the self-employment opportunities it offers (fewer than most people realise, but still) is an attractive proposition. Add the emotional escapism that football offers (if in doubt, think of the double life that Football Manager owners lead as real people) and you might have *some* idea of the ‘rush’ football fans get when they think about running their own football blog.

Fact #1: Football blogging pays less than, say, blogging about health, legal issues, self-improvement, finance, technology, travel, style…I could go on and on. Targeting the young male demographic just isn’t worth it for advertisers, so unless you’re dealing in merchandise (or gambling) or have a few hundred million lying around for a club takeover, there’s little money in the football business.

Fact #2: The online football community as a whole is a few years behind in terms of technical aptitude and awareness. It’s not a criticism nor does it seem to be a hindrance - in fact this lack of awareness boosts the optimism a football blogger has that one day they can make a living writing about football. However it also prevents many quality writers from striking out on their own and while some just fade away, others are bought up by blog networks, magazines and newspapers. Very few make it to this point though, and it gets harder every year.

When you match these two with the global financial crisis and the difficulty many ventures (football and otherwise) are having in securing funding, it’s inevitable that football pay rates / employment will take a cut as well.

And pay rates in the football industry, except for major media outlets, are quite low. Whereas one could expect to make $100 per post as a blogger in other fields, you’d be hard-pressed to find ‘blogs’ that pay over $10 per post (yes, there are exceptions, and I’m not talking about OleOle here). The football blogging community has a long way to go and a key factor in it will be investment from blogging networks (assuming the likes of b5media take the sport seriously) and ventures like OleOle and Pikum (not a blog but they could easily add a betting advice column for each match they’re covering).

The other day I was reading David P’s piece on b5media and their blogging rate cuts - what stood out was not the low pay rates - (I’ve paid $2 per article myself) but that they are paying strictly according to the traffic each writer generates.

Contrast this with Soccerlens.com, SoccerNews.com, 4sportsake.com, OleOle.com and others - where we’re paying either a monthly retainer or a per-article fee to our writers.

As someone who’s worked as a freelance writer, I prefer retainers to per-article fee or traffic-based compensation - it’s definitely the way to go for experienced or top quality writers who bring more than just content to the site. However that doesn’t scale well - news gets old very quickly and paying someone $10 per article when each article is earning $5 is just plain stupid.

The main hurdle with perfomance-related pay is reliable tracking for each author. In a blog network it’s simple to work out - you just check the traffic for that blog. For a multi-author site like Soccerlens however, you would need a different method of tracking traffic for one author’s articles over a period of time.

At Soccerlens I’m considering ditching the per-article model and adopting a stipend+performance-related pay model so that our writers have some basic financial guarantees and beyond that it’s up to their creativity and quality to make money for themselves and us. The credit crunch has forced everyone to streamline and optimize their finances, we’re no different.