How much are words worth?

[unrepentant progress]

I submit to you that this is one reason why your media sucks. Because it's next to impossible to make a living. Bolding mine.

We wanted to calculate how many feature stories the top magazines in America assign every year, and how much they typically pay their writers for the assignments. The list was only going to be for the top publications in America–the ones that pay between $1.50-$5 per word and that comprise the top tier of journalism. These are the magazines that line the shelves of airport bookstores everywhere and the ones that we write for pretty regularly. Think The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Atlantic, Wired, Men’s Journal, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, O, The Atavist, and the dozen or so other magazines that sits on the tops of toilet tanks and the tables of dentist offices from Seattle to Orlando.

...

After ten minutes listing the average number of features in each magazine multiplied by the number of issues annually we had a number: 800. On average these stories would run at about 3000 words and pay $1.50 per word. It was only a ball-park estimate of the overall freelance writing market cap. But it was also a rather depressing one. Let me put this in bold so it stands out on the page: The total market for long form journalism in major magazines in America is approximately $3.6 million. To put it another way: the collective body of writers earned less than Butch Jones, a relatively unknown college football coach, earned in a single year.

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Another way to figure out what the total publishing industry is worth is to check out the advertising rates that mainstream magazines publish on their websites. Take Wired, for example – not to pick on them, but because they are a representative of the some of the best journalism that exists in the country today. According to its media kit, a single page of advertising sells for $141,680. (And that’s not even the top of the market. A full page ad in GQ sells for more than $180,000). Multiply that by the number of full page ads in a single issue of Wired (about 30) and you get about $4.6 million in gross revenues per issue of the magazine.

Think about that for a second. A single issue of one major American magazine generates more gross revenue than what the entire magazine industry pays out in word rates over an entire year. If you figure that Wired spends about $30,000 on words in any given issue then a little more back of the envelope math says that words account for only 0.6% of the magazine’s revenue.

$3.6 million. That’s it. And the math gets even more depressing. If we assume that writers should earn the average middle class salary of $50,000 a year, then there’s only enough money in that pot to keep 72 writers fully employed. And, of course, those writers would have to pen approximately 11 well thought out and investigated features per year–something that both my friend and I knew was almost impossible.

More: http://www.scottcarney.com/2015/01/feature-story-market-cap-writer-wants-think/

Also see his followup post: The case for $20 per word.

[blkmusclmachine]

1. ,

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[Bill USA]

2. the internet may offer the opportunity for creative types (e.g. writers) to get a better 'deal'.

With fewer layers of infrastructure and costs to hide profits in maybe the writers will be able to get a larger portion of the revenues. Of course, this will probably only be the case if writers organize and deal with managements as a group. Otherwise, count on being screwed.