By now most folks have heard about the Jason Calacanis $1,000/month social bookmark/news offer. I’m sure some will be upset, others will be thrilled to see more money being injected into this area of the web. Lets not worry about sides right now, I’m interested in what these numbers actually represent. Bring on the basic math!
Jason provided some ball park numbers in his follow up post on the response to his offer:
- 12 social bookmarkers
- $1,000 per month ($12,000 per year)
- Estimated 2-3 hours per day
- At least 150 stories per month per person
So for $144,000 per year Jason expects to get at least 21,600 stories. So the big picture is that the maximum cost for his offer is approximately $6.67 per story link. If his social employers do more than the minimum of 150 stories then his costs per story goes done, so his per story link cost is probably going to be less than $6.67. These numbers are even more interesting in the light of Jason’s most recent post, Nicholas Carr nails it, because he estimates the value of each story link at $7 to $12. I don’t know the details of what other costs Jason has to pay for to keep the new Netscape.com up, but one thing seems clear, he won’t be loosing money by paying people for story links.
Now for the other end of these numbers, what the “Netscape Navigators” get out of this. To make things easier we’ll assume that they will be working regular business days, 23 per month. To meet the 150 links per month they will have to submit about 7 per day. Using the 2-3 hours per day that Jason mentioned each link is allotted 17 to 25 minutes. Not a completely unreasonable time frame I think. At 46 to 69 hours per month (23 x 2 and 23 x 3) the hourly rate is $21 to $14 per hour for each “Navigator”.
So is it worth it? We’ll obviously $12,000 per year isn’t exactly a full time job, but as extra money it isn’t bad. I think for most people the deciding factor would be time.