
BuzzFeed’s 19-year-old quizmaker will no longer work for free - pseudolus
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-friday-edition-1.5002107/why-this-19-year-old-buzzfeed-quizmaker-will-no-longer-work-for-free-1.5002111
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bastawhiz
For me, the real story here is that BF failed to take any action at all to
retain a top five driver of traffic to their ad revenue - driven website.

Let's say that quiz interactions from McMahon come out to 5% of ad impressions
for all of BF. What would a site as big as BF pay to ensure that those 5% of
impressions don't disappear overnight? At most companies, I'd imagine quite a
bit.

Even if we look at the low number for revenue generated from McMahon's quizzes
($200k), it's easy to imagine a company paying that much or more to continue
driving those numbers. If someone is providing you a service for free that
accounts for a very meaningful percentage of revenue, how much revenue could
they be generating for you if you actually incentivized them to do that work?
1.25x? 1.5x? 2x? More?

It would seem to me that BF never had the realization that "huh, maybe we
should protect this asset instead of protecting our short-term profits and
praying she keeps doing this for free forever."

~~~
slededit
People are sorted into different classes in companies. You’ll never get a
company to pay six figures for someone they consider a free intern -
regardless of whether it’s in their economic interest.

~~~
bastawhiz
> You’ll never get a company to pay six figures for someone they consider a
> free intern

And yet here they are, having lost that percentage of revenue because they had
this mindset. I don't think she needed a six figure salary necessarily, but BF
made exactly no attempt to do _anything_. Unlike an unpaid intern, McMahon
could have kept doing this indefinitely, not just for three summer months.

~~~
slededit
It’s human nature, and it happens not just in business. People get up in arms
whenever an open source project tries to monetize in some way other than
“support”.

~~~
derefr
Isn’t the whole point of having things like CEOs and shareholder-elected
boards of directors, to find people who are good at optimizing for the
business’s profits over what their own human natures tell them to do?

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barrkel
Price and value are two different things.

Looks like quizzes are valuable to BuzzFeed, if the gist of the article is
true.

It doesn't necessarily follow that the price of a quiz should go up. The price
of a quiz depends on the supply of and demand for quizzes. This quizmaker may
be able to charge a premium - certainly the price will be non-zero - but it's
unlikely to reflect the value it adds to BuzzFeed.

(This fundamental disconnect between price and value is what drives the
greater returns to capital vs returns to labour. Labour competes with other
labour; capital captures the difference in the cost of labour and the value
created by labour. And the whole system is set up to tax labour instead of
capital, because labour isn't very mobile, while capital is global.)

~~~
devereaux
This reads like a Marxist analysis. Let's focus on the biggest flaws in the
reasoning

> Labour competes with other labour

And consequently, capital competes with other capital. And in this day and
age, it's not expensive to create a website.

Assuming she's a world genius at making quizzes, all she needs in a domain
name + some viral marketing, then slap ads on top on that. Some extra content
would help, to drive visitors. But considering how people thrive on just doing
quizzes, her MVP may not even need anything besides the quizzes.

> labour isn't very mobile, while capital is global

The $ I spend on mechanical turk and the online contractors I hire when I need
them say otherwise.

> capital captures the difference in the cost of labour and the value created
> by labour.

No, factors of production are paid at their marginal productivity. Capital
without labor usually can't produce much. When labor is scarce and highly
productive (software engineering), it commends high prices.

I agree with you that writing quizzes seems simple, and a skill that could
easily be learned by anyone. However, she has written thousands of them. The
article says she was #5 of BF. There are not many people who do that.

Let's take another example: anyone can play basketball. But it takes some
special skills to score while a team of highly motivated, trained and paid
professionals try to prevent you from scoring. If you keep succeeding, this is
what commends a high wage - even if anyone can play basketball.

~~~
rfrey
You wrongly say the parent (which is a straight-ahead reminder of supply and
demand, plus some interesting implications springing from tax policy), and
then counter with an argument which is even closer to Marxism.

(Although Marx would roll his eyes at the idea that pricing was based on the
skill of the producer relative to her peers, and divorced from demand for the
good.)

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bemmu
Once upon a time I was prototyping a quiz-building app, and to launch it I
needed to create some initial quizzes. It was just soul-crushing work to me,
and I never managed to launch the app.

Seems her "secret" for writing a lot of popular quizzes was that it wasn't
work to her. I can relate how someone at BuzzFeed getting paid to make them
would be much less effective than McMahon creating them as a pastime she
naturally enjoys.

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randomacct3847
So called “shadow work” is becoming more prevalent. When you choose to self
checkout at a grocery store you’re essentially doing work for free (scanning
and bagging your own groceries) in place of a paid cashier and bagger.

~~~
peteretep
One would assume that in a sufficiently competitive market (for examples,
certainly in the UK, supermarkets), this then gets passed on in terms of price
cuts.

~~~
phillipcarter
> One would assume

I severely doubt it's the case. Besides, businesses aren't typically
interested in having a competitive market anyways. It's probably more
profitable to not lower prices at all and lobby to make it harder for
competitors to lower prices . . . or just conspire with major competitors to
keep them higher. Both actions have a strong historical precedent in US
markets, at least.

~~~
ddxxdd
Businesses are generally more competitive than people realize. The average
person believes that corporate profits are typically in the 36% range, which
is 5X higher than what reality shows:

[http://www.aei.org/publication/the-public-thinks-the-
average...](http://www.aei.org/publication/the-public-thinks-the-average-
company-makes-a-36-profit-margin-which-is-about-5x-too-high-part-ii/)

~~~
xyzzy123
Partly this is because profits are taxed, so it makes sense to shift profit
into some other accounting bucket like capital expenditure / growth, offshore
ip etc.

------
ykevinator
Stack overflow has the same business model.

~~~
CM30
To be fair, most platforms and social media sites tend to have the same
business model. The only reason YouTube or Medium or Facebook or Twitter or
Reddit or whatever else are financially viable is because most people are
volunteering their efforts for free.

Arguably the same rings true of every wiki, internet forum and community site
in general.

The question hence becomes 'what point does a site or service go from being
innocent to exploitative?'

Few would say Wikipedia is exploiting its users. Some may say that about
StackOverflow or YouTube, but many would say it about BuzzFeed or the
Huffington Post.

What's the line between a community and a platform and a publisher? What kinds
of sites and services and business models based on user generated free content
are a good thing and which aren't?

~~~
pilsetnieks
I would say the exploitative threshold is crossed when the unpaid community
members don't derive any value for themselves from the content (or maybe when
the community organizer derives significantly more value from it than its
users.)

From wikipedia they get information, from the Stackexchange network - answers
to questions that enable or improve their work or hobby; Buzzfeed's Justin
Bieber haircut quizzes, however, do not provide any value to the users, apart
from a tiny fleeting endorphin rush, maybe.

~~~
im3w1l
It's not the reader that gets exploited it's the creator? What does someone
get for answering a question on stack overflow?

~~~
HillaryBriss
often it's just the pleasure of being ignored, or downvoted, or insulted by a
newbie who wants you to do some additional free coding work. so, yeah, it's a
pretty good deal

------
jasoncartwright
"If you're good at something, never do it for free" \-- The Joker

~~~
arthurcolle
pretty sure that was Joker's mother

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alexkavon
> "It's just crazy because, like I said, I'm in college. I didn't really know
> what I wanted to do with my career yet, and now I have all these options, so
> it's really good."

 _glances over at timer counting down from 15 minutes_

~~~
iaw
She's talented enough that she was driving a substantial portion of BuzzFeed's
traffic without work experience at the age of 19.

Netflix did not reach out to her because it's her "15 minutes" they reached
out because she has a skillset that overlaps with their needs. Long after
we've forgotten about this article she'll likely continue to be successful in
internet marketing if that's the route she chooses.

This young woman just learned that something she does for fun in her spare
time has a high economic value.

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smsm42
Wait, so these annoying quizes that keep popping on all social media and that
force me to block people because it becomes intolerable - somebody wrote 700
of them _just for the fun of it_ , without payment? This is.... I have no
words. I assumed at least somebody made a living out of it, however weird is
this way of making money. But just producing clickbait spam filler for free?
Surprises ever day.

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aboutruby
I guess working for exposure does pay well (landing a job at Netflix) /s

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devereaux
1) Because she gained experience while writing 7000 quizzes

2) Because with said experiences, she developed mastery on the topic (cf the
10'000h rule)

3) Because she can now charge sweet sweet money for her services (being the #5
quiz maker on BF would imply that she knows how to provides value)

In retrospect, even if she did if for free, it wasn't a bad deal: it was a fun
way to spend her time and she gained some skills

It's not much different from whoever hacked Linux servers as a teen, then
suddenly found this skillset could translate to good money on the market-
sometimes more than what they studied for in college.

~~~
pacifika
If buzzfeed hadn’t laid off people she wouldn’t have received these job offers
as she would have been none the wiser.

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lawrenceyan
Good. Age shouldn't be used as a means to discriminate against someone. Pay
should be based on skill level and ability to provide value.

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faissaloo
I'm surprised she was doing it for free in the first place

