You can get people to work for nothing. But play around with their dreams and they won't forgive you

WHAT ARE 1,000 words worth? In years gone by, you could get a day of Ernest Hemingway’s time: the writer committed to putting 1,000 words on paper before he took his first drink.

Likewise JG Ballard, the author of Empire of the Sunand Crash, would stop in the middle of a sentence if the 1,000 word mark had been reached. He once told an interviewer: "I try to write about 1,000 words a day in longhand and then edit it very carefully later before I type it out . . . self-discipline is enormously important – you can't rely on inspiration or a novel would take 10 years."

Author Graham Greene on the other hand, was a relative slacker, viewing a day’s work to be exactly 500 words, written straight into his black notebook.

Far lower down the word-production line, the cliche of a picture being worth 1,000 words applies to most newspaper journalism: only a few lucky hacks can command €1 a word or more, which is not bad for those who spend an afternoon typing. (More realistic figures can be found on the National Union of Journalists website, which keeps tabs on the pay rates of freelancers.)

Recently a small UK-based media company, Snack Media, caused a minor storm by placing an advert offering work for just £10 for 1,000 words, or a penny a word. The company is a “content farm”, which conjures images of lambs gambolling in the fields, though it is more at the battery end of the market.

Its “writers” produce words that few people will read intentionally and Space Media offers that “content” to companies with space to fill.This could be in the form of sponsored tweets or a Facebook entry.

It might secure a football match report written by somebody watching the television, or a piece about the joys of the Amalfi Coast by someone who never endures the inconvenience of looking for their passport.

As platforms proliferate across the web so words have become a commodity. The idea behind Snack Media, and a host of similar companies, is to charge for content at one end while getting it almost free at the other.

It is a scaled-down version of the Huffington Post business model. HuffPo, one of the world’s most popular websites, was founded by Arianna Huffington as a liberal-leaning online newspaper. It was sold recently to AOL for $315 million (€221 million).

Many of the site’s stories are supplied by a 16,000-strong army of loyal bloggers working for free. They know that Huffington has created a bigger platform than anything they can create themselves. If they are good enough, their work will find an audience and perhaps even the eye of a commissioning editor of a newspaper who will pay them for their efforts.

The success of the HuffPo model is in stark contrast to the decline of print media, which is staffed by expensive journalists and requires even more expensive printing presses and distribution networks.

Snack Media’s mistake was not in offering too little, but too much. It thought that, in today’s post-HuffPo word market, bloggers would prefer to work for £10 than for free. Snack Media was wrong and its derisory job offer has become a PR nightmare.

I’ve a feeling the negative response to the ad is something to do with the nature of incentives. It has echoes of the Israeli day-care story first brought to the world’s attention in the book Freakonomics. When parents were fined for picking up their kids late from the nursery, the number of times it happened rose. This was because they had substituted an economic incentive (the $3 fine) for a moral one (the guilt parents were supposed to feel when they left their kids waiting).

The introduction of money played with the delicate balance that is human behaviour and the parents began to act rationally, working out that $3 for an hour’s extra child care made sense. The moral incentive was far more powerful than the new economic one.

Instead of money, HuffPo’s bloggers are working for a complex stew of reasons, probably included among them are the desire for fame, love or attention tomorrow. They may see it as the first rung in their climb towards a column in the New York Times. Or it may make them feel like they are in the same game as Hemingway or Ballard. Who knows? Who cares? If it works for them great, we all have dreams that keep us from looking at our lives too harshly.

But Snack Media’s derisory £10 snaps us back to reality. Its cynicism has helped prove that in today’s “free economy” you can get people to work for nothing, but play around with their dreams and they will never forgive you.