You Don’t Have To Write One Word For Free: Talk Heats Up On Wizard’s Moves

I noted a while back that in moving into a new on-line iteration, Wizard had dumped a major amount of archival content, including columns by many writers no longer with the company. It's since become a topic on other sites, so I wanted to revisit it here.

While the move seems to fall somewhere between the kind of thing designed to punish vocally active ex-writers and a brusque sweeping aside of the past for no particular reason beyond "because we can," and the whole matter is compounded by the fact that some writers seem to have been assured that that material would stay up, I'm always a little confused when moves like Wizard's get argued in terms of the offending party's perceived financial interest. "Don't you want the extra traffic and therefore the extra revenue generated by this content?" more than a few people have roughly asked. The problem is, equating content to hits to revenue to corporate goals in such a facile fashion seems to me a rudimentary way of looking at the Internet for profit right now. Frequently, companies are willing to sacrifice material that doesn't fit into a new conception of what their archives should look like, what their sites should be about in order to better use the Internet to their advantage. Sites that dump content may also simply want to purge themselves of certain relationships or rid themselves of links to certain types of pieces more than they want to profit from them. And despite people angrily asserting it is so, Internet advertising isn't a straight traffic meritocracy -- a lot of different things can be rewarded by advertising attention, including issues of overall site quality that could arguably be improved through pruning.

That's not to say Wizard's dump wasn't jerky that in the end it won't prove totally short-sighted. I'm just saying that any argument asserting the utility of all content isn't the slam dunk some folks think it is, not anymore.

That's a really long introduction to direct you to this article, about what may be the other half of recent Wizard strategy: putting together a group of unpaid writers to generate content, dangling the carrot that they might place paying work within the magazine itself. I agree with the writer of this essay that this is a horrible development for a company of Wizard's size and stature, and I would hope that any writer taking non-paying work from Wizard stop and that any writer taking paying work from the company find out exactly what's going on and decide if they're OK with it before they continue keeping them as a client. Comics has a long tradition of using unpaid work, and I can't pay the writers who have provided work to CR the money they're worth. But Wizard is a hugely successful company with a highly-compensated top tier; to use this kind of incentive is exploitative more than it's smart business and I urge any and all creative people involved to do what they can to influence the situation.
 
posted 9:05 am PST | Permalink
 

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