I agree that my analogy to slavery is a flawed one and obviously has more to do with creating emotional resonance than verisimilitude. I also agree to an extent that the Brijit community of writers is motivated less by money and more by competition, or by some sense of purpose. I don’t quite get it, I suppose, but am willing to acknowledge that perhaps there are a group of people out there who just love to write summaries and share some sort of camaraderie.

User-generated content after all, is a labour of love, like Wikipedia for example. But that’s the crux of the issue that I had. Free content is priceless because it comes from a place of sharing and community. When you put a price tag on that content, it changes the dynamic. By its very nature, money indicates a perceived value and sets up an economic structure. It changes a socialist dynamic to a capitalist one.

In the web 2.0 world, anyone can be a writer, or a musician, or a movie producer. Should they get paid for it? Perhaps. But if they do it for the love of it, not the money, would they even care?

These are questions that will be answered in time, I’m sure. I’d just like to say I respect Brijit and have no qualms with the intention or premise of the site, which really is quite marvelous. Best of luck to you.

That said, let’s take the notion that Brijit is some sort of slave master off the table. Slavery is involuntary, and there’s nobody writing for Brijit that didn’t explicitly choose to do so. Not to read too deeply into your analogy, but it demeans the horror of actual slavery.

Second, let’s make a more meaningful comparison of payments here. We’re not competing with Conde Nast for writers — we’re competing with other sites that work with user-generated content. And of course, the vast majority of these pay precisely nothing. Zero. Zip. Nada. So even if we dropped our fees to $1, we’d still pay infinitely more than virtually any online content site out there.

Finally, a word about competition and process. At present we take up to three submission for a typical assignment, which means you’re only competing with up to two others. And in terms of speed, some of our most prolific Brijiteers can craft up to three abstracts per hour. To be clear, we never set out for someone to make a living on Brijit. But publish two abstracts a day and you’re talking about $200 per month — it adds up. And it’s particularly good if you’re going to read / listen to/ watch the source material anyway, especially since you have the flexibility to do so in your pajamas.

Hope you’ll stick with us as we grow.

Best,
Jeremy Brosowsky
founder & editor-in-chief, Brijit
http://www.brijit.com