The Number of Views on NewsBreak Stories Predicts the RPM: Are They Manipulating Writers’ Earnings?

Statistical analysis shows that the number of story views is negatively associated with RPM values and earnings (r=-.76, p<.00001), predicting 58 percent of the variance, raising the question of whether Newsbreak is suppressing earning rates for writers

I won’t go into the history of how writers have been treated on NewsBreak or the frequency of contract changes and unclear expectations as this has already been written about at length by many, myself included. I also want to say, before presenting what I’ve learned from the data related to my own articles on the site, that I am thankful for the months I was able to earn a decent amount from the site, which helped me pay my bills.

Additionally, I do understand that sites have the right to decide who they want to employ and how much to pay different individuals, and that Newsbreak certain has the right to pay different employees different amounts. No one is forced to work for them and we do so by choice.

At the same time, I have notices something that seems off regarding my article views and associated RPM values. Before I had my base pay cut off, I earned $2K to $3K a month in views only due to uniformly high RPMs. I naively believed that I would just lose the $1500 in monthly base pay, but continue to be able to earn the amount I had before for views. I figured I’d miss the $1500 but would still be making more than I was on any other writing platform.

But once my base pay was cut off, my RPM’s started dropping. The first month wasn’t too bad but then they began to plummet. Since then, my earnings have topped out at between $30-$50 a month. To be fair when I saw my RPMs dropping to 4s and 5s and not infrequently .01 or .08 with a about a dozen RPM’s of 0, with no logical way of predicting the RPM my articles would earn and only form replies to my emails that didn’t answer my questions, I stopped writing as frequently. Each month I still hope something will happen to allow me to earn higher rates, but so far this hope hasn’t been realized.

This month, I finally arrived at the point where I could no longer ignore the pattern of my RPM’s especially given that several other writers have written about the issue. It was clear that my highest RPM’s which were around 8, were assigned to stories with very low views, while the articles that received a large number of views (over 10k) received the lowest RPMs.

Today, I finally decided to calculate some statistics in order to see if I’m just crying wolf or if this is occurring to the degree I believe it is for my articles. I calculated a correlation and when that turned to be significant, I calculated a regression model.

The correlations between my story views and the RPM’s assigned to them was -.76 (p<.00001). For those who don’t have a stats background, a correlation measure the strength of a relationship between two things. In this case, my question was how strong is the relationship between my articles views and the RPMs they’re assigned?

Correlation coefficients range from -1 to +1, and each of these represent a perfect relationship. The farther away from zero the coefficient is, the stronger the relationship.

Correlations of .75 (or -.75) and higher are considered to be strong relationships. In this case the correlation was negative so for my views and RPMs as one went up the other went down, or the higher my views the lower the RPMs and the lower the views the higher the RPMs. Regarding the regression model, these findings indicated that almost 60% of the variability in RPMs assigned to my articles was accounted for by the number of views.

Final Thoughts

I realize that there are a lot of things that contribute to RPM’s. These are usually dependent on the advertisers budgets for the ads they place.

However, in this case, it appears that Newsbreak staff are largely determining RPM’s independent of ads budgets. At least this was the impression given how they could set RPM’s for those on base pay which were guaranteed at a specific amount, and since then guarantee RPMs for some writers when they come off base pay that are extremely high, in upwards of 100 or more, which they have referred to as “premium rates.”

Additionally, there is no consistency in the rates that they are assigning, at least as far as my articles are concerned. The dozen or so articles that they assigned an RPM of zero covered a variety of topics. None were just rehashing stories in the news. Two were COVID related which they said wasn’t a preferred topic from creators (now called contributors) while other similar articles received scores from .08 to 6+.

Some of my most popular articles were on unemployment in Illinois and two were also given scores of zero. Some local and hyperlocal content received scores of 8+ and some that were along similar lines received scores of less than 1. They stated that if views were too low stories would receive an RPM of 0 but while many of the dozen stories had less than 10 views in subsequent months while many that had only a single view were assigned RPMs of 10.

I don’t know how RPMs are actually calculated by Newsbreak. But based on guarantees before base pay was cut, and current guarantees for writers still being given base pay and some whose base pay has been cut, it is clear that there is more to it than just the advertising budgets of companies placing ads. The one thing that clearly is contributing is the number of views an article gets.

I can’t speak to the relationship between views, RPMs for other writers’ work though this has been mentioned by other writers as well, but based on the simple stats I ran for my articles, there is a strong and highly significant relationship between the number of views my article get and the RPMs they are assigned which translates into earnings.

As has been discussed by other Newsbreak writers with similar experiences to mine, it is as if Newsbreak is encouraging us to write mediocre, lackluster articles that will get a limited number of views as it seems to be a losing proposition to write viral articles with thousands or tens of thousands of views. Unfortunately, even if these mediocre articles are assigned higher RPMs they will still earn little money since there will be few views.

If you found this article informative, you may want to read my other articles regarding NewsBreak, you can find them here:

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