In the past year Odyssey has changed its policy regarding paying its creators. When I first joined in February of 2017 creators only got paid if their articles reached a certain number of page views, but until that point writing for Odyssey was an unpaid job. For many, including myself, Odyssey was strictly an unpaid job because very few articles reached their minimum page view marker.
Now if a team has a certain number of creators and they write a certain number of articles each month the Editor-in-Chief (EIC) gets paid. The payment increases as the goals increase. Odyssey does not mandate what EICs do with this payment and leaves it up to each EIC to decide.
When this first rolled out I was still a Contributing Editor. My EIC put it up to a vote in our community GroupMe about whether we wanted the payment split between all of us so we got around $2 per article or if we wanted to spend the money on a bunch of food and eat it together. It was close, but in the end we settled on splitting the money equally among the team members.
As a long time writer for Odyssey I was beyond thrilled when I found out that the work I was putting in was now going to be rewarded. Yes, I wouldn't really be making that much money, but it was more than I was making before.
When I took over as EIC I decided to keep this policy. All team members who did not receive a strike for that month (i.e. submit every week) would receive part of the money. To me this makes perfect sense. To some of my fellow EICs it is insanity.
Through a random GroupMe conversation one day with my group of EICs managed under our editor, I found out that the majority of them did not split their tiering incentive with their team. Instead they kept the money for themselves. Some of them used a portion of it to do a creator of the month challenge where the winner would get a gift card or a small portion of the money.
I am in NO way admonishing them for this because it is technically an EIC incentive not a team incentive. They do not have to give their team any of the money. But what I am doing is questioning if it makes their team as effective. I think that by giving my creators a stake (i.e. they won't get paid if they don't write) it makes them more motivated to do so.
Writing for Odyssey is real work. It takes time and effort. It requires you to do push your content and share it on your social media platforms. It is your words. If I were to write articles for another writing platform I would be compensated for my work, so why is Odyssey any different?
To me if I don't split the money I receive from headquarters with my team it feels like stealing. I wasn't the one who wrote all the articles. It was my team. They deserve to be paid for the work they did.
But Emma, do you get paid for your work? Yes, yes I do. I get 20% of our ad revenue every month and I get paid the same amount for my articles as my team members do. That seems fair to me.
While there is nothing wrong in keeping the money for yourself, for me sharing the money is the only option. Splitting the money equally among team members is a great motivator and it's only fair.