Hey everyone,
I saw a few places do this but wanted to know more about it. Sitepoint does it as well. How can you pay someone to write an article for you and pay them a bonus based on the traffic it generates? I looked at Sitepoint and it is based on pageviews. Is there a way that prevents the writer from auto-refreshing that article page to jack up the number? Is this even a viable option now? Is there a better metric to measure the amount of traffic an article generates, like number of times it is retweeted or liked? Thanks.
as an article writer myself, that would not be a fair deal unless the page views is only a bonus as you said. the writer has an influence on the quality of the article but there are so many other factors that determine page views that the writer cannot help.
If you go by unique visits, it won’t even be a problem. If you measure using “hits” then of course they could simply refresh the page but if you do it based on unique page-view’s (which all statistics software shows) you will be able to independently remove the issue of people revisiting as it will measure it in respect to unique IP addresses popping up in the logs rather than anything else. Though as an article writer I’m not sure I agree with the “hits” incentive model as you’re likely to end up publishing only subjects the masses will enjoy (usually ends up as low quality galleries) rather than unique interesting content. 
depends, if you give them direct access to those then yes, no manipulation possible. If you only give them a screenshot, that screenshot can be manipulated (even before taking the screenshot, the page itself can be manipulated) - if you only provide them with the exported data, that again can be manipulated.
couldn’t you write a script that is run automatically on a cron job every other minute. Put this on a couple of servers (shared hosts, free hosts, …) and you could get a significant amount of visits together.
One person can’t visit a page enough separate times to have any significant affect on the number of page views. Even if they visit the page 20 or 30 times a day those visits will be insignificant when compared to the total daily page views which should be in the thousands or tens of thousands before you really have it being seen by enough people to start thinking bonuses.
The analytics software of your choice (not counting most of the ones pre-installed on common shared servers) should be able to tell you the number of unique page views. Some Content Management Systems might also be able to tell you this. Though, how this is then implement so that you, i.e. the buyer, doesn’t cheat on the writer, I don’t know.
How would I cheat the writer? Aren’t we both going to be looking at the same analytics?