But we don't do any advertising so there may be lots of good writers who haven't come our way yet.
Some things we have to consider:
1) How do we determine a winner? Popularity/number of reads seems like an obvious one but it isn't necessary. The most popular guy on the internet still won't generate enough pageviews to make up the cost of the prizes so we don't want someone gaming the system.
2) Do we let people here participate? It seems like that would be too much of an advantage but maybe not.
Alex Antunes had this thought:
Have multiple prizes, e.g. a $150 monthly grand prize for 'most popular' (aka most visited), plus a $30 prize for 'Best Analysis' within each category (Physical, Earth, Life, Medicine, Social, Culture).So what do you think about that?
The latter is chosen by a 'science board' (you plus one notable columnist for each category, e.g. for the Culture prize, you and Garth decide, for Physical, you and Tommaso, etc. So not a big judging effort, but it helps reward articles which are especially in depth and well written, even if they aren't necessarily populist. It also means more prizes, which means entrants are more likely to get a prize, which means more happiness and good will all around.
You need promotable midpoints too, not just 'winner this month'. Perhaps rotating rounds-- 'space week', 'bio week', 'culture week', each of which can be promoted through different avenues, or you can have tiers or ladders. This'll take some brainstorming.
3) How do we get people involved without it looking like some lame self-promotion thing? Obviously we could just buy advertising rather than having a writing prize if we wanted attention but I don't know anything about marketing and know very few people outside here, other than pretty famous writers and researchers who aren't doing contests.
Let me know what comments you have.
