In September 2010, VGChartz sent Nick Simberg, one of their senior editors at the time, up to Seattle to cover PAX. The following month, he discovered it would have been better if he hadn’t gone at all.

2010 wasn’t halfway over when VGChartz realized they needed to send someone to PAX Prime in Seattle. The call was put out to their writers, but no one was available. No one except Nick Simberg. Living in Humboldt Country, California at the time, and with VGChartz as his only source of income (he was making $200 a month as a Senior Editor, plus anywhere between 75¢ and $1.25 per 1,000 pageviews for his posts), VGChartz head honco Brett Walton agreed to foot the bill for accommodation and transport.

Nick drove up to Seattle with his then-current girlfriend. PAX wasn’t her thing, but she’d agreed to help with the camera and generally keep him company.

With Brett giving no instruction on specific events to follow or even how many articles to contribute, Nick spent three days wandering through the convention seeking interviews, getting hands-on experience with titles such as the then newly-(re)announced Duke Nukem Forever, and getting photos of cosplayers.

At the end of the three-day event Nick had made nine posts covering the event, with the most popular being (of course) the cosplay gallery.

Once Nick returned home, he heard nothing from Brett concerning the PAX coverage, but Brett contacted him two weeks after the event with an idea for a fun post. An amusing Super Mario Bros. 3 “Epic Fail” video had been posted to YouTube by a user named Master0fHyrule (who, it turns out, is Andy Garner – perhaps better known to Reddit users as GamingForever1), and Brett thought it would make for a good news post. Nick wrote a short preamble for the video and posted it to the site.

In October, Nick met VGChartz requirement for a writer based in LA and volunteered to move the 660 miles south to be closer to events, studios, and other gigs that VGChartz were otherwise unable to cover. Two weeks later, he received his earnings report for the month of September.

According to the report, he had earned $57.49 from pageviews.

Nick double-checked the figures. His PAX coverage had received in excess of 130,000 pageviews – his cosplay gallery alone had netted him 90,000. The Super Mario Bros. 3 video had netted him another 130,000 pageviews.

[At time of writing, the Mario Epic Fail post displays a total of 70,698 pageviews. My sources inform me that a few months ago Brett Walton changed the display from total pageviews to unique pageviews, which would account for the discrepancy (and also accounts for why closing and re-opening the page again doesn’t make the counter go up).]

By his calculation he was owed somewhere between $255 and $473. What the Hell had happened?

He emailed Brett Walton about the discrepancy, and the answer wasn’t quite what he was expecting: Brett had taken money out of Nick’s earnings to cover the PAX expenses:

In the case of PAX, once I’ve paid $550 for a hotel and $200 in gas, we’re already $750 down for the month so even with the Mario Epic fail maybe generating $250 for the site and maybe another $200 for the cosplay one (can be generous and say $500 for the two), we’re still down overall - and that is without taking hosting fees into account. Simply, I cannot afford to pay you for those two articles or any of the other PAX stuff- they were done (and promoted heavily by myself) to offset the costs of the PAX trip, which it still didn’t quite do.My view is that by merely attending PAX and you having the chance to meetpeople and do some networking then it is well worth the small loss, but I’m not sure how much you managed to get out of it really?

Brett also complained about the price of the hotel. The hotel he’d booked near the Seattle Convention Center. During a convention.

Brett’s response had been sent to Nick on October 22nd, and Nick sat on it for a while. He mulled it over in his head, and it just didn’t make sense to him. That wasn’t what they had agreed to. That wasn’t what Brett had said he would do when he agreed to cover the PAX expenses.

On November 3rd, Nick collected his thoughts for a response. His words express it much better than I would have, so I’m going to post some excerpts from it here:

I thought that when you said you’d start paying me for the traffic on my articles, you meant that you’d actually start paying me for the traffic on my articles. When you said you’d cover two nights at a hotel (which was admittedly expensive, largely due to a ridiculous $70 hotel fee that Seattle charges on rooms EVERY NIGHT for no clear reason - it was only supposed to be a $180 room, a block from the convention) and gas, I thought that meant that you would actually cover these things so VGC would have someone at this show (very important to be at these shows in person, especially if we want our site to grow). If I had known that you would just take the money that I would have earned and used it to cover all my business expenses - not even including food - I would have just stayed home and written articles based off of other sites’ stories. I’d have more money, and you’d have more money, but VGC would not be at PAX. Basically, you used my money to send me to PAX when you said that you were going to cover it.

And that Mario video… if you think a story will be huge, and you don’t want to pay money for it, you’ll have to write it yourself. Saying, “I know I told you to write it, but I’m keeping all the ad revenue,” isn’t really an okay thing to do.

[…] I understand that you want to spend as little as possible for the most work out of people - that’s just being a businessman - but you can’t just not pay me for work that you said you were going to pay me for.

Unlike some of VGChartz’ other contributors, Nick actually had a proper signed contract with VGChartz, and Nick pointed out that, per the terms of the contract, Brett couldn’t make changes to the contract without both he and Nick approving it. Clearly, Nick hadn’t approved this change in payment terms.

Brett responded the following day, opening with the line “Listen I don’t want to get nasty,” then he gets nasty. He claimed Nick had failed to reach the unshared, arbitrary number of posts he’d expected from the trip to PAX, that he’d commissioned the Mario 3 video and so the pageviews were his anyway, and he could cancel Nick’s contract any time he wanted to. He also mentioned that he’d later sent Nick to BlizzCon and had been out of pocket for that as well. Apparently Brett was mortified to discover that sending people to conventions costs money.

Brett also gets angry about having paid for Nick’s girlfriend to travel down to BlizzCon, forgetting entirely that he’d agreed to do so after Nick had suggested she join him - she’d been the photographer for the 90,000-view cosplay article, so it made sense for her to take cosplay photos at BlizzCon. Brett could just have easily asked Nick to find someone local to act as his photographer. This is, of course, is unrelated to Nick’s September earnings, so it seems strange that Brett would bring it up in a conversation about the previous month.

I’ve summarized Brett’s response rather than quoted directly from it because, honestly, it’s not written in a manner that lends itself well to excerpts. If you want to read the full, unedited email, it can be found here.

In June 2011 VGChartz stopped paying its editors the flat $200 fee and paid them exclusively based on pageviews. Nick was now expected to edit content on the site for free.