According to Salary.com, the average pay for a webmaster at an established company is more than $60,000 a year. But most of the posters on DigitalPoint seem to be working on their own Web sites. If you are an independent Web publisher, how do you value you time? How much money do you need to make per hour, per week or per year to make all this work worthwhile?
I value my time at $10 per hour. However, sometimes I do things out of passion as a hobby. How about you?
I value mine at the rate I need to survive. If my other source of income dried up, I'd need to earn at least $15-20 an hour. But I'm not there yet! An average webmaster for a company earns at least $30 an hour plus benefits, although it really depends on the part of the country where they live.
that was a nice one. Well, these times there are a lot of people giving cheap webdesign, so it is hard in general get a decent rate. I will got a lot higher that those hours you post. But I always do web design for a flat rate.
I'm priceless ;-) JK - Its difficult to value you your time when you are self employed because things you do today may earn money tomorrow, 1 year from now, 2 years from now and so on.
FeaturedPR, I quit my job two years ago. I do contracting about half the week and my own site publishing the other half. The contracting part has been doing pretty well. The publishing part was stinking in the beginning but has been getting better in recent months. How about you? Also, I think I have a better view of this. Even though I said a webmaster working for a company averages more than $60,000 a year, I'm really not doing "webmaster" work all the time. If I write articles for my sites, optimize adsense, post on blogs and forums, etc., that kind of work is what you would get from someone who is probably paid in the upper 30s to low 40s per year depending on where they live. And that's getting a lot closer to $15-20 an hour.
Jessicalore, I also get a higher rate for my contracting work. But I like publishing a lot more. I hope I can do publishing full time within another year or two. We'll see.
Mine is only around $2/hr at the moment, mainly because I just lost my main online job and I'm working at whatever I can get. My goal is to get it $8+/hr by next month.
The key difference between rich & poor is that rich people think in terms of NET WORTH and poor people in terms of per hour.
Each hour of my work is valued at $50. From the economic point of scale,i only need to do 3 hour/week webmastering job and its sufficient to keep my server running.
For the $60,000 jobs you'll need a four year degree and experience, yes? Also, you'll have to see what part of the USA. Income tax in California will take a large portion of your paycheck.
Since I am not in the service industry perhaps this doesn't apply to me, but I'm not much of a grunt worker, I like to outsource, so my time is valuable I guess.
I won't work for less then $20/hr and that better be a "fun" job. A lot of my friends think I'm going to make them free...complex.. sites. Heh, I stopped doing that a long time ago. Friends can be pretty demanding.
Yeah, maybe in London, L.A., or NY where a 1 bedroom apartment is $900-$3000. and sandwich for lunch is $12 and it cost $25 to park your car for the day then they will want someone with 4 year degree and 5-10 years of full time experience.