As advertising continues to plunge into the abyss after stumbling over the edge of the cliff earlier this year, sales managers in Fleet Street are figuring out how they can incentivise their teams into selling more online after years of neglecting the web for the easy margins in print.

This OTE mentality has never managed to make it as far as the shores of editorial because we’ve always found it so difficult to quantify success for journalists. Is it number of stories written, number of exclusives delivered or some other nebulous yardstick?

But the web changes this and I wonder how long it will be before owners and accountants notice this. We already know who our most successful writers are by one measure - they’re the ones who deliver the highest number of page views.

So which will be the first publisher to build a bonus based on page views into a journalist’s salary? Could you do it with your entire reporting staff and, if so, would it lead to a decline in standards?

And if we did it, what would we call it on a job ad? OTE or something else? Something like pay-per-click perhaps?