Per-word pricing is standard in trade fiction (short form -- e.g. magazine markets, which are mostly dead outside the SF/F genre field).

It's also how I used to be paid as a jobbing IT reviewer/columnist/journalist in the British newsstand computer trade press (caveat: I switched to writing novels full-time in 2005).

Accelerando is currently blowing my mind. Very cool stuff.

It's not a common metric, however, when you free lance right you are often told, "I need a piece about x & y, 500 words long." So based on that 500 words, let's say you make $200. So you just made 40 cents a word. But then next article, the editors says "I need a piece about x & y, 800 words" This time you make $400. So instead of trying to explain it like that in these metrics, it makes more sense to just aggregate the numbers together; because the piece lengths vary.

Per-word is usually a rough yardstick that's invoked when trying to figure out the flat rate for pieces of various sizes. It lets publications quote 500x for shortish pieces of about 500 words; 1,200x for mid-sized pieces of about 1,200 words, and so on.

I've never known a publication to count the words exactly, once the story is delivered. A finished piece of 970 words or 1,050 words will get paid the standard rate for 1,000 words, without any adjustments.

Per-word rates are the most common in English; in German language, it's per character. Sometimes news outlets will establish a relationship with a freelancer that use dto be called a dedicated stringer, and some of those contracts would include a base retainer for the month, with a specified sum extra for words or whole articles over the base agreement. Just recently I heard of a freelancer agreement with Forbes that included a low base sum for four articles a month (very low, tho I can't recall) and US$0.05 per click, and they'll take just about anything she pitches. Some people are excited about the model (including the freelancer doing it). I do think raises questions about whether important topics would not get addressed because they're not grabby enough, but that's less of a problem for an outlet like Forbes than it is for, say, a city or local newspaper (e.g., a routine city hall or school-board meeting)

If you look at each entry, there is a little bit of grey text that has some additional detail. They show the really low per-word rates were actually "$50 flat rate per piece" (one says.)

Hope that helps.

Thanks, I totally missed the additional detail text.