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Blogging Isn’t Ready For Paid Posting
Businessweek online has a hot story today entitled ‘Polluting The Blogosphere - Bloggers are getting paid to push products. Disclosure is optional‘. In a nutshell, the company PayPerPost.com ‘is a new business that pays bloggers to write nice things about corporate sponsors — without unduly worrying about whether or not bloggers disclose these arrangements to readers’.
Murphy is launching PayPerPost.com, which will automate such hookups between advertisers and bloggers and thus codify a new frontier of product placement. Advertisers pay to post details about their “opportunity,” specifying, among other things, how they want bloggers to write about, say, a new shoe, if they want photos to be included, and whether they’ll pay only for positive mentions. Bloggers who abide by the rules get paid; heavily trafficked blogs may command premium rates. Those seeking to subvert PayPerPost from within can’t: No pornographic or “illicit” content is accepted.
Ok, we all get the argument in principal. Bloggers are just like anyone else, like TV or a radio show, and those outlets often feature product placements masked as “features”. So if they can do it, why can’t bloggers?
Just because I understand the argument, doesn’t mean I approve of it.
There’s a difference here. A big one. And that’s that blogs are in essence NOT a broadcast medium built for viewership as tv, radio and others are. Those mediums are run specifically to make money, blogs are not, ok, the vast majority of them are not.
And that’s what I’m talking about here. Not Gawker, not Lifehacker, none of those anomolies. I’m talking about “real” bloggers. The majority of blogs that are not generating much traffic in the scheme of things. Those are the real story here.
So what happens when a “real” blogger uses this system? Without disclosure, it kills the blog, dead. And even with disclosure of an “ad”, they’re asking you to do the ulitmate no-no in blog advertising, which is to write the ad as if it is a blog entry. Not below the entry, not floating in the entry, but it IS the entry, disclosed or not.
This won’t work.
A. If any large blog tries this, they’ll get busted and their readers will utterly destroy them or leave them.
B. Even if you’re transparent and disclose the entry as an ad, blog readers aren’t ready to deal with fake content just yet. They just got used to handling ads, just barely.
C. The backlash for an advertiser, large brand is going to be gigantic. Once the first advertiser is exposed, the blogosphere is going to relentlessly destroy their brand over time.
From Techcrunch…
If you visit the Mindcomet.com website you’ll see that they do advertising for some very high profile clients. I can imagine many of them wouldn’t want to be associated with a project like this at all. Like EarthLink. They have a major campaign underway to improve advertising by paying people to make authentic promotional materials for them. How ironic.
So I get it… but I’m not sure blogging is ready for it yet.
More discussion at techmeme..com
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I can see getting paid to blog, but not for products or for corporations or for good buzz. Nothing good can come of it.
I am confused? Isn’t this already happening? Isn’t that what makes a “good” affiliate blogger? Isn’t this the secret of getting people to buy? This person has come up with the obvious. I myself write about products I personally use on a daily basis. These things make me happy, keep me organized, are sleek and cool. Now that I said that, what famous bloggers come to mind? I am not going to call them out here but I am thinking of those that have (me included) jumped on the GTD band wagon. All the while having Amazon links to Moleskine, Space Pens, and Mead 3×5 cards.
Am I wrong?
Adam, no, it isn’t happening as far as anyone will admit that is. Do people do it, probably, but they sure as heck don’t talk about it if they do.
This the main reason we don’t allow affiliate links in our posts here at ReveNews. It would cheapen the content if a reader knew it was being written for profit, no?
Even with transparency (telling people you’re using an affiliate link) it can have diverse effects on your brand.
However, that being said, it can be done. If you’re writing a blog and you mention to your readers that the link is an affiliate link, you can get away with it, as long as your readers are cool with it. The key again is transparency.
Depends on how it is done…but this particular effort does not impress me.
Right now alot of the news media and video people digest are actually well crafted “media campaigns” and creative agencies are already using the blogosphere and other spheres to manipulate their agenda and inject memes. Frankly I think are better ways than paying a blog x bucks to post and leave it up for a month.
Can you use performance links and not cheapen the blog? It IS possible, but hard to do. I think it has alot to do with how much the audience knows the blogger, what they are about, how they earn their bread and what motivates them. It is a trust issue I think.
Jeremy Wright was doing paid posts (with full disclosure) a year ago and so have many other bloggers. This is a great example of how Businessweek is setting up bloggers with a controversial link-bait story to get bloggers posting and linking to them for FREE. Heh heh…
I remember the ‘big scandal‘ when shoemoney ramped up attention about Darren Rowse/ProBlogger being a Chitika fanboy because he was cut a deal. Turns out it wasn’t such a big scandal or a big deal at all–most of us either already assumed it was the case or cared less. I think Darren’s just as strong as ever, if not stronger than he was then.
My point: Paid blog posting, affiliated blog posting and personal affiliation posting is happening, is known to be happening, and most people could give two hoots. Transparency is nice and I personally prefer that, but that’s not what’s happening and blogs aren’t being killed over it.
Wayne is right, those blogs have trust. Bloggers that are not as established as those monoliths could not get away with it as easy.
Don’t get me wrong, I think you can do it. Just in the way that this company is selling it, makes it, I dunno, less appealing eh?
Again, trust.
If bloggers want to make money for some sort of advertising I don’t see where the problem is as long as it’s not hidden from the visitors.
Personnally I wouldn’t want to advertise for any corporation on my blog because I do think that it is contraire to the blogging spirit but I certainly wont impose that view on the totality of the blogger community.
Also I do agree with that advertising on a blog today is too early and would probably backfire on the company advertising.
Isn’t the really good thing about blogging that we, as bloggers, can post negative comments about a product as well as positive ones? That’s the real benefit of blogging as far as I can see it, for both users (readers) and the companies that want to grab some attention from the blogosphere. Enjoy the good publicity, and learn/adapt to the negative.
With that in mind, I find it interesting that payperpost have to vet all posts before “the clock starts ticking”.
Our team will review the content and either approve or deny the post. If it is denied, you will be given a chance to revise and resubmit. Once approved, the clock starts ticking.
This may seem quite obvious, as companies seldom want to receive the bad blogs no matter how much people like me, my friends, or big guns like Scoble tell them it’s all part of the game, and no doubt payperpost.com are fully aware of this too - but I personally think they’re missing a trick here. They’re trying to turn advertisers onto blogging in a way similar to adwords etc. but they’re only going halfway, and I’d love to see them have almost a two-staged level of service for their customers.
Blog-lite: good stuff only
blog-full-on: the good and the bad
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