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There has been a great deal of discussions in the blogosphere regarding PayPerPost. If you are not familiar with this service, the company offers an opportunity for bloggers to write articles based on PayPerPost’s “opportunities”. Once the blogger completes an article and it gets accepted by PPP, the blogger can post the article and get paid for writing it.
At the moment, I am not making any money on this blog . I have no advertisements, no Google Adsense, nothing. Now sometime in the future that could change, I haven’t really given that much thought and I absolutely have no issue with bloggers that offer advertising. There are so many great writers out there who spend a great deal of time and effort in creating an exceptional blog and if they can make money on it, I believe that is a great thing.
What I do have a problem with is when bloggers are getting paid to write something. This might be old fashion on my part, but I believe that the only thing a person truly has is his or her word. And it seems to me whether you have a full disclosure policy or not, when you start writing about a product, service or company that is paying for that article, you enter a gray area which I don’t feel comfortable with.
I think my biggest issue with how PPP works is that before an article can be posted it must be sent to PPP where it is “reviewed and accepted” by PayPerPost. This is their language that I found on their site here. So does that mean if I reviewed a product, thought it sucked and wrote a negative article on the product, would my post not be accepted? Even worse, would they suggest edits and changes that should be made to the article? If so, I believe I have just sold my name and have become a talking shill.
We have seen time and time again in our world how people have lost all confidence and trust in the people they should trust the most; politicians, marketers, journalists, etc. One of the reasons I believe the blogosphere has taken off like it has is it was the one place where people believed in what bloggers were writing. It is honest and opinionated and if we start selling our words to the highest bidder, the blogosphere will become just like everything else.
I guess for me personally it comes down to something very simple. When people reward me with taking a couple of minutes of their day to read and respond to something that I have written, I want them to have no doubt that it is coming from me and no-one else. Everyone does not have to agree with my thoughts and opinions, the world would be a very dull place if that was the case, but they will know that what I am writing I am putting my name on and that is far more valuable to me than any size check.
What do you think? Can we find a happy medium where a PayPerPost can be successful without corrupting the blogosphere?
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I agree with ya Cord….I would rather write something and have it be my own words. Right now, I write my blog because I love what I do. I guess I just don’t want to be limited to what I say just so I can get paid.
I agree, Cord. I get the feeling the only folks participating aren’t ‘real’ bloggers, just people starting blogs to get the money. Which turns PPP into one big link baiting scheme.
Check out their cheesy owner on the CalacanisCast. He’s sounds like a slimeball.
Andrew - Thank you and I absolutely agree. As I said in the post, I believe you get into a gray area that I am not comfortable with.
Paul - I did see Calacanis interview and I think Calacanis let him off so damn easy. I don’t get it… He thought he would of been so cute with the writing on the forehead thing and it blew up in his face. Stupid theatrics instead of actually asking good relevant questions.
Thanks for the comments boys…
PayPerPost is, unfortunately, going to make us all a little skeptical of bloggers and their intentions. I personally have done about 4 of them — it took a few to get my feet wet. It also took far too long, because I wanted to actually review the products I was promoting. Turns out the actual rate was somewhere around $15 an hour — I may as well wait tables, much less actually catch up on the real work I have.
Furthermore, as my readership has grown, I feel that it’s even more disingenuous, especially since there’s 1 “opportunity” in 100 that is remotely relevant to my audience.
I think that the idea is great, but I like the text-link-ads and reviewme versions better. A review takes a real time investment — that’s ok to get paid for in my book if its honest (blogger integrity sure comes into play here). A link labeled as “sponsored” is also fine. Even the occasional post, if labeled correctly, is ok. But PPP encourages bloggers to hide the truth.
And that’s just lame.
Calacanis, along with voices like yourself, for what it’s worth, actually helped me realize this, so despite his “stupid theatrics”, his reiteration that “Disclosure should be displayed prominently at the top of any post” [I think] helped make the world a better place.
I hate PAY PER POST sites…
almost as much as I hate comment trolls for link love.
On the ethics side the review process is exactly the same as Reviewme and Sponsored Reviews. They are reviewing after a post has been published, so it is a question of whether you get paid or not.
In general they are checking for meeting the requirements of the opportunity, and the vast majority of the opportinities I have seen do not require a positive review.
From what I have seen, most PayPerPost requirements (unless it is a fun crazy stunt thing) are very basic, such as including the exact link text.
A lot of this comes down to the advertisers, and not the bloggers.
If the advertiser only wants buzz and links, and is only willing to pay $10 per post, they are not going to get in-depth reviews and many of the advertisers haven’t got the budget for that.
You also have to take into account the style of the blogs in question. You wouldn’t expect the same kind of analysis of a site from your average chatty work at home mums blog as you would from a professional marketing consultant.
What I find worse is when a “quality” blog accepts a paid review, and just writes something short because their time is money, and spending a few hours on a $200 review isn’t a good time investment.
It should be remembered that PPP has to be scalable, because their income percentage even on the higher paying “opps” is less, and their customers are ordering in bulk, and can define all kinds of link rotation automatically.
If you took a consulting gig and were being paid for it, would you tell your customer the truth?
@johnny - lots of the people writing PPP ops wouldn’t be able to wait tables, because they have kids to look after at home, or have physical disabilities.
It is great to idolise Calacanis, but then he has only just been encouraged to include his own disclosure in the sidebar after months of prompting, and certainly doesn’t include anything at the top of every post, or his back dated content.
Johnny - Thanks for the comments and your opinions. I don’t think this is an easy issue nor one that will go away anytime soon.
Andy - I think you make a lot of great points, but I think the point which stuck with me most is when you said, “They are reviewing after a post has been published, so it is a question of whether you get paid or not.”
This is the gray area that concerns me. You know and I know that people are people and if they are going to take the time to write a review on something, they are going to write it in a way that gives them the best opportunity to get paid.
You have to look at it from an outsiders point of view. I have never heard of Andy Beard before and through one way or the other I land on your blog for the first time. I am reading a review you have done and when I finish I see that big PPP button disclosing you have paid for this review.
No matter what, a person who does not know you Andy, has got to now take your review with a grain of salt because the article was driven by you getting paid to write it and that payment came from the owner of the product or service you just reviewed. You have to admit there is a conflict of interest there.
I know and respect you Andy and I have been a reader of your blog for quite a while so because of that, I personally would never question your ethics, but most people are not going to have those kind of relationships with ana author. So now we have the same exact skepticism that pervades so much of our world today.
I knew this was coming and I guess I should just accept that Review Me and PPP sites will only grow larger as time goes on. I just really enjoyed the pureness of blogging and I think once we as a community lose that, it is impossible to get back.
Let me know what you think and thanks as always for your comments.
I deal a bit with PPP in what I do at WPNI. Only from a different angle. The team I work on puts together many of the branded sites and advertorials that you find on Washingtonpost.com, Slate and Newsweek. We are constantly asked when we reach out to a blogger for a freelance agreement whether this is pay per post.
The flat answer is never. What we are after our great writers with flavor and personality to write on interesting broad topics like small business and travel.
They are never required or even asked to talk about the advertiser. We also brand the site in such a way that there is a clear distinction.
But I love the question because it means that I have a great writer and one who will produce good work. The blogosphere has been amazing and has opened us to a fresh pool of creative folks.
Blogging has never been pure
You send me traffic, I send you traffic. There is no written agreement or even specific intent, but that traffic has monetary value, as does the time taken to write the post that sends the traffic in the first place.
How often does an employee or shareholder blog about something that sucks with one of their products?
When Robert Scoble was blogging for Microsoft, whilst he might have occasionally said something negative about a product, the overall bias was on the positive.
Matt Cutts blogs on his “private” blog, but very rarely says anything negative unless someone else has already noticed it, and more often than not in some kind of spin control.
I have highlighted in the past but it received zero coverage that you are allowed to blog about, and encourage people to use Firefox with Google Toolbar, and have a referral link in the post, but you are not allowed to highlight to your readers that if they do decide to download and install the product, that there is a monetary reward.
I could have written the exact same post about the Bloggers Choice Award and been paid $10 for it - lots of PayPerPost bloggers snapped up that opportunity very quickly.
I recently read a post by one of my subscribers, Eve who works extremely hard in the “Why Do I Blog” meme.
Even though the paid posts are her main source of income, she still retains an ethical position on positive reviews.
There is a risk involved with paid reviews. Blogs rank very highly in the SERPs if they are well optimized. I now get search traffic every day for things like “Volusion Review” and my review wasn’t highly positive.
If I was buying reviews for a product that I had a lot of money invested in, I am sure I would consider only reviews that didn’t express an opinion about anything one way or the other, and just announced the new service.
That would be a purely reputation management decision.
In print magazines for computer games it is not unheard of for a major advertiser being able to “pull” a poor review before it is published.
Advertising budgets certainly have an effect on due diligence. A reviewer is not going to slam a product from their largest advertiser without spending a huge amount of time to ensure they are correct about any potential flaws, and working hard to find some kind of counter-argument.
Paid posts are a relatively new medium, and clear disclosure should be encouraged, and not looked on as a “you can’t trust my opinion” badge. I don’t actually like those badges amd have told the PPP people that, because it doesn’t appear in the feed.
Hmm Tim O’Reilly doesn’t have a disclosure policy on his blog. I wonder who his company have financial or professional connections with.
Andy - You’re right, everything has some sort of monetary value except one thing. I don’t call out an article that you wrote and send you traffic because of any other reason than I think you wrote a damn good article and I believe my readers would find it as interesting I did. That is the pureness of blogging. I understand all the monetary value and all that and as I said in my original post, I believe that great articles should be rewarded for their hard work by being paid and paid handsomely!
I just think there is a conflict of interest that just does not sit right with me. I probably am being incredibly naive and I recognize that everyone is in bed with everyone else at one time or another. I guess I am a romantic and would like to keep this absolutely wonderful place we call the blogosphere away from all that. It brings us down to where all the rest are and that bothers me because for a quite a long time I have believed that we are better than that.
As I said, I think this is something I am going to just have to accept, but I figure I can go kicking and screaming as I do.
Matt,
So what is the end game there? Are these sites created using rich content for the sake of SEO? I am not sure I understand.
I totally agree with you. The whole purpose of blogging is to speak in your own voice. Not having to conform to what someone else want you to say.
I totally agree with you regarding the mentioned things. When somebody pays you for writing, you are always inclined to write for them and we may not be in a position to express our own words.
Dame & Nirmal - Thanks for the comments. As I said earlier, unfortunately this is not a simple issue and I doubt that PPP and ReviewMe sites are going to go away anytime soon. So I have a feeling we will be having further discussions as time goes on. Thanks for the comments.
Cord -
Actually the end game for us is to create areas that advertisers can sponsor. The problem is sometimes we just don’t the content that they want or we can’t or won’t cover it.
In those instance, we go the advertorial route. The team I am apart of develops the concept, finds the free-lancers, publishes the mini-site and then drives traffic to it.
These come in several sizes:
1) Hard-core advertorials (no not porn) that is composed of only client related content. In those instances, we get content from the advertiser and publish - no freelance involved.
2) Special content sections where we get freelancers to discuss broad topics - like travel, small business, enviromental issues. We attempt to integrate these into our published sites (Slate, Post, Newsweek), but they are labeled as special promotion or special advertising section.
We have actually formed our own blog network here at WPNi called Blogroll (similar to Federated Media) and in some instances are reaching out to these bloggers for free lance gigs.
What is great though is that they are very careful about the PPP route. Which we always have to assure them that it is not.
Matt - Hmmm, interesting. It seems to be a similar path that Calcanis took with Weblogs before selling them to AOL, , but with more of a slant on pure advertising than just content. Am I close?
When it comes to questionable areas, I always go back to one simple question. Is the content, is the web site offering something of value to a user? For example, all those domains that are bought because people misspell words and has nothing except Adsense ads are not offering anything of value.
So as long as the content, the site is offering something of value to a user who lands on it, it is acceptable to me.
The Blogroll was created for a couple of reasons. 1 WPNI has a fairly large sales staff already selling the 4 sites that we own. We have deep relationships with advertisers and agencies already out there. At the same time, our advertisers need an efficient method for reaching the blogosphere’s audience.
Our partners are given the opportunity to accept or not accpet ads that come through and then also receive promotion on the homepage of Washingtonpost.com
You can read about that here and see some of the blogs - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-adv/blogroll/directory.htm
One of the added benefits is we have this huge network now of excellent writers and story tellers that can help us build custom areas that we sell to our advertisers as well. While keep the lines clear as we can.