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I received an email yesterday from someone at a company called BlogToProfit. They are a PayPerPost wannabe — Arrington and Calacanis have talked a lot about PayPerPost. They both argue that paying bloggers to write about certain topics with links to the products and sites *and* without proper disclosure is disingenuous. I agree. Below is the dude’s email:
Jordan Keezell wrote:
Hi,
I found your blog, and am interested in sponsoring some posts on your blog on behalf of our advertisers. I read the post about “Follow the Hummer” and enjoyed your writing. We have 5 different sponsors that are interested in sponsoring posts on your blog. BlogtoProfit is a company that connects blogs with advertisers who are interested in blog advertising.
We would like to sponsor 5 posts on your blog. Upon completion, we would like to continue to sponsor your blog!
1) Please notify me which of the categories below are agreeable to you.
• Plastic surgery
• Restaurants
• Gyms
• Tattoos
• Auctions
• Real estate
• Web
• Fashion
• Cars
• Dogs2) Sign-up at http://www.blogtoprofit.com
3) Provide your paypal so we may send you payments
Here’s a great example of a blog post with a sponsor link included:
http://suejeff-writeon.blogspot.com/2006/09/
sleighbells-ring-are-you-listening.html
Draper, Fisher, Jurvetson recently funded PayPerPost with a $3 Million round of financing, with Josh Stein as the lead investor. According to them, this business model has a lot of promise:
Bloggers, Stein said, have to decide what sort of disclosures they want to make with their readers about this, and whether it fits with their ethics. But the market should decide that, not PayPerPost. “The blogger knows better than we do what their social contract is with their reader base.”
This model worries me. I don’t see many bloggers proactively publishing disclosures, for fear of mass exit by his or her readers and other worries. At bottom, it’s a disingenuous business model. It may eventually get steam and more cash, but it just doesn’t feel right.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Pete:
I loved the podcast with Arrington and the payperpost guys. It was a heated exchange. The last two minutes were the best. The point is brought up that payperpost at this point is viewed as perperclick was when overture launched. It is now accepted and embraced as a legitimate form of product promotion and online marketing. If the payperpost guys will force people to disclose the fact that they are being paid to post then this model has the potenital to take off. The again, if I see “sponsored post” at the top of a blog post you can bet that I won’t read it. Who knows. It will be interesting to see if this takes off and becomes the next pay per click.
I don’t see anything wrong with a “sponsored post” per se. If there is interesting content, I would read it, but I would view it for what it is. Research companies put out “sponsored” reports and you have to read those while looking for bias and spin from the sponsor at the same time. I think the issue is that, like a newspaper, you should disclose when something is an ad if it looks like an article.
But then again, why should bloggers be held to a higher standard? Local news stations are notorious for using “video press releases” as “news” — segments that are thinly veiled advertisements. The local stations use them because it’s free content or they might even get paid. Hell, the federal government has unethically produced “news” pieces that local news uses without disclaimers.
Should bloggers and the “new media” take the high road? Personally, I would.
That blog they gave as an example is basically a “splog”. Nothing but sponsored posts. Nothing interesting. I can’t believe they get paid for that. That’s a bullshit blog and a horrible example for them to use.
@Mark,
I agree. A post with that discloses properly is not bad. It’s ethical and smart business. I guess the difference with these companies is that they encourage shady-ness by not encouraging or forcing bloggers to publish a disclosure. When bloggers don’t explicitly show a disclosure, then it appears as if the posts were genuinely his, but it’s really an ad disguised as an honest conversation.
By the way, I am loving the The Lean Blog. Nice job to you and the other authors.
Pete