Polluting The Blogosphere
Posted by Patrick on July 3rd, 2006
The latest issue of BusinessWeek Online has an article called Polluting The Blogosphere – Bloggers are getting paid to push products. Disclosure is optional. The company behind this dastardly deed is PayPerPost. It goes something like this:
To Advertisers:
PayPerPost is an automated system that allows you to promote your Web site, product, service or company through the PayPerPost network of bloggers. Advertise on blogs to create buzz, build traffic, gain link backs for search engine ranking, syndicate content and much more. You provide the topic, our network of bloggers create the stories and post them on their individual blogs.
To Bloggers:
Get Paid to Blog. You’ve been writing about Web sites, products, services and companies you love for years and you have yet to benefit from all the sales and traffic you have helped generate. That’s about to change. With PayPerPost advertisers are willing to pay you to post on topics. Search through a list of topics, make a blog posting, get your content approved, and get paid. It’s that simple.
As you can imagine, there are plenty of opinions being bandied about. Jason Calacanis sums it up best – The currency of blogging is authenticity and trust… you pay folks to blog about a product and you compromise that. I would almost care about this, but it’s so obvious to everyone that this is either a joke or an idiot that there is nothing more to say.
Of course, Scoble hits it on the head as well - After all, I read blogs and forums to try to learn the TRUTH about products, companies, movements, and ideas. Advertising rarely brings truth.
I guess this sort of thing was inevitable especially when you consider how far Hugh MacLeod hit one out of the park with Stormhoek. I suspect that this pay to blog tactic will not gain much traction as the bloggers that would participate in such a scheme dont have the kind of currency to deliver a decent ROI to the advertisers.
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