The Pay Per Post Model getting Face Space - AGAIN!
Editorial: Holy crap folks, I honestly thought the pay per post controversy - where companies pay bloggers to write posts and link back to the company - was dead, buried and a distant memory.
I’m not going to link directly t0 the cause of the current shitblizzard that’s brewing, but I’ll link to a few opinion pieces on it.
Marshall Kirkpatrick’s TechCrunch article spells it out pretty well. But if you do some checking at Technorati for the names of the companies referenced in MK’s article, you’ll see a whole bunch of bloggers talking about the BW article and how the blogosphere isn’t ready for paid posts. They talk of how bloggers credibility will be ruined if they accept payment for posts, if they should do full disclosure, be transparent, disclose their earnings, etc.
It’s like this is a new thing or something!
Meanwhile, if one checks through the archives of some of the long time bloggers out there, one finds that this discussion has been going on for at least 2 years. See this post (and notice the date on that post) by JW over at Ensight.org.
Then, if you are so inclined, do some Googling for the term blogging for dollars. It’s been going on for years folks. It’s nothing new. Or is it?
Is the blogosphere like a fish bowl and bloggers like goldfish? You know what they say about goldfish don’t you? How, a goldfish sees something as he swims past a point in his bowl and on his way back around a little later, what he saw is new all over again. Are bloggers memories that bad?
WTF? *lol*
Oh wait, I don’t have all my data straight here - since the last big pay per post debate, 100,000,000+ new blogs have been set up by 10’s of millions of fresh new bloggers - who don’t have their data straight either.
Addendum: So for all you bright eyed, bushytailed bloggers who’ve been doing this less that a year but now have a good readership, here’s what’s happening: The BW article on PPP is link bait. bizweek is baiting you all with something controversial to rile you up and get you to link to them, because we all know how valuable links in the content of blog posts are right? Companies are willing to pay you for them - but BW is smart - they know the churn-rate in the blogosphere is high, and they got you to give them those valuable links for free by rehashing a tired old topic.
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July 1st, 2006 at 3:13 am
Regardless of what people say during the Gnomedex (Techcrunch), the blogosphere *IS* an echo chamber. How many times have I seen a topic that was discussed at length and died, coming back six months later for someone that have “just found out about it”, and then a legion of bloggers repeat the “discovery” as it was the latest truth.
Really, I have more than 300 feeds in my RSS agregator, and I remove any feed that is just posting non-original things.
As for the actual topic, it’s easy: many times I read blogs that read as a newspaper. If it looks like a newspaper, it reads like a newspaper it must be a newspaper, ergo a journalist.
Lots of magazines and newspapers now have “bloggers”. Those are the same guy who until three years ago were “columnists”. Nothing changed, just a different name.
Real bloggers though should go for independence, clarity, fresh content. Not necessarily news, but content.
July 6th, 2006 at 10:40 am
[...] : Oh, and when you see hand-wringing about foolish marketers trying to buy posts on blogs, come back to this: They’re buying the most precious editorial and brand space from the big guys. [...]
July 7th, 2006 at 12:37 am
[...] Altough this idea is not “new” - read Bloglogic and Ensight - the idea resembles a PPC (Pay Per Click) type of advertising. By using PayPerPost, advertisers can target Niche blogs and a niche audience just like Google Ad Words or Adsense advertisers do. I don’t think that bloggers should accept money from someone to blog favorably about them, their product or their service. The blogger may lose credibility in some peoples’ eyes if they find out what they are doing. The larger issue is what happens when someone pays a blogger to write an unfavorable post about a competitor? Will this pimped out blogger do it? Will they take a chance and burn someone for money? It’s a lot easier to write a fluff piece than it is to write a barn burner. I wonder if that issue has ever come up in PayPerPosts’ short history? [...]