business: PayPerPost to undermine blogosphere-credibility?
PayPerPost is a service currently in beta trying to connect advertisers with bloggers seeking for revenue from their blogging-activities. advertisers offer ‘opportunities’ to bloggers, defining the requirements a blog-post has to meet in order to get paid for it (f.e. linking to a product-website, reviewing a product or writing about personal experiences with a product or service). while PayPerPost promises to review oppportunities and ban offers which would “require bloggers to be dishonest”, popular bloggers have already expressed their antipathy for the service (read Robert Scoble or TechCrunch).
PayPerPost is currenlty available to US-bloggers only.
Update: here is an interesting snippet out of PayPerPost’s terms-of-use for advertiser:
You acknowledge that PayPerPost bloggers are independent third-parties and not directly controlled by PayPerPost. As a consequence, any blog postings of your content or product(s) will inherently risk negative or unflattering comments about your content, product(s) or company. You specifically acknowledge and agree that PayPerPost has no control over any Posts that may be available or published on any blog (or otherwise), and that you are solely responsible (and assume all liability and risk) for determining whether or not such Posts are appropriate or acceptable to you.
I have mixed feelings about this kind of venture. On the one hand, it’s a great way for bloggers to pick up some extra money. On the other hand, it definitely could lead to dishonest reviews. The best-case scenario would be for bloggers to promote only those products they truly believe in.
I tend to agree with Scoble & co., bloggers using this service will almost definitely loose credibility… even if they disclose to their readers that they are being paid for a particular post. I wonder what happens if I write a paid review and the review turns out to be negative - will I still be paid? [the way I interpret the payperpost-website: yes, since they are not allowing "opportunities requiring bloggers to be dishonest"]
Polluting The Blogosphere…
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 Adverti…
what is PayPerpost’s requirements?
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John
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payperpost states their terms of use for bloggers at http://payperpost.com/page/terms. the terms for advertisers can be found when registering for an account - I just update my post with a snippet outof it.