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PayPerPost: Can We Stay Believable?

October 2, 2006 |

TechCrunch reports that PayPerPost, the company that pays bloggers to post positively about a certain product without the blogger revealing it, has received $3 million in venture capital.

The blogoshere is happily divided into two camps. Dave Winer seems to think it is not such a bad idea. He says that

it’s better than the old way of doing things, because it’s out in the open, it’s existence is disclosed. In the print world, there’s a pretense that such a practice doesn’t exist, but of course it does.

But the specific blogger doesn’t disclose his/her relationship with PayPerPost - indeed, the blogger is explicitly told not to do so. How is that any better than the ‘old ways,’ where a magazine would write positive articles about the product of an advertiser? I fully agree with John Chow that is is a completely unethical situation. It was so for magazines and it is evenly so for bloggers:

How many credible blog would sign up for this? I cannot think of any. The only person that comes to mind would be that blogger who paged me from DigitalPoint forum. He had a bunch of blogs and wanted me to buy some blog posts. For $10 he would write about my blog and tell all his readers how great it is. When I told him I do not need to promote my blog, he offered the service to any other sites I may own. When I asked him if he had seen any of my other sites, he replied no, that it did not matter because he was sure it was good. This blogger would sign up for PayPerPost.

What happens if our readers can’t trust us anymore? Any good writer can cover up the fact that payment was received for a post. There is no easy way to spot this. Actually, it is no better than the government placing fake newsreports in local newscast.

Original Source: Getting Paid To Write A Blog Post - Is This The Future? « John Chow dot Com

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