The Last Podcast Opinionated Web 2.0 News and Commentary

Doc Searls on PayPerPost

My post on PayPerPost left a number of the PayPerPosters I cited just a little bit irate. Just have a look at their comments on my blog and on their own forum. You know you have hit a nerve if somebody says: “But ofcourse (sic!), we need to do something about this guy!!! Any comments?”

Doc Searls’ comments on PayPerPost just showed up in my feedreader and I think he sums it up better than I ever could:

PayPerPost makes you an asshole. Your job is to serve shit. You reduce yourself from a human being to an orifice for excreting messages.

Posting for pay is worse than sick. It’s stupid. If it’s money that you want, there are much better ways to blog for it. For example, by writing usefully about anything you know and care about, or by exposing your good work (at whatever you do), with frequent links to others who write and care about the same things. In the long run, you’ll make more money because of blogging than with it.

Actually, if money is all you want out of blogging, please don’t bother.

Couldn’t agree more. I also liked the comments Mike Arrington made on the Gillmor Gang today. To paraphrase him: PayPerPost is damaging to the blogosphere as a whole, as it reduces everybody’s credibility.

And to those who complained about my adsense ads: I don’t control what ads appear there and I am not writing copy for Google or pretending to like a product I don’t even know anything about. When my readers see me talking about something, they don’t have to second guess if I am shilling for somebody else.

Source: The Doc Searls Weblog : Monday, October 16, 2006

Maybe you’re not actively shilling, but at least I have control over what commercial ads will be on my blog, as opposed to ending up with Audi TT ads on there because it was in my post. What do you do if you blog about something you hate and it generates an ad? Isn’t that somewhat immoral too?

I sure wouldn’t hand over control of what was being hawked on my site to anyone but me.

In the end though, the readers control if any many gets made from the adsense ad, while you are the one who makes the decision to hawk a certain product. There is nothing immoral about that – what is immoral, though, is not disclosing your affiliation and misleading your readers. You actually disclose that your post are spnsored, but many PPPsters do not.
In the end, though, you are just doing SEO for companies – for very little money – while poisoning the blogosphere with bogus posts.
You say the purpose of your blog is not commerical – if that is the case, just delete the PPP stuff and have a clean conscience.

Who the fuck is Doc Searls?

Why does his opinion matter?

You realize the only reason I’m reading your blog now is because you turned up in my search for PayPerPost, right?

Frederic – do you have a blog? If you understand SEO, then you know this particular blog is doing just that for PayErPost, Scoble, thei Doc searls loon, and many others….

I actually have dcome to bleieve tint he open market.

Readers cna sift and choose what they want to bleieve, and more importantly, they can investigate and learn for themselves.

What’s immoral is drawing conclusions without understanding the larger market picture.

All blogs are inherently commercial. If we didn’t have somehting to sell, we wouldn’t publish it publicly.

Just saw this post from a search about paid posting. Thanks for the link to PayPerPost. I am now making $100 a day posting shit in a couple of hours.

[...] services that turn bloggers into paid product shills are wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s too bad that someone actually has to explain [...]

[...] services that turn bloggers into paid product shills are wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s too bad that someone actually has to explain [...]