Cash Creates Questions at PayPerPost: Can the Nascent Paid Blogging Network Actually Succeed?
Barely six weeks ago, Ted Murphy, CEO of interactive consulting firm / agency MindComet, launched a paid blog post advertising network called PayPerPost. The service entails advertisers commissioning bloggers to write about their products and services in exchange for cash.
Many bloggers were quick to blast the idea, saying it would degrade their credibility. One of the sticky points: PayPerPost has no disclosure requirement. In other words, a blogger could write a paid blog post, and their readers would have no idea.
Popular emerging technology blog TechCrunch ran a post entitled PayPerPost.com offers to sell your soul. Even BusinessWeek Online ran an article called “Polluting the Blogosphere”, which said that running undisclosed PayPerPost blog posts was “far from honest.” Nearly everyone agrees that bloggers need an easy way to monetize their blogs, but is PayPerPost the way?
PayPerPost was born out of MindComet. “We started contacting people that blog about different subjects and tried to get them interested in products,” recalls Murphy. It was a marketing move that was supposed to connect advertisers who didn’t have the budget to spend on a mass market campaign reach individual bloggers, tell them about products, and send them press releases. “It was extremely successful for our clients, and they loved the exposure. But we lost money on every time we did it, because it was so manually intensive,” he adds.
That started MindComet down the path of automating things to connect bloggers and advertisers. Murphy and his team also needed a way to communicate with large numbers of bloggers in a short period of time. That led to the formation of an email-based service called the BlogStar Network.
BlogStar’s central mechanism was a web site that let bloggers fill in information about their blogs and their interests, and then they would receive related paid blog marketing offers via email. It was much easier than trying to contact bloggers manually, but it still had problems. MindComet couldn’t send out offers as frequently as its advertisers would’ve liked, and there was no way to target offers beyond a blog category.
“Every time we would get emails back from people saying ‘I don’t care about this crap, why are you sending me this crap’,” says Murphy. “We had to create a tool that allowed the bloggers themselves to come on and say ‘oh, I like this,’ ‘I identify with this,’ ‘I’d love to write about this.’” BlogStar ran for more than two years, building up a network of bloggers, which was later transferred over to PayPerPost, giving the new service something tangible to start out with.
The biggest problem bloggers have with PayPerPost is its disclosure policy, something that was also highlighted in the BusinessWeek article. That’s also something Robert Scoble has a problem with. The bloggers who signed up last month are getting paid now (a post must be up for 30 days before PayPerPost will send payment), so there are more positive opinions out there now, but the controversy remains.
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- Pingback from Adotas Cash Creates Questions at PayPerPost: Can the Nascent Paid Blogging Network Actually Succeed? « A Media Circus
This is a huge issue, and I really think the IAB and other industry associations should be tackling this topic aggressively and proactively. The disclosure issues raises many important questions. I blogged extensively about this a month or two ago. It’s a very important debate with consequences well beyond “Pay Per Post.”
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