How it works
If you have a blog, you register with pay per post program and if you are accepted you can choose from a list of opportunities that they provide and blog about them. After 30 days (you must keep your post active at least that long) you will be paid. The amount of money you receive for one blog post can vary depending on the advertiser, but the good thing is that you know from the start how much money you will receive.
The controversy
A few months ago, a lot of well known bloggers like Darren Rose, Marshall Kirkpatrick, and many others didn’t seem to like this program. Even BusinessWeek.com had a very negative opinion about it and stated that it was “Polluting the blogosphere“. The main reason why these people were against it was that bloggers might have been tempted to go over the ethics and promote a bad product and the worst part is that their readers would not be aware that it was a payed post since disclosure WAS optional. And to be honest, I tended to agree with this aspect (up to a point) and I strongly felt that every “postie” (as payperpost.com like to call their bloggers) should provide a text info at the end of their post to let everybody know that it was an ad.
However, payperpost.com did not say that disclosure was forbidden, so it was the blogger’s decision to post a disclosure or not. Therefore, I don’t believe that payperpost.com was all that bad, and I can not understand why a blogger would take the risk of destroying his credibility by not letting his readers know that he was payed to write that post; keep in mind that payed posts are not related in any way with the action that readers will take (the payment does not depend on a number of clicks or sales generated by that post).
Patrizia Broghammer had a very interesting comment on Problogger; it started with: “When a marketing guy is paid to make a commercial for a company not necessarily needs to like the product or use it.It does it because they pay him”.
But again, everybody knows that he was a marketing guy and he was payed to do that, but if a friend of yours for example will come to you and recommend a specific product there is a far better chance you will try it especially because you assume that he was not payed to advertise for it and he speaking based on his own experience.
Now, disclosure is REQUIRED so all that debate only generated a buzz, so now almost every blogger seem to know about PayPerPost program. Looking back, it seems more and more like link baiting…
P.S. And just in case anybody is wondering, what I have written above is not a “pay per post” ad
Technorati Tags: Pay per post, PayPerPost, Make money from blogging
