After years of debate over the best financial model for blogging, you would think that "make money blogging" would be music to the blogosphere's ears. I know a lot of people who would sit around and blog all day if it meant they could make as much money as they do working at ad agencies or publishers.
But as they say, if it sounds too good to be true…
The blog money-making opportunity I'm referring to is the brainchild of a company called PayPerPost, which aggregates what are essentially opportunities to write fluff pieces for advertisers. Bloggers who take the company up on its offer can earn money for writing those pieces, depending on whether their posts pass muster with PayPerPost's review process, which determines whether or not the blogger has complied with policies and with the editorial points the advertiser wants worked into the content.
Here's the kicker: as of this writing, PayPerPost doesn't require that bloggers identify themselves as participants in the program, nor do they require the labeling of posts as paid advertisements.
Blog rumblings and grumblings
This model has been the subject of a great deal of controversy within the blogging community. Some heavy-hitting bloggers like Jeff Jarvis and Jason Calacanis have raged against PayPerPost's model, decrying the lack of transparency and honesty behind it. As Jarvis wrote on his blog, BuzzMachine:
It is fine for a blogger or newspaper or vlogger or TV show to take advertising, clearly labeled. It is wonderful for a blogger to get paid to write, editorially. But when you write what a commercial interest tells you and pays you to write, then you are no longer speaking as yourself but in the service of that marketer. That's fine, too, but it isn't content. It is advertising (or advertorial, same difference).
PayPerPost's community of paid bloggers has lashed back, debating the issues in blog comments. In defending the model, some folks have even produced short-form videos attacking Jarvis and Calacanis. (Ah, the ad hominem attack-- the last refuge of somebody who has lost an argument….)
Credibility at stake
The biggest problems with PayPerPost's model are that it has the potential to erode the credibility of blogs, that its values don't appear to be consistent with the movement that gave rise to blogs, and that it uses a top-down approach to address what is, essentially, a bottom-up challenge.
First, let's deal with the credibility issue.
A few of the commenters who have come down on the PayPerPost side of the argument have asked what the big deal is and wonder why the decision by one blogger to get paid for writing favorable posts would affect anybody else. It's convenient to want to look at individual cases like this in a vacuum, where the actions of one blogger don't affect the reputations of bloggers in general, but that's not the reality of the situation.
If The Washington Post got caught labeling paid advertising as editorial, and this became a common practice in the newspaper industry, would it not affect the trustworthiness of newspapers overall? While most people evaluate the credibility of facts disseminated by blogs based on their assessment of the credibility of the blogger, a mechanism for getting undisclosed paid advertising on blogs (that is indistinguishable from regular content, by the way) sows additional seeds of doubt.
The blog community doesn't need that.
After all, weren't the first successful blogs founded on the notions of transparency and honesty? It's that genesis that makes it possible for blogs to credibly break stories about doctored war photographs from trusted mainstream sources, or about poor fact-checking from someone who was one of the most trusted journalists in America.
Listening is important
From a marketing perspective, though, I dislike PayPerPost's, ahem, solution in that I think it's a top-down way to deal with a challenge that should be addressed from the bottom up. As Jarvis says on his blog:
You cannot buy our word of mouth. It's ours. You cannot buy buzz. You have to earn it. The only way to get either is to create a good product or service and to treat your customers with respect by listening to and being open and honest with them.
It's the listening part of that wisdom I'd like to address. PayPerPost's approach allows marketers to continue to avoid listening to their customers' voices on blogs and other social media. It's in the same vein as the dinosaur corporation that sees buying another few dozen TV GRPs each week as the solution to negative press.
In other words, companies can participate in this without really listening to what's going on. To me, that's another disservice.
The market will decide
In the end, whether PayPerPost succeeds or not will largely be determined by how well it plays in the marketplace of ideas. The blogosphere has an uncanny knack for rooting out the fakers, as we've seen with the Wal-Mart and McDonald's fake blogs. It's just a shame that ethical bloggers will have to suffer erosion of their credibility by being lumped in with their less ethical online neighbors.
Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com. Read full bio.
