Paying for Posts

Pete Blackshaw weighs in with a lengthy post about a new company called PayPerPost. The idea behind the company is a sort-of marketplace where advertisers and bloggers can meet up and exchange value. Advertisers post up offers: blog about our product and we'll pay you $X. Bloggers can choose a topic, write their post and get some cash. Pete ticks through all the issues associated with this, with a level of rigor and even-handedness that is extraordinary. Take a look at his post and you'll see what I mean.

In my talk at WOMBAT, I mentioned that WOM sometimes rides a razor's edge of ethical behavior: we're trying to move marketing outside of the bounded space of placed-advertising and into the world of natural conversations. These sorts of enterprises clearly put us very close to that edge.

Pete puts it all into perspective, I think. There's nothing illegal here, but there has to be disclosure attached to this sort of effort. If you place AdSense ads on your blog, they're clearly marked. If you blog about something specifically to get paid for it, that needs to be disclosed as well (even if you write negatively about it). Or, perhaps your blog as a whole should be noted "Posts may be paid-for".