Wholesale envelopmental citizen journalism. What a concept.

How much did techcrunch get paid for this post then?

I could use this service, if its kept confidential that the blogger(s) were paid to speak about my product. That is kept confidential, right? Otherwise, whats the advantage to the person who pays?

>>
yeah!!! this is the question

This service is likely to be most popular with bloggers who have small readerships. Those with a large and loyal subscriber base will already be generating significant enough income through ads to bother with this. Why risk alienating your readers by pulling the wool over their eyes when they are happy to see paid-for ads next to content with real value.

There are of course tens of millions of blogs with small readerships that offer a huge combined readership (the long tail anyone?). But from the point of view of a company wanting to advertise, i’d have a problem with the fact that i would be paying lots of bloggers with few readers (or none at all).

Rather than paying people to write about your product, try reading Seth Godin’s ‘Purple Cow’. I.e. make your product remarkable and people will talk about it anyway. See, I wrote about that book and i won’t be getting 5 bucks in the post.

Elliot, it’s funny you mention Seth’s Purple Cow book. I talked about that in the podcast.

If you think PayPerPost is bad, check out this gem McManus uncovered: http://www.readwriteweb.com/ar.....market.php

(Pay per digg… Ugh.)

I need to proofread (or not post at 6am after being up all night working on a website). But that should be “MacManus”, of course. I am sure he hates it when people do that.

How do they take into account blog-popularity, number of regular readers and other demographics?

Jeff, they don’t worry about that stuff. The blog just has to be at least 90 days old. Something I bring up in the podcast is that it’s clear that they don’t care about blog popularity. In my opinion, this is about creating lots of links to the advertiser which helps with search engine rankings.

Elliot,
If you read any popular blogs, you’d know that they’re always looking for ways to monetize their traffic. If the PayPerPost service is confidential, i.e the bloggers don’t have to reveal that they were paid for the post, then it wouldn’t really annoy their audience.. it would come across as a genuine review.

I agree with the idea of building a remarkable product that people talk about. But sometimes you are just short on time and can’t wait for your idea to spread, and people to find you and talk about you. In those cases, PayPerPost can be used as a kind of shortcut. I don’t see it as unethical or wrong, its just like any other form of advertisement to me.

Josh, it’s around 50/50 people spell it Mc or Mac

PayPerPost raised $3 million from Inflexion Partners, Village Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. This is when you known that paid advertising on the Internet has gone too far. Marshall over at TechCrunch humorously points out that PayPerPost pollutes the Blogosphere and asks bloggers to sell their souls. Rob Hof over at BusinessWeek spoke to the CEO:

“PayPerPost is poised to redefine the concept of advertising as we know it,” founder and CEO Ted Murphy says in the press release. “We intend to create the world’s largest network of consumer content creators and show advertisers how to utilize the creativity and voice of the masses. It’s marketing by the people, for the people.”
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Ali, I agree that new ways to monetize traffic will always be appealling to those who ’sell’ audiences (bloggers, traditional content based websites and traditional print publishers). It’s also widely known that these media rely heavily on info from press releases so writing about a product beacuse someone asked you to is nothing new.

However, journalists/bloggers etc build loyal readerships based on trust. We read TC because we trust that Michael et al will provide us with current, valuable news and reviews. If we suspected that the TC guys were simply writing about products because they were paid to do so that trust would be eroded.

I don’t like it and I doubt it will work. It seems a tad sleezy. Personally, at least based upon the ads I saw, I can’t imagine maintaining the integrity of my blog and making enough money to care. Hey here’s a post on discovery engines, my trip to etre, mesothelioma, and purple cow. Wait - how did mesothelioma get in there?

Looks like it wouldn’t scale well either - lots of human intervention…yuk.

http://www.MARKSEREMET.com

Jeff & Michael: my research says segmentation by blog popularity, industry, PR and even ranking (the platform has a feedback loop similar to ebay buyer/seller feedback) are all likely enhancements. The platform is young and just trying to keep up with demand from CGM publshers and advertisers so far.

It’s nice to see that this time around the discussion isn’t so polarized . For those of you curious: sign up at PayPerPost.com, pick a topic that fits your audience, including the tone you want, disclose as you feel is appropriate for your audience and stay creative/informative. If getting compensated for your time/effort doesn’t feel right then don’t continue. I, for one, would love to hear your feedback and any data you can share on this blogging revenue model versus others you have tried.

If, however, you find PPP rewarding and the ‘Posties’ an enjoyable bunch to converse with and share best practices, I won’t be surprised…

I suppose it’s okay when big marketing firms do this for their clients (guess what - they already are) but if we bring this ability down to individual blogs and advertisers then it’s more controversial?

How many news magazines and television shows do what basically amounts to the same thing? Yet, people still read their Wired or Time magazine, and still watch their evening news.

Sounds like a good way to generate buzz for advertisers and a good way to lose credibility with readers.

I love the idea. And they seem to be adding rules to prevent abuse. Example: You can’t do two PPP posts to your blog back-to-back. If I go through PPP’s listings and I see something that I’d write about anyway, why not make a few extra $? As PPP gets to be more popular, there will be more interesting things to write about for $.

Last time I was there I discovered a website selling MySQL databases. That was very interesting to me. And here I am posting about it on Techcrunch! My new blog wasn’t 3 months old at the time, so I couldn’t write about it. But, it’s not just about the blog posts. When you post a listing up there on PPP, people will read your website and decide if you’re worth writing about.

Just looking at it from an SEO perspective, it’s got a lot of value. Many times you pay websites a lot more to give you a linkback, this is a steal.

Sure, it’ll have all types of repercussions within the blogging community, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a viable way to make money off your blog. Remember how much hoopla there was here on TechCrunch when the ads first started up? This is slightly different, but will become normal over time.

Hey techcrunch, good job bringing down their site - I can’t seem to access it - I bet the extra traffic is causing problems

Any person with a blog can come in and accept your offer, plug your site, and take your money. I used the service a few months ago and the people who accepted my offers have these no-name blogs that probably aren’t even in the Google index. This service is a total waste of money! I hope it flops hard.

Suedelock: Shoot me your actual advertising spend/results data. Your experience doesn’t match the real data multiple advertisers have shared about the platform. I’d also like to see your ad opps to make sure they were requests for creative, entertaining posts that allowed the blogger to use their own voice. PPP is young and loves feedback so make sure to share your experience directly so they can improve for you and others in the future…

Check out the world’s first PayPerPost shill blog at http://www.revenews.com/jimkuk.....02339.html

It’s one of the required human rewards - it’s either fame and glory or pay. I tend to agree with James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds, that you can get the best results from crowds, not individuals; and that the fame and glory and authority seekers are a step above those seeking monetary rewards. The monetary reward crowd will produce good content and these types of business models will co-exist right alongside the free contribution model popularized by wikipedia and blogging.

The vast majority of blogs are expenses for the bloggers, not profit centers for the bloggers. Expense at least if you factor in the money value of their time. Payperpost and others will be a good way for passionate bloggers to have their cake and eat it too, keeping it pure while paying the bills.

Mike, I love your critical view on this company. That really speaks for you, seriously.

One of the interesting things in the podcast was that the ppp guys defended what they were doing by comparing themselves to Overture. When Overture just launched, most people were very critical at them for doing paid search. (as you know, their model ended up being very successful and Google’s success is based on it). I think the Overture comparison was the only somewhat credible aspect of their reasoning and it made me think about it a bit more. However, after giving it some more thought I believe that the Overture comparison not going to hold when the dust has settled. Overture (and now Google, Yahoo, etc) is giving something that that users want. Looking for a hotel in Seattle? Here are the web results and here are the ads. Whereas I can’t see a parallel to the ppp model… i read blogs because they filter out the interesting stuff out there and write an insightful perspective on it. I cant see how the paid model is going to work here in a sustainable way.

Instead of placing ppp in the “overture” bucket, i’ll place them in the “spam” bucket for now. Yeah, sure, companies make money with spam, but is it sustainable? And is ist something you proudly tell your kid about? Not sure.

Any thoughts anyone?

Jake: nice observation. However, I would make the comparison with a tad more granularity. Yes, GoTo/Overture had their own destination search site, but it really flourished as a provider of revenue/paid results to consumer destination sites, but also needed a revenue model to sustain all the other value they brought to users — just a few examples included Yahoo and MSN; and Google does this as a vertically integrated model (although the vast majority of revenue comes from paid search listings).

Now, if you can accept that all blogs are sites that could benefit from a revenue model to sustain all the other good they bring, then you understand the truest comparison. Just like paid posts, paid search listings bring value that some people will admit and others will debate. However, no one will debate that paid search listings enable Yahoo, MSN, Google and a myriad of other sites to deliver value to users without having to make money at every turn (i.e. paid search is why Google can lose money on Maps, Writely and GoogleLabs projects). Likewise, paid posts provide a revenue model that allows consumer content generators to bring value to users without having to make money on every bit of real estate they own (e.g. [insert ugly AdSense copycat names here]).

If you add in the value of PPP’s honeypot of blogger topics, the ranking/incentive structure to improve one’s blogging efforts, the aesthetics of displacing blinking ads and the ‘posties’ best-practices blogger community that has emerged around PPP you find a model that matches Overture and goes well beyond in the value-creation category. The result is a platform that benefits the entire Consumer Generated Media ecosystem.

“I cant see how the paid model is going to work here in a sustainable way.”

The idea is old as dirt.

From Dictionary.com … 2 a : to approve openly ; especially : to express support or approval of publicly and definitely b : to recommend (as a product or service) usually for financial compensation

As a PayPerPost advertiser doing a $150 trial last month, I thought I was going to get 20 sploggers who would do the absolute minimum to get paid (write 5 10-word sentences to clear the 50 word requirement), and then start cutting and pasting from others. The 20 posts we got were not splogs by any means: it was almost like marketing feedback — Keyword: almost — at least some of the bloggers are writing about stuff they don’t really care much about to get their dinner money.

Some people who cleared $50 this last month with nothing more than a thousand pageviews a month are removing Adsense altogether. An Adsense CPM of $1 vs. a PPP CPM of $50-100 — why bother with Adsense?

But no one should quit their day job for PPP blog money: The majority of advertisers do this for the links. Once Google et al devalue PPP links more severely than they already do, this business is going to have to stand on another leg. In the meantime, this Christmas is going to look really good for PPP, PPP bloggers.

“Some people who cleared $50 this last month with nothing more than a thousand pageviews a month are removing Adsense altogether. An Adsense CPM of $1 vs. a PPP CPM of $50-100 — why bother with Adsense?”

This quote from a previous comment is really sad.

Yes, that is what DJs probably thought/think when they sell playtime for songs on the radio. The market will certainly shake this one out–and further currupt the operation of the blogosphere. Spam, splogs, link spam, comment spam, I just searched “patent reform” on Technorati and got one good link–to a Brad Feld post–and more than ten splogs. Yes, the market is working!

By the way, that practice, called “payolla” for those old enough to remember, is illegal and has been for something like 35 years. Yet it persists and makes it hard for bands that cannot pay to get air play. Lately the big radio networks have been going through yet another round of trying to deal with it, now in the form of “independent promoters” who the record companies hired to get air play, who in turn mostly simply bought the play by bribing stations, networks and djs.

Dan,
Thanks for your response. What you say is interesting and worth considering but in my opinion paid search is in a subtle way very different than how you describe ppp :

Paid search is phenominally successful for users, advertisers and search engines alike, because it adds REAL value to all 3 of them.

Users love paid search, because they are looking for something and paid search makes it easy to find it (in many cases much better than organic results). Advertisers love the fact that they can approach consumers right when they search for something. Search engines are lucky enough to be able to facilitate this “magic”.

In contrast, while ppp may make advertisers and publishers happy, they miss the 3rd necessary factor: consumers won’t like it imho. And I am convinced you need them, too. Anyone disagree?

Anyway, time will tell what happens with these guys, but i won’t be putting any of my money on this.

I’m still interested in more opinions, I think this is a fun and valuable discussion.

Jake

Blogging Sponsored is Huge these days
So many companies use it
http://webiztoday.com/wordpress/?p=14

You got it Jack.

I hate the Internets.

Good luck getting ranked by memetrackers and search engines if you use PayPerPost (and text-link-ads for that matter).

Google will block your outbound pagerank if they see you’re using sponsored links (they have automated systems that will do this).

We’re about ot update our terms of service to make it clear that we won’t index your site if you’re using TLA or PayPerPost….

Maybe now that bloggers are officially taking bribes to write content we can finally start calling them “journalists.”

Kevin

Kevin, Make sure you remove TechCrunch from your index, too.

I believe you use nofollow links now

The decision is actually more difficult than I originally made it out to be…. we’ve actually removed a few sites larger than Techcrunch due to link spamming and a few other reasons. The list is very short right now.

I think it’s a matter of whether hard coding support for that site outweighs the fact that they have astroturf content. I’d prefer to index high quality sites even if they do have astroturf. I’d rather not to even open that pandora’s box though…

For some of the smaller blogs I’m just not sure it makes sense to keep indexing them if they’re going to contribute to the link spam problem.

Kevin

Technology companies have been using press releases (i meant offline) for so many years (perhaps decades) now. Most news we find on business page of any daily newspaper is likely to be a press release put there as news. This tactic has already existed.

Now payperpost is taking this to blogs!!!!

No controversy at all when it comes to media marketing. Just think of the big guys in this industry and the behind closed doors sessions they leave in their wake all for the making of money.

At least PayPerPost is making it publicly known about what it is doing and what direction it is heading. It’s a thumbs up from me. I can only hope my site has similar success (it will if I have anything to do with it!)

Col

We’ve used PPP on two occasions (for a total of 17 links). We want to promote ourselves on blogs, and there are not a lot of options. We’ve used BlogAds (expensive), we send tips to bloggers (effective, but only works for certain things and is labor intensive), we do press releases, we use StumbleUpon’s system, and we buy Adwords, in addition to PPP.

I think the attitude of Kevin Burton, and perhaps of Google (though I’ve seen no direct statements by them), is really annoying. We’re just trying to promote our business using a variety of ways. If in their relevancy ranking algorithm a search or other site wants to discount outgoing links from PPP posts somewhat or completely, that’s fine. But all the self-righteous indignation and talk of “ethics” is a little over the top.

In the specific case of what we’re promoting, we do not require positive or negative statements about our web site, we balance the pay and word count so that bloggers with no interest in the topic don’t have an incentive to participate, and we explicitly ask bloggers not to blog about our “opportunity” if such a post would be out of place on their blog.

Yet further proof that there is a lot of money floating around, just waiting for an enticing opportunity. It boggles me to see VCs invest their money into a business model that promotes unethical practices. It’s like paying a magazine publisher to write only positive things about products. Don’t consumers have the right to know the truth?

Great comments by all.

It’s fun to see so much support for PPP from those that understand trying to blog, covering their expenses and maybe clearing some spending money — while keeping their integrity intact. A marketplace of PPP’s magnitude must be guided by the mainstream bloggers rather than the elites and the numbers are on PPP’s side. So long as PPP continues to listen to the market and bring value to publishers, advertisers and audiences then the tipping point will come even quicker than it did for Overture. What a fun couple days!

I’d like to speak a moment, from a blogger’s perspective.

I currently run a small weblog, with a tolerable Google PageRank of 5.
I’ve tried things like AdWords, AdBrite’s text ad system, Chitika’s eMiniMalls, IndieKarma’s bottom-mounted micropayment bar, and a donation jar.
Over the past 18 months or so, all of those systems have earned me a grand total of roughly $1.

Why? More and more people are blocking any sort of banner-shaped ad.

For us ‘micro-bloggers’, if you’ll excuse the term, bringing home enough to offset the cost of hosting without driving potential readers away is actually difficult. I mean, yippee, instead of $68.95 a year, I’ll spend $68.95 a year — none of these companies pay out in small amounts!

I started off with PayPerPost as a skeptic, thinking, “Oh, this’ll be another one of those ‘get rich quick’ schemes that will net me nothing, at best.”

I made one of their posts, sat back and did a little regular blogging, and thirty days later, I was surprised to see a $5 deposit into my PayPal account.

So, I started getting into the whole PayPerPost thing. I cruised around the blogosphere a little, and found out what was making people tick. Some people were expressing a small sense of displeasure at the fact that there is no built-in disclosure about these paid posts, and I could agree with them on that.

What does an honest blogger do with that?
Takes the idea, and runs with it. With the exception of one post, there is a small purple div that sits at the bottom, and basically tells people that the post is sponsored by PayPerPost.

I’ve seen a VERY small number of opportunities pop up, and the advertiser stated that they DON’T want the blogger disclosing that they were paid for it.
What do I do?
I rate the opportunity as low as I can, refuse to take it, and move the hell on to something else that interests me.

Keywords: Interests Me.

There’ve been plenty of opportunities that have interested me coming through at PayPerPost. I’ve actually perused the list, seen something there that reminded me that I wanted to talk about it at some point in the near future, and taken the opportunity.

What’s even nicer still is when, even as a small blogger, we get good feedback from the people who we’re posting for. It helps to build respect for these people who just want to promote their business by word of mouth.

To go back on previously mentioned comments, however…

Michael Vu, #41:
Actually, as a blogger, there are opportunities that are either all positive (relatively common), all negative (I’ve only seen a few), or neutral, which gives us freedom to say what we want about them.
I’ve actually done a post where I tore apart an offered service, pointed out what I felt needs to be fixed if they’re going to offer it as a paid service, going far above and beyond the minimum requirements for the post.

Jessep, #17:
Bingo.

maaan, i love this post including all comments. I still do not like PPP though, successfull and widepsread adoption of PPP business model would mean destruction to all beauties and ideals that stands behind the concept of blogging.

I just want to amplify what Xial and Dan are saying about the disclosure and best practices aspect of PPP. I’ve been writing posts for PPP, and have a disclosure at the bottom of each post. Like Xial, I don’t take posts that require nondisclosure. Maybe in the long run, I won’t be able to make as much money as other bloggers, but my readership expects and deserves to have that disclosure there. If I don’t disclose the paid post topics, and someone finds out, then that would call into question all of the other posts on my blog.

I did have an interesting experience with one advertiser who emailed me directly, demanding that I remove the post relating to their opportunity. When I emailed PPP about it, they said, yes, the advertiser had contacted them about the post, but they didn’t contact me since there wasn’t any nondisclosure requirement in the opportunity description.

The end result was that I deleted the post, and PPP will still pay me for the post. That’s what I call sticking up for the scrupulous blogger. The advertiser wasn’t too happy about it, but at least now they know that there are indeed full-disclosure posties out there.

So let’s put an end to the nonsense about unethical practices. There’s nothing inherently unethical about PayPerPost. It’s just another modality of advertising. And my site stats show visitors clicking through to the advertisers’ websites, even with the full disclosure.

good