IZEA (formerly PayPerPost) has soft launched their new social network for “posties” Social Spark.

Social Spark brings the PayPerPost scheme into a candy colored social network. There’s little need to describe all the features as there’s nothing really innovative: think MySpace or Facebook but in bright colors. The key difference is the focus on shilling; center stage is offers for paid posting, including most popular offers and most recent. Each offer includes which members of PayPerPost/ SocialSpark recently visited it and posties can leave props for each offer.

One thing that did surprise me is that SocialSpark is also offering “sponsorship opportunities.” These would appear to be as they suggest, simple place a box on your site and get paid sponsorships that would be entirely legitimate and without moral qualms to most people.

The key difference to PayPerPost before it is that offers taken up in SocialSpark must include link=nofollow links, start with a disclosure, and should be neutral in tone: still shilling, but less evil.

The service is currently in closed alpha testing and running behind schedule (it was originally scheduled for a January launch) so perhaps this explains the complete lack of offers available on the site. Most of the paid opportunities come from IZEA itself and not third party advertisers.

SocialSpark isn’t my thing (nor Michael’s), but others may disagree. Screen shots as follows:

IZEA (PayPerPost) have suspended Zookoda, the blog to email service they acquired in April.

According to CEO Ted Murphy, the service has been suspended due to “elevated levels of abuse on Zookoda.com” and goes on to explain that the service is being used by spammers. For those that think that PayPerPost pollutes the blogosphere with spam content, the following from Murphy is rich with irony:

We hate spam. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone that really enjoys spam. Some people hate spam even more than we hate spam and those people complained to our network hosting service. Our network hosting service REALLY hate spam….We’re not spammers, we don’t support spammers and we do support everybody’s freedom of choice when it comes to opting in and out email lists.

Murphy suggests that the service will return in January, but we’re putting it on deadpool watch; Zookoda has been failing for months. Most Searched reports that the service started deteriorating when IZEA took over and had gotten to the stage where it simply stopped sending out email distributions in early December. Erno H on LinkedIn reports similar problems. An email distribution service that doesn’t provide email distribution is a business with nothing going for it.

It’s been less than two weeks since Google penalized PayPerPost bloggers in the most devastating way possible – by resetting all of their PageRanks to zero and effectively removing them from the Internet.

PayPerpost, now called IZEA, is in the process of launching RealRank, an alternative way to rank blogs. But their advertisers are still looking for blogs with an actual PageRank to write about them (this helps with the SEO effort). The result? Freaked out PPP shills who are going to have to find a real job.

Bloggers are expressing their angst on forum thread. Among the more pathetic messages:

Oh. My. God. Oh my god! I can’t believe this is happening. I NEED to earn money with my blogs, I’m going to have to take every single opp I qualify for every day in order to keep up with expenses.

and this, from someone lamenting a negative comment on their blog (the second paragraph is a winner):

I’m trying to develop a thicker skin, I really am. But this is my livelihood, you know? This is important to me. When I started with PPP, I never thought I would still be doing it seven months later, or that I would care about it so much.

And since when is independence and paid blogging mutually exclusive? There is choice involved.

So much for the claims by PayPerPost that their bloggers only write about products they actually believe in. PayPerPost isn’t dead, but a big chunk of their advertisers are clearly bailing now that the SEO value of paid posts is gone. That’s bad news for the shill blogs that rely on PPP to pay the bills, but good for the blogosphere in general.

Update: Ok, the poll is now closed. It was close, but the “Nos” have it with 55% of the 3,437 votes cast. No IZEA ads on TechCrunch.

In 2006 PayPerPost CEO Ted Murphy emailed to ask if we’d take their ads on TechCrunch. We said no and that was the end of it. Yesterday I heard from Ted again on the subject of advertising. His company, which has been renamed IZEA, wants to advertise their new RealRank service on TechCrunch.

For anyone unfamiliar with PayPerPost/IZEA and our position on them, it comes down to this: We think the core product is deeply flawed and we’ve said so many, many times. Over time the company has made policy changes that have mitigated some of the biggest issues we and others have with them. For example, they now require disclosure of paid posts, although we take issue with some of the language and the placement of the disclosure.

They are the blogging world’s pariah and are fairly routinely trashed for, as I put it, polluting the blogosphere. For more on our posts on them, see their Crunchbase profile. Here’s our first post on PayPerPost, which is representative of most of our coverage. If you have a spare couple of hours (and you’re tired of watching my sweet dancing moves), you can read all of our coverage of the company here.

Anyway, the company now has other products which we have no particular issue with (example), and RealRank, a new way to rank participating blogs since Google has basically kicked them out of the Internet, is one of them.

We’ve asked Ted if he minds us asking our readers what they think about taking advertising from IZEA on TechCrunch, and he’s agreed. So the question is, do we accept advertising from IZEA for RealRank? The poll is below. If you say it’s a bad idea, we won’t accept it (and Ted says he wouldn’t want to do it anyway since it wouldn’t be received well). If you say yes, we’ll take it.

Two quick additional points. First, yes I know that simply writing this post is a way of promoting PayPerPost. But we’re not linking to them here, and I’m pretty sure Ted isn’t super pleased with all the links to the negative posts we’ve written. Second, it should go without saying that even if we accept their advertising, it isn’t going to affect our editorial coverage of the company. In fact, I may go more negative just to prove we’re neutral, if that makes sense.

What’s your opinion? The poll will remain open for around 24 hours, and we’ll update with the final vote. If you’re wondering how I’m voting on this – well, the very first vote is a “no.” :-/

If participating in PayPerPost wasn’t questionable enough morally before, today it’s now a poisoned chalice as Google has commenced punishing PayPerPost bloggers by completely removing their page rank.

IZEA (the new holding company for PayPerPost) CEO Ted Murphy is not surprisingly calling foul on the move, claiming that it’s part of some sort of censorship conspiracy by Google. Better still Murphy claims that it’s part of Google’s attempts to deny competition because PayPerPost is a “a very attractive alternative” to Adsense.

Murphy goes on to claim that TechCrunch should be punished because our occasional posts thanking sponsors (like this one) is nothing different to what PayPerPost bloggers do.

WTF?

TechCrunch, like many blogs occasionally puts up a post (usually monthly) highlighting our great sponsors, but lets look at one of these posts. They nearly always include the words “TechCrunch Sponsors” in the post title, and are very clear that its TechCrunch thanking our sponsors (”Thanks TechCrunch Sponsors”). There is zero editorial on the benefits for or against the sponsors such as PayPerPost, and it’s clear what the post is about, unlike your typical PayPerPost blog post. We also don’t take money for writing editorial content; TechCrunch publishes posts for and against without favor, where as your typical PayPerPost blog distorts the line between truth and paid advertorial.

Unlike Michael I’ve never been as strong in my dislike of PayPerPost, and although I’ve never used the service myself (I did sign up for an account when they opened so I could review the service) I’m all for exploring different ways for the little guy to make money, even if personally the ethics and morality of PayPerPost has never sat well with me. Yet if PayPerPost ever wanted friends, wild conspiracy centered posts such as this one just say “mad” to me. This looks and smells like a company that is not in a good way, a company that is lashing out as its business model starts to fail around it. I’m predicting Deadpool within 12 months; I can’t see a lot of bloggers being happy with losing Pagerank so we should see an exodus of bloggers out of PayPerPost (particularly ones with traffic) over the next few months. This will leave PayPerPost with inventory deficiencies that will result in diminished revenues making the PayPerPost business model unsustainable going forward.

thanks to Trace for the tip

PayPerpost, which has renamed it’s parent company IZEA, says they’ll be launching a new social network in January 2008 called SocialSpark.

Bloggers and advertisers (the company says they have over 85,000 bloggers and 11,000 advertisers) will create profiles. Users visiting the site will then “browse the public profiles of advertisers and bloggers along with their associated sponsorship and blog related data.”

”It’s the first social network that is designed from the ground up to be advertiser-centric, while preserving the free, managed flow of user information common within other networks” said CEO Ted Murphy.

The translation, as far as I can tell, is that SocialSpark is a place for advertisers to interact with bloggers who are willing to take pay per post type advertising and run with it. Get to know them, see how big their audience is, whatever. There’s absolutely nothing distasteful about it as an idea. But to the extent it furthers the pollution of the blogosphere by encouraging more paid shilling, it makes us all worse off.

We heard about a new service from PayPerPost today, and while it’s a little boring, there is nothing about it that I can take particular issue with at first blush (we often find things to criticize with PayPerPost – our past posts are here).

Like the popular site TinyURL, URLbrief lets people exchange a long, difficult to communicate URL for a short one. They’ve added a couple of bells and whistles – The URL creator can link to multiple destination URLs and visitors are taken to one of the links randomly when they click. Also, users can see stats on how many clicks the link is getting and browser data on the people clicking.

The service seems completely unrelated to the main business of PayPerPost, which pays bloggers to write posts about advertisers.

But…and I’m thinking out loud here: Those posts always include links back to the advertiser, so perhaps they will use URLbrief to direct that traffic. This seems counter intuitive, since advertisers want the links to go directly to them. But rumor has it that Google has been trying to find ways to penalize PPP blogger links. Perhaps this is a way to minimize any collateral search engine damage from direct links. The stats feature of URLbrief also provides good, verifiable data back to PPP as to how many people click the links, which may help them monetize advertisers more effectively.

Who knows. No conspiracy theory is too outlandish when it comes to this company. All I know is, they’re up to something, I’m sure. There are way too many services out there just like this, and there is absolutely no revenue model around this service. Their blog post on the new product is here.

Controversial startup PayPerPost makes another misstep this weekend – they became verbally abusive with an employee candidate who turned them down.

A couple of weeks ago we wrote about how CEO Ted Murphy took all employees on an all-expenses-paid offside to Club Med, where they got drunk, inexplicably dressed up as Native Americans (complete with red face paint) and then posted video of the whole racially offensive episode on the web.

Now this: Today we were sent an ongoing email string between PayPerPost and an engineer, Lawrence Salberg, who was steered towards the company by a headhunter. After an underwhelming interview the candidate did some research and wrote back to the headhunter that he was not interested in the job, and in fact that he was so upset that he wasted his time that he didn’t want to hear about any of the headhunter’s other opportunities, either. “Remove me from your candidacy system immediately,” Salberg said in a long email outlining the reasons he would not work at the company.

That should have been the end of it. But the headhunter forwarded Salberg’s email to PayPerPost VP Software Development Peter Wright (Update: See here), who went on the attack. “I’m shocked at some of the statements in your email to Lori” Wright said in an unsolicited email to Salberg. Other gems aimed at the job candidate:

• As for this company having no future, have you done ANY research at all?
• First you say that the only people that would work at such a company are those with no brains, no self confidence, etc etc. I take offense at that.
• The thing that amuses me most about your post though is how easily you are swayed by loud noises.
• I wish you the very best of luck in your search for a “career.”
• I know there are lots of safe little environments out there with well structured corporate ladders that you can happily spend your days climbing and climbing until eventually you retire.

Wright also spends time boasting about his own accomplishments, saying:

I’m a best selling author. I wrote the world’s best selling VIsual Basic book (and 13 others) and had a very happy career as a consultant specializing in Microsoft technologies that took me all over the world.

And so on (the entire string is available here as a pdf – it includes a number of attacks on TechCrunch as well). Wright defends the abilities of his team and technical management, which have previously been criticized as lax and unprofessional.

It’s never professional to go on the attack when someone declines your job offer. With a company as controversial as PayPerPost, there’s also a good chance the embarrassment will be forwarded to the press. The lesson here – be very careful before you take a job at this company, and if you decline, don’t even think about giving your honest opinion. And if you’re a startup looking for a smart engineer, Lawrence Salberg is still on the market.

Ah, PayPerPost. The controversial Florida-based startup that is leading the effort to tarnish the blogosphere makes another PR blunder. And this one’s a whopper.

The company has been chronicling their startup days on a video blog called RockStartup. There have been some embarrassments before with the video blog – such as when a viewer noticed that the company had purchased $700 chairs for employees with investor capital and then yelled at a painter for standing on one (CEO Ted Murphy, pictured above, later said the chairs were purchased used).

But the most recent episode is where the company really takes the cake. All employees of the company were taken on an all-expenses-paid trip to Club Med, where as far as I can tell they spent their time getting drunk and dressing up as Native Americans, complete with lots of red face and body paint (something many Native Americans find both racist and offensive, and which has been equated to Blackface). The company also hired something called a “Creative Thinking Coach” to guide them through the whole experience.

The only question I have is…Did Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the main VC behind PayPerPost, really greenlight this debacle?

Controversial pay-per-post startup PayPerPost has raised $7 million in a second round of financing, bringing their total raised capital to just over $10 million. Like their previous round from last October the financing was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, with participation from Inflexion Partners and Village Ventures. New investor DFJ Gotham, a fund affiliated with Draper Fisher Jurvetson, also participated.

It is generally a bad sign when a company is not able to bring in a new investor for a financing. The company and existing investors generally like to do so because it brings in fresh connections and ensures that a new third party is involved in valuing the round. When a company does a second round with the same investors, it can be (but isn’t always) a sign that the company is in trouble. In Pay Per Post’s case, the simplest explanation would be that most VCs want to keep their hands clean. Getting involved with PayPerPost could hurt their reputation and exclude them from other deals.

Listen to our podcast interview with founder Ted Murphy and investor Josh Stein here. The company’s profile is here.

Update: An email from Josh Stein at DFJ which points out an inaccuracy above and provides a believable reason for the makeup of the round:

PayPerPost, the controversial blogging service that lets advertisers purchase commentary on blogs, has released a new product called PayPerPost Direct. The new product is a widget that bloggers can add to their blogs that announces their willingness to sell blog posts.

Previously, bloggers perused listings on the PayPerPost website, looking for opportunities to make a few extra dollars. Now, bloggers can set their own minimum price when creating a widget, and let advertisers come to them directly.

This feature subtly shifts the way the company approaches the market. The current system has advertisers paying a set fee per post regardless of the differences in blog size or authority. The result was a low average fee of a $5 or so, which didn’t attract the larger blogs. Now that bloggers can set their own price and engage with advertisers one-on-one, we may see a few of the larger ones begin to use the service. Competitor ReviewMe has a similar approach that pays large blogs more, although the price is based on an algorithm.

PayPerPost keeps 10% of fees generated through the Direct product. Their standard fee on their normal product is a 35% cut.

We’ll wait and see if any of the large blogs adopt this anytime soon. PayPerPost is still deeply flawed – it allows advertisers to demand positive writeups, and they do not require bloggers to disclose within the post itself that it is sponsored text.

Look for a press release later this week. An overview video is available here.

Controversial startup PayPerPost will announce the acquisition of Zookoda, an Australian blog-to-email service, tomorrow.

We wrote about Zookoda last year, and the company put the product up for sale last September. There were reportedly a number of offers for the service when it was originally put up for sale, but the asking price of US$500,000 was too rich to close a deal. Now, nearly seven months later, PayPerPost has stepped in to acquire the company. PayPerPost is not disclosing what they paid for Zookoda, although CEO Ted Murphy did tell me it was a cash deal.

PayPerPost previously announced the acquisition of Performancing only to back out of the deal a week later. Murphy assured me that the Zookoda acquisition won’t suffer the same fate.

PayPerPost says that Zookoda has 10,000 blog customers sending emails to 2.3 million people. Like the Performancing deal, PPP will want to market their core service to those 10,000 bloggers. Murphy tells me that they are also looking for new distribution channels for their content, and email is a natural fit. PPP bloggers will probably soon be seeing pitches to join the Zookoda service, perhaps with the promise of higher payouts when they post.

New service BegForPost takes on the ethically questionable PayPerPost service that allows advertisers to pay bloggers to write about their products.

BegForPost promises none of the ethical hassles of PayPerPost. There’s no payment, just begging for coverage:

You’ve worked for months building a startup on a boostrap budget and the launch is near. How will you get an initial influx of traffic to propel your product/service into viral bliss? Don’t pay off bloggers to promote your startup, beg! Getting started is quick and easy. Fill out the form below, sit back, and wait for Internet stardom. You’re almost there!

* Completely free
* No chicken hats
* No conflicts of interest
* No annoying reality show
* No direct deployments to production
* No premature acquisition announcements

The first “begger” is Sparkmeter a “tool to help cut through the ‘08 election news.” They requesting a review on TechCrunch. Nice.

Our previous PayPerPost coverage is here. I expect a cease & desist letter from PPP to BFP to be arriving momentarily.

The blog payola virus is spreading yet again. In addition to PayPerPost, ReviewMe and CreamAid, a newcomer with the catchy name SponsoredReviews is preparing to launch.

The Blog Herald got a good first look, and notes that it differs only in the details from the other services. Disclosure is required. Bloggers can choose to write a positive or negative review. And, in a business model change, it looks like bloggers can set their price (PayPerPost lets advertisers set the price, and ReviewMe sets the price automatically based on how popular the blog is).

Unlike the others, SponsoredReviews gets right to the point on their home page. While none of the other sites will admit that search engine rankings is a big part of these scams, SponsoredReviews lists it right on their home page as a benefit to advertisers. At the end of the day, these advertisers won’t care all that much what exactly these blogs say, as long as they are linking back to their product. This is something I couldn’t get PayPerPost to quite admit in my podcast interview with them late last year.

So the third party costs are becoming pretty clear: misled readers, search engine pollution and credibility questions around the entire blogosphere. All for a few dollars a post.

It’s not often that a company announces the acquisition of another company and then subsequently walks away from the deal, but PayPerPost isn’t a typical kind of company.

In a post on the PayPerPost blog today, the company said “We…dug into the Metrics platform and regretfully found that it wasn’t what we were looking for right now.” That came just a week after the official announcement of the acquisition.

Generally speaking, responsible companies “dig into” the acquisition target before they announce a deal.

Whatever happened, this isn’t pretty. After the deal was announced, Performancing moved their non-acquired assets to a new domain name and re-launched that service. They certainly stopped talking to other potential acquirors, given that the deal was officially announced. In merger-land, this is what’s known as “being left at the altar” because everyone down the road who you talk to will want to know why the previous deal exploded.

Performancing should have had a more nailed down acquisition agreement, so they aren’t entirely blameless. But PayPerPost is becoming an increasingly ridiculous startup, and a black eye for investor Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Our previous coverage of PayPerPost is here.

PayPerPost, the controversial startup that pays bloggers to write about advertisers’ products, will be in the news again tomorrow. They will be announcing the acquisition of blogging tools and services company Performancing (see our earlier coverage of Performancing).

The main purpose of the acquisition appears to be for PayPerPost to get access to the 28,000 Performancing users, most of whom are bloggers and potential customers of PayPerPost. The popular Performancing Firefox blog editing plugin is not being acquired, and will be spun off into a new brand.

Our previous coverage of PayPerPost is here.

PayPerPost, a marketplace for advertisers to pay bloggers to write about their products, will make a significant policy change on Monday: Bloggers will now be required to disclose that they are being paid for their posts. This looks to be at least partially due to recent moves by the FTC to force word-of-mouth advertisers to disclose any financial incentives to promote products: “FTC” is mentioned five times in the press release that will be issued on Monday (a copy of the press release is below).

This isn’t a perfect fix for PayPerPost – advertisers can still require a positive post about their products, and the disclosure does not have to be within the post itself. The blogger can choose to “prominently” display an accurate disclosure policy on the site in lieu of disclosure within the post itself, although the disclosure policy being recommended by PayPerPost states that paid posts is the same as any advertising on a site. Still, it is a big move in the right direction.

In many ways this move reminds me of Plaxo’s decision to stop spamming non-customers after a barrage of criticism. In this case, the move seems to stem more from the threat of government regulation. Regardless, we applaud the change.

Our previous posts on PayPerPost are here, and a podcast interview with the founder and one of his venture capitalists is here. Also see our coverage of competitor ReviewMe.

The press release is below.

Read More