Get Paid to Blog?
July 1st, 2006 @ 9:58 am CST, 339 words, 1 image by Evan BroderIn the interests of full disclosure, I will note that I am hoping to get paid for this blog post.
PayPerPost is a new service where bloggers can get paid for writing articles on certain topics. TechCrunch has denounced this service as doing irreparable damage to the reputation of the blogosphere. And just to be hypocritical, they’ve offered $100 to anyone else who wants to give their opinion.
So I’m going to take them up on that offer.
I foresee several blogs quickly decaying into advertising sites, blatantly supporting certain products, “selling their soul” as TechCrunch puts it. However, I think most of the blogs that make use of this service will manage to do it without hurting their reputation. Even if disclosure of payment isn’t required, I think many bloggers will disclose anyway. This seems to me like a better deal than, say, putting up Google Ads, because those are just annoying.
However, my position is skewed: I keep my blog for fun, and I don’t try to make money from it.
I signed up for PayPerPost, and I’m going to try it out to see what happens. But, I’m going to lay some ground rules:
- I will always make a note at the bottom of a sponsored post.
- All sponsored posts will go into the PayPerPost category.
- And I will never give a product a good review if it doesn’t deserve it.
- Edit: One more rule that I just thought of: only one sponsored post per day. Period. I may have to switch posts if the money gets better somewhere else, but at any given point, one post per day.
It looked like many of the blogging “opportunities” didn’t require a good review anyway.
More of Italy coming soon…or maybe I’ll just update my old posts with photos.
Edit: I was slightly mistaken. TechCrunch did not sponsor this post. Ted Murphy, the owner of PayPerPost, put the opportunity up to try and raise the stakes, asking if it was so easy to pass up $100 for 100 words. Please disregard what I said about hypocrisy.
This post sponsored by http://www.payperpost.com.
July 1st, 2006 at 10:12 am
I like how it’s filed under both “Uncategorized” and “PayPerPost.”
Very interesting.
July 1st, 2006 at 10:26 am
Yeah. One of the screwy things about WordPress is that it puts all new posts under Uncategorized…and doesn’t take them off, even if you add another category.
I should work up a hack to fix that…
July 1st, 2006 at 9:11 pm
Funny, pay-per-post reminds me of the free webhosting services that require a certain number of forum posts per month as ‘payment.’
I don’t like the idea, I don’t like the trend it could set. If it’s successful, obviously there will be other such services popping out of the woodworks. And we’ll see blog content being shaped and directed by money-tainted hands:
So an advertiser wants more of a certain topic or product in the blogosphere, all he has to do is put up a good enough incentive. Bloggers who would otherwise have posted about their day, or an interesting news piece, philosophical dissertations, whatever - will be unable to pass up the chance to make a quick buck and write about whatever product or widget will get him or her the most return.
Obviously there will be bloggers with ethics, like your ground rules suggest. But can anyone honestly expect that to apply to the blogosphere in general? When applied to the masses, and when the end being sought is money, ethics go out the window.
And of course, it’s highly subjective, as even PayPerPost admits: every post has to be approved before you get paid. But where’s the line that separates an approved post from a denied post? How can we expect PayPerPost, or anyone for that matter, to be able to tell a genuine product review from mindless but intelligent-sounding, regurgitated drabble? How can such a system as they’re proposing possibly last?
Plus, when there’s absolutely no incentive to review, those who do are the ones who feel strongly enough about the product, one way or another, to go through the trouble of putting up a response or evaluation. When people are getting paid to review or opine, clearly content is not the first thing on their mind. This reduces the quality of the content, first of all, to such a degree as to render blogs, on the whole, informationally useless. BusinessWeek said it quite well with ‘polluting the blogosphere’ - who will go to the blogs for information at all when they have to sift through so much crap? And who’s to say that the paid bloggers won’t aspire to conform to the ‘approved’ standard, whatever they may feel that to be, in order to get approved and therefore paid? Writing for the sake of approval by a specific organization or corporate advertising machine sounds, well, like the apocalypse, the doom, bastardization, and perversion of all that is good on the internet.
And finally, as TechCrunch noted, PayPerPost proudly slaps on that “As seen in BusinessWeek” sticker somewhat disingenuously. BusinessWeek in no way featured them as a shining, promising new business model; their story, titled Polluting the Blogosphere, was almost a grave warning:
I’ve only been looking at this question for the past twenty minutes or so, so I’m not an expert or whatever, but my initial vibes tell me this could be a horrible, horrible thing to happen to the blogging world.
As for ‘uncategorized’…hm, I’ve never had that problem, I don’t know what you mean…
July 1st, 2006 at 10:48 pm
I do have a brief retort:
First: almost all of the “opportunities” do not require a positive review. Supposedly the review process only checks that required links/tracking images/word count are in place in the case of these neutral opportunities.
Second: although blogs were originally created as “online diaries” of sorts, they’ve since strayed from that. The most popular blogs are news sites, and I wonder if PayPerPost thinks it’s targeting that brand of blog more.
That being said, I think the service will have the most draw to personal bloggers, like me, for instance.
I also do agree that it has the potential to do horrible things to the credibility of the net, but if its main appeal is to personal bloggers, then that’s less of an issue. Sponsored posts will stick out like sore thumbs, and they’re more likely to retain the trust of their small group of dedicated readers.
I guess when all’s said and done I’m kind of on the fence here. My open source–driven freedom-loving morals contradict my desire for easy cash, which is unfortunate. Right now my call is to wait: that $100 opportunity was a rare thing; the second highest bounty is $10, and almost all of the bounties were posted by Ted Murphy to get the ball rolling. I say wait and see where the bounties seem to stabalize.
I do think it would be ideal if disclosure were required, though.
July 2nd, 2006 at 11:16 am
You can fix the uncategorized in Wordpress to something else just by simply editing the “Uncategorized” category and naming it something else. Then, you can also set your default category to a different one if you so desire. That’s my simple work around. The problem is that they don’t let you rename the uncategorized, but they do let you rename it.
I like your idea of having the post at the bottom say This post sponsored by PayforPost. That’s cool you got in when he offered the $100. Today he added Howard Stern to the list. I can see Howard interested in this sort of thing.
I don’t think this will kill the blogosphere. Markets have a way of working themselves out regardless of what people try.
July 4th, 2006 at 12:10 am
Do you get money for ‘offering your opinion’ and also from PayPerPost? That would be rather ironic.
Blogging for money isn’t new; you have corporate shills, countless blogs that mirror each other’s content (with or without attribution), blogs that are loaded with advertisements are quite common.
Disclosure is always nice, since it presents some insight as to the objectivity of said author. Although, only setting topics is entirely fine; as long as there’s no rejection of content on the grounds of conforming with a pre-defined notion or agenda, being paid to write is fine with me.