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Paying bloggers to blog
Marc Canter at AlwaysOn: Paying Bloggers to Blog. Marqui is paying bloggers to blog for $800 a month and $50 a qualified lead. The bloggers can say what they want and we won't fire them.
This is already kicking up a lot of dust in the blogosphere. (For the record, ourmedia has no relation to this plan.)
Robin Good thinks the idea rocks. So does the Head Lemur.
Shelley Powers has some early thoughts about sponsorships in bloggerland, harking back to those '50s quiz shows.
Stowe Boyd at Corante thinks it crosses a line: "Now, when you are reading some shill blogger of the future, will you have to read the dozens of potentially complex and conflicting provisos and disclosures in order to determine whether the blogger is saying something for cash or not?"
Marc offers his riposte here.
I'm on the fence on this one. I'll simply point to a cautionary article I wrote for OJR in 2001about The fuzzy world of sponsored content.
The article lists some of the ethical problems with corporate sponsorships, but concludes: "There will always be readers who don't trust anything on a site if you sell things (dooming all content sites), just as there are some people who don't trust newspapers or broadcast news because they sell advertising (dooming all media except Ms. magazine and Consumer Reports). Like it or not, sponsored content helps keep content sites afloat."
The lessons that apply at websites apply to bloggers as well. If you do it, do it carefully and honestly, and know that there's a price you'll pay in some readers' eyes.
November 30, 2004 at 03:02 PM in Weblogs | Permalink
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» Blogging for dollars from IrishEyes
DUBLIN -- Over lunch in a five-star Dublin hotel, conversation turned to why anyone would type keystrokes without being paid for it. Why would someone blog without getting paid? It quickly transpired that the questioner saw revenue only when he [Read More]
Tracked on Nov 30, 2004 9:40:19 PM
Comments
Although the move by Marqui is unprecedented, a symbiotic relationship between blogs and commerce has existed for a while now. Many bloggers are involved with affiliate programs. Some of the bloggers who are rely on incidental clicks from visitors to make a little pocket change, while others take it upon themselves to become corporate shills hoping to reap easy rewards. Blogger (the company) actively promotes Adsense to its users, and a few bloggers have gone on the payrolls of mainstream media companies. Blogs are a new form of media, but nothing about them makes them inherently immune to the commercial considerations that affect other forms of media. There's room for infomercials on television, so why not on blogs? (And I suspect that readers will treat these "infomercial blogs" in the same way that viewers treat infomercials on television.)
Posted by: C. Max Magee at Nov 30, 2004 6:38:04 PM
