Advertising or Paying Per Blog Post, Hmmm

Posted on August 11, 2006
Filed Under Advertising/Marketing |

Payment in the blogosphere has some interesting parallels with what happens in the press, newspaper world.

I want briefly to add a sceptical voice to those who’ve expressed doubts about Payperpost.com, a system that is still in Beta but which allows advertisers to request bloggers to create hype around their products. In exchange the blogger gets a fee (generally between $2 and $10).

It’s taken a hit from techcrunch, webby’s world and a few others.

In the grown up world of newspapers and magazines though this kind of thing happens all the time. Look at the gadget pages of magazines like GQ and you’re looking at a way of priming the advertiser community.

Look at the weekend supplements of the major newspapers and you’re looking at areas of a newspaper that advertisers dictate the look, feel and tone of. One magazine I wrote for would not publish a hard journalism story - their marketing department warned them off anything other than chic lit fluff.

I posted yesterday on how news organisations have undermined journalistic quality by reducing fees to the point where being a freelance journalist is hardly a viable living any longer.

The other side of the coin is that advertisers now have far too much actual muscle to determine the overall shape of a publication.

The conclusion I’m not going to draw is that therefore we should all head off down to payperpost and take a few dollars for buzzing a product. What I won’t do either is say that Google has it right with Adsense or that contextual advertising is right for bloggers.

Somewhere in the evolving media landscape though there has to be a place for people who make a commitment to keeping information flowing, relevant, accurate, etc to make a decent living and that will no doubt involve a compromise.

In fact recompense is already beconing an issue as users pirate and upload artistically produced videos on YouTube and MySpace. Go here for that debate.

If the next generation media doesn’t provide a revenue source for diligent collation, analysis, processing, updating etc of information, then it’s little better than old media.

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