So after giving PayPerPost a couple months of being in the market I thought I’d weigh in on how I think it’s going to shake out. If this is your first introduction to PayPerPost, Techcrunch did a pretty good introductory article on it here. The service is basically just like it sounds, PayPerPost is a medium where advertisers can pay bloggers to write a post about their service or product. Companies can mandate the post be positive, if a logo is to be included and pretty much anything they want. As you can imagine this is a very controversial issue in the blogsphere and online advertising as a whole. Blogs have been the one medium that was solely for the individual with the integrity of the content seemingly purely up to the writer and not influenced by payment. While most people taking sides as if this were the civil war I’m a bit more open to both sides and here’s why:

Bloggers got to make money:
Yep, at one point you’re going to want to get paid for posting everyday, unless you really just like writing. Whether this is by hosting terrible looking Google Adsense on your site or doing a PayPerPost article for a company if you’re blogging everyday and people are visiting your site in droves you’d like to see a bit of a “thank you”. (Sidenote, I don’t really like ads on blogs, though Techcrunch has done it tastefully, so I can guarantee that I will never have Google Adsense on my blog). In a PayPerPost at least it’s not effecting my viewing or user experience reading like a flashing ad or a aesthetic eyesore such as google adsense right in my line of sight.

So I’m ok with the PayPerPost idea. What I’m not ok with is the whole aspect of secretely posting about a service or product without letting your blogging audience know that you were paid to write about a product. Now this happens all the time in print and TV with companies paying for coverage on their product from journalists or product placement in commercials (how many times do we need to see Rachel on Friends drinking FIJI water in one episode?), so it was a matter of time before it crept into the blogs medium. So instead of treating PayPerPost as the incarnate think of it as validation for Blogs as a valid media source akin to the newspaper or magazines. If you are a blogger that is something to be proud of.

parting thoughts…
So I just hope that PayPerPost makes it mandatory that on every post that a blogger does for them, or a company that works with them, that a logo or announcement of sort is made that the blogger was paid to post. This way the blogger is not tricking their audience into thinking that this post was objective and I as a reader I realize that what I’m reading could have been altered. That said I doubt that I will ever use the PayPerPost service, I’d rather not risk losing the audience that I have for any amount of money and jeopardizing my integrity because no company can refund that.

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