Online Media Cultist

Crunchnotes notes that high profile blogger “Robert Scoble got sucked into the PayPerPost machine” because he accepted a fee from PayPerPost – a company that pays bloggers to write reviews about products and services – to speak at a conference.

It’s a clever strategy on the part of PayPerPost: throw out enough money in enough different ways and all of the sudden everyone is complicit in its activities. Not that its activities are implicitly or necessarily ill-intentioned. As I just commented over at a Deep Jive Interests piece that defends the right of “blue collar” bloggers from making a living:

I take sort of a middle position here. While I don’t begrudge the blue collars from trying to squeak out a living in the online blog-mines, I’m fearful that services like PayPerPost will help to lower the whole of the blogosphere’s credibility. Like it or not, “blogs” as a whole have a reputation (good, bad, and ugly in the mind of the general public) and if web surfers and searchers sense that paid services have sullied the bloggy waters (via paying writers to write paid editorial without clear disclosure), that can have adverse reaction in terms of traffic, page rank, and the overall health of the blogosphere.

Scoble has since backtracked and says that he will now reject PayPerPost’s honorarium but oddly still seems to imply that he will take travel expenses. Talk about ambiguity!

TechCrunch has announced that they have refused to take on PayPerPost as an advertiser with the intention of keeping a “fence” between the likes of PayPerPost and themselves. Just as a point of note, Blogcritics decided against running PayPerPost ads that were offered to us through a third-party service. Not only would it be a strange conflict of interest, but it goes against the grain in terms of our philosophy that money is neither efficient nor valuable compensation that a company can offer to an open pool of bloggers. And that’s not taking into account the ethical thicket that PayPerPost writers can get into if they’re not super right-sharp in declaring loud and proud about how and why a review came to be.

I’ll be curious to see how many blogger luminaries and high profile conferences PayPerPost can lay some money on, and how many well known online media sources will end up running paid ads.

Can PayPerPost buy its way around and through the blogosphere’s defenses? I hope not. I’d like to see the hub bub die down and generally go away, but I fear that won’t be the case. For now, I’ll continue to follow the money.

In the blogosphere, credibility and transparency is everything. Why should you believe me? Because hopefully what I’ve written in the past is fundamentally reasonable and, even when you the reader disagrees with me, it’s because there’s an honest difference of opinion and no cause to delve into potential ulterior motives exists. Sure, I tend to like and enthusiastically yak about social news sites (Digg, Reddit, Netscape, etc.) more than pure social networking sites (MySpace, Friendster, etc.), but it’s hoped that that bias is born of my eccentricities and interests and not because I’m getting paid by Kevin Rose, Conde Nast, or the departing C.K. Sample.

SponsoredReviews represents a new assault on the blogosphere’s credibility, on the heels of the commotion and controversy caused by PayPerPost’s arrival on the scene. The scenario is basically the same: sign up and get paid to write about advertiser’s products on your blog. Now, it’s possible, maybe, for this sort of service to be a relatively innocuous scheme where writers are encouraged to experience new products and services and write about them in exchange for some kind of compensation. However, Michael Arrington gets right to the heart of the matter in diagnosing SponsoredReviews as nothing more than a linking scam: “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.”

Tony Hung brings up the somewhat bizarre but nonetheless plausible notion that companies may even directly bribe bloggers, politician- or star-athletic prospect style, writing, “More recently, there was a bit of a stir in the blogosphere when Microsoft sent ‘gifts’ of Ferrari-branded laptops to bloggers to review Vista, as it was thought that Microsoft was bribing bloggers with gifts.”

If readers will not be able to know which results in search rankings are from unbiased writers, that represents a huge credibility problem for the blogosphere. That could lead to a massive retreat of readers to those sources they feel they can trust, namely large and traditional media companies. These of course are the very same sources that millions spread out from in the first place, looking for new and fresh and vibrant information sources and communities in the form of the blogosphere.

Whether we like it or not, it seems that SponsoredReviews and PayPerPost or their ill bred offspring are not going away. The question is: how will the blogosphere defend its credibility in the coming days? Perhaps a third-party eBay-like service will emerge that will allow readers to assess “credibility points” in some form. Or maybe blog networks that proudly assert their independence will increase in fashion.

Strunk and White, in The Elements of Style, assert that it is incumbent upon the writer to throw a lifeline to readers to save them from the swamp of uncertainty. SponsoredReviews and the like are new creatures in the blogosphere’s murky depths that must be actively confronted.

PayPerPost, the controversial company that pays bloggers to review products and services, has launched a new set of features, which Darren Rowse at ProBlogger breaks down as including new video ad products, targeted channels, and payment based upon traffic rankings from Alexa, Google, and Technorati.

My position on what essentially is paid editorial falls somewhere near Darren’s take that “I’m not really into writing paid reviews on a blog - however I’m not completely opposed to the idea IF there is disclosure.” However, my feeling is that the vast majority of PayPerPost bloggers will not fully disclose and that lack of transparency could have the ripple effect of hurting the full of the blogosphere’s credibility.

There’s no one better at sussing out the philosophical nuances of online media than Scott Karp, who writes over at the The Blog Herald: “There’s a direct connection between bloggers and their communities — so who better than the blogger to create marketing messages that are relevant and interesting for their communities?” However, he then goes on to examine his own potential bias or the perception of potential bias because of paid advertising from PayPerPost that runs on The Blog Herald. He ends with this: “The truth is, standards in media have never been simple — blogs are just the latest medium to slog through the commercial mud.”

Here’s the thing about PayPerPost, though, something that I have not spent a lot of time looking into. Jeff Jarvis flat out states that PayPerPost pays bloggers to write “positive posts about products.” According to PayPerPost’s requirements, they only mention that bloggers should state their opinion about products. However, they also state that Step Three of the “The Simple Process” is that “Blogger posts based on opportunity requirements.”

That’s kind of a strangely phrased step, isn’t it? If I sign up for PayPerPost and follow each requirement to the letter, but trash each product in a ruthless and reasoned and intelligent way, will I continue to meet the “opportunity requirements”?

I’m thinking not.