Sad Day for Bloggers

What a sad day for bloggers.

In short, Payperpost.com is going to pay bloggers to write on a certain topic. They’re rumoured to be paying $5-$10/post. They would screen your blog post before you publish. Disclosure is optional.

Read more about it at Techcrunch, and their defense at Payperpost Blog.

I guess from today onwards, I won’t be trusting blogs anymore. Blogs have been my reliable source of free opinions and reviews for the past years. What payperpost is doing is so wrong. It’s killing blogs.

On their blog, they claimed that advertisers are encouraged to allow neutrality of comments. Yeah, right. I’m not sure how many advertisers would pay for bad reviews. If they’re bad, they would get the bad reviews anyway, without needing to pay people to write about it.

A lot of bloggers have been leaving comments regarding this issue. Most thinks it’s bad, but some think it’s no different than the current blogosphere, which might be true as well, considering the fact that a lot of ‘celebrity’ bloggers I know in this region have been getting paid to blog about certain topics too, eg. Kenny Sia, Xiaxue. And they’re doing this more and more often now. I know free moolah is hard to resist.

Even though we all hate this idea of paying bloggers to write on designated topics, somehow I’m sure a lot of us know this is going to come eventually. Someone’s going to do it. And it’s not going away anytime soon, seeing how influential some blogs are turning out to be now. Even campaigns now are relying on bloggers to help spread the words, but at least they’re not paid to write about it and only on the good side.

If payperpost wants to keep its image as the good guys, like how Google managed to do after they launched their initially controversial Adsense and ad-supported Gmail, I think they would have to make sure they follow these strict guidelines:

• Neutrality is not only encouraged. It is a must for advertisers to be involved in this program.
• Disclosure is a must. The post has to be mentioned that it is getting paid for. At least make sure the post would carry an image link to the payperpost.com. This way payperpost gets some publicity, and the readers know when a post is sponsored.
• Post screening would only be for meeting non-opinion-related criteria, eg. post length, linkback, image inclusion. I believe screen sponsored blog posts is fair enough for them. The advertisers wouldn’t want to pay bloggers for writing “Apple is good. PC is bad.”. But make sure no screening of any other things, not even typo and/or grammar.
• Have a list of the advertisers and its corresponding blog posts on payperpost.com. I’m not sure if this could be done. Maybe it cannot be done as probably some advertisers wouldn’t like being listed on the site. But if it can be done, it is a good thing to do. At least we know where to refer to if we suspect a post has been sponsored (by payperpost) and on top of that, both bloggers and advertisers get extra worth by getting linked back from a major site.

I know this is coming one day. But let’s just hope they would turn out to be the good guys, or the not-so-evil guys, like how Google managed to be in the end. Let’s hope blogs, in general, would stay neutral at least for some time to come.