If Michael Jordan and Howard Stern can do it...
And now a word from our sponsor, literally -- I mean this post will contribute $10 to pay my hosting fees.The era of celebrity endorsements has arrived for bloggers -- or at least gotten a whole lot easier. No, I'm not saying that Nike just backed a truck up to my house with shoes my size and color; rather, Pay Per Post (PPP) is here with a mass-market simplicity/scale.
With www.PayPerPost.com, Maitland, FL-based MindComet has created a platform to connect advertisers and bloggers who will blog for cash. BusinessWeek's article "Polluting the Blogosphere" hasn't even hit the shelves yet and already the keyboards are buzzing about this new platform.
Not all the buzz is good buzz, but when is it ever. With controversial platforms, there is often a middle-ground that addresses major concerns while retaining disruptive potential. If the founders listen and learn, there are a lot of free focus groups sharing their opinions about the best/worst angles of PPP.
Will June 30, 2006, be as important as February 21, 1998 when GoTo.com started, god forbid, "selling positions" in their search results -- launching the Pay Per Click (PPC) monster? Here's a snippet from BusinessWeek's 1999 article reviewing GoTo's model:
"GoTo.com is one of the Web's stranger ideas. It sells its listings, and how high a site ranks depends on how much the owner is willing to pay for each visitor. The payment is clearly displayed with the search results, which can be odd. The top response to my Sony query was online auctioneer WebAuction.com, which sells some Sony products. The site paid 29 cents for my visit, but listed no Sony products on the page it gave me. Sony's own site, which didn't pay, ranked 14th. GoTo seems to be getting payment mainly from sites that want to latch on to a popular name, a formula that doesn't work well.
Except for GoTo, all of these services are useful tools in the hunt for information on the Web."
I don't know if these local guys have something that will stick or if they know how to build a platform company, but if the buzz is any measure -- they're on to something.
As for FVB, this posting is really just a test of the PayPerPost service. I don't expect FVB to go commercial beyond trying/learning new technologies on the site, and I'll continue to highlight when my posts have a potential for conflict -- right after I finish this ice cold Coca-Cola...
(sponsored posting)Labels: payperpost
Posted by VC Dan | 7/10/2006
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Comments (2)
Jim Nail from Cymfony here. This is a response to your post on my blog with suggestions about how PayPerPost.com could handle disclosure.
Both the options of Payperpost automatically inserting the disclosure or advertisers requiring it would indeed solve 80% of my heartburn. I suspect that advertisers won't require it -- they seem to think the future of advertising is to not identify it (eg., look at the growth in product placements, which don't look like ads and have no disclosure). Ethical bloggers would disclose on their own, but we see that is not happening. So, like many other aspects of business that need regulation and oversight, this area of blogs does.
I think it is preferable for Payperpost.com to self-regulate and groups like WOMMA to provide oversight vs. the FTC or the states. Why is it Payperpost's responsibility? I go back to the magazine advertorial example. They have strict requirements for disclosure or, as is often the case, they design the section and insert the disclosure, not the advertisers.
Thanks Jim.
As I shared on your blog, I can see how PayPerPost could short-circuit this problem by requiring disclosure, but I stop short of criticizing them if they don't take that proactive step to correct what the publisher or advertiser should solve. Your advertorial example suggests that a blogger/publisher should have strict requirements for disclosure, I agree. However, it's not the phone company's job to solve disclosure just because they helped the advertiser and publisher connect.
Of course, in this medium, buzz can matter as much or more than logic so all the complaints suggest PayPerPost would benefit from a more proactive stance. If the founders listen and try to help, they can probably reach a valuable middle ground.
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