The PayPerPost controversy

PayPerPost just received $3 million in venture capital, and has been at the cusp of controversial discussion lately.

It is a heated topic, and the primary trigger for all of the controversy has to do with disclosure. With the service, bloggers get paid a predetermined amount for name-dropping within their blog about a service or product. The advertiser determines what is required to get paid - links, images, word count, etc. Journalists are also upset about the fact that these advertisers also determine whether the post is to have a positive, negative, or neutral spin. Currently, the blogger is not required to disclose to their readers that it is a paid post, or that they are affiliated with the PayPerPost program in any way.

Alarmists are reporting that this new service will "pollute the blogosphere" and are calling for boycotts against blogs participating in it. Other "blog purists" are content with posting negative publicity for the service on their blogs. Personally, I don't see a problem with this new service, as I believe that readers are smart enough to see through paid plugs and honest ones. I would also say that they aren't giving bloggers enough credit, when it comes to our integrity. For example, If I were to sign up this blog in the PayPerPost service, I wouldn't post positive commentary on anything that I didn't think deserved it. Getting paid to plug a site that I already like would be a nice bonus, and I wouldn't feel ashamed to do it.

As for disclosing that I was using the service, PayPerPost pays their bloggers to namedrop their service all over their blogs, so I think my readers would get the idea pretty quickly. Even if they didn't, I would have no problem disclosing that I was using the service, and wouldn't deny it if questioned.

Regardless of what your opinion is of this new service and whether it is ethical or not, you can't argue that PayPerPost has discovered a new target market and has cleverly invented a streamlined approach that blows the unpredictable nature of other blog revenue programs like Adsense right out of the blogosphere.