October 12, 2006

I blog for PayPerPost *for* ethical reasons

TechCrunch recently wrote about PayPerPost's gain of $3 million of venture capital. TechCrunch orginially wrote about PayPerPost back in June, and its opinion was not favorable. PayPerPost is a marketplace that connects advertisers with consumer content generators, like bloggers, vloggers, podcasters, etc. - and provides them with opportunities to earn money by blogging about a given product or service. The business model has created a certain amount of controversy mainly due to the fact that the paid posts are rarely required to be marked as advertisements. The problem then is, if there is an "ad" blog post next to a non-ad blog post, the general public would not be able to tell the difference. Some see this non-disclosure as unethical. Many do not.

My opinion on the matter is that is not unethical. While the choice to disclose or not disclose is up to the individual blogger, many of them choose to disclose. I personally make it clear that I blog for PayPerPost. I have made videos about it, blogged about it many times (as I am doing now) and will tell people directly that I get paid to blog. As I addressed in an earlier post, I fell that honestly getting paid for work - blogging about a particular topic - is better than plastering a ton of gaudy flash ads all over the site that may or may not have anything to do with the blog. On the one hand, I am choosing to give my personal opinion about a given topic - on the other hand, my blog is saying things that I have no control over. To me, the choice is clear. The blog advertising model that I follow is the PayPerPost model. And I choose it for ethical reasons.

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