Slashdot Mirror
PayPerPost VC Defends Ethics of Paid Blogging
An anonymous reader writes "PayPerPost venture capitalist and board member Dan Rua defends the ethics of paid editorials. He claims PayPerPost is 'good for the internet' and is not simply blackhat SEO. Rua states that PayPerPost has blown past its milestone of 15,500 bloggers, and is earning hundreds of thousands in monthly revenue. He describes PayPerPost's most viral product yet — ReviewMyPost — which pays people to link to paid posts. The LA Times accuses PayPerPost of paying bloggers to make up fictional testimonials. For instance, the Times reports that a law firm is using PayPerPost to pay bloggers to write that a certain birth control patch is killing and injuring young women. Rua does not deny these claims, but simply states they are the exception and not the rule. How long before the FTC follows through on their promise to enforce blogger disclosure?"
LaLa Girl, who was profiled in the LA Times article, has her blog here.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
This was very common with a music reviews site I used to write for. All of the music we reviewed was provided by the record label, at their expense. All we had to do was listen to their stuff and write about it. The problems started when I started submitting reviews unleashing a torrent of hate on some really crappy music. They did not like it one bit, because if we pissed off the label, then the stream of free CDs would stop, and the magazine couldn't survive if it had to foot the bill to purchase all of these CDs. Eventually I stopped writing for them and started posting reviews to my own web site.
Pedro
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The Insomniac Coder
Remember folks, we need to get rid of free speech to protect free speech! Right after we destroy the village to save it!
No, you are willfully misinterpreting and emotionally exaggerating what I said to distract the reader. You know full well that speech is controlled in many different ways to promote the common good e.g. truth in advertising.
A marketing executive claiming that fraudulently misrepresenting paid propaganda as objective third party opinion is somehow okay? He's the one that should be in jail, not the so-called terrorists.So he should go to jail for expressing his opinions on ethics?
Again, willfully misinterpreting what I said for your own ends. You know full well I was referring to his "business", not his opinion.
It's a real shame truth-in-advertising law hasn't caught up with them yet."truth-in-advertisment" laws can only apply to traditional media. The internet is international, and impossible to track without big bother controls.
Ah, yes. The false dichotomy. Beloved of self-serving politicians everywhere. It's not perfectly possible, it's not perfectly impossible. It's actually somewhere in between, like most real world law.
There is no reason why a company cannot just operate out of a country where paying people for blog reviews is legal. The only way to stop it then would be big brother spying on all blog operators.
And now we have the straw man. There are many possibilities, you've just chosen the one you think you can argue against. Some other ways to reduce/stop it would be to rely on competitors and consumers to report it, do statistical analysis of blog traffic and to make the penalties so severe (e.g. per-sale fines and executives personally liable) that even a small chance of being caught makes it unprofitable.
(which I am sure you wouldn't be against - Any loss of freedom is justified to you protect us from those terrible terrible advertisments - but would be nearly impossible to implement).
The appeal to "freedom", manipulatively trying to frame the argument.
Fraudulent advertising is actually costing me my freedom. The time of my life is the most important thing I have and I don't want it being stolen by these scumbags. Advertising in general is terrible when it's stealing as much of people's lives as it does these days.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Yeah, this is all well and good for some (a few) slashdotters that do think. But for the hundreds of thousands of people who go researching on the internet about, for example, birth control and find the top 5 hits filled with these false articles, they won't know any better. This is consumer fraud, plain and simple. But this isn't something the government and FTC alone should handle; googlebot and all the other search engine bots need to wise up. They were able to do it for meta tag abuse, then link farms, this is the next step. The real, honest bloggers need to step up too. One of the main reasons there aren't already required paid disclosures on these blogs is because of a carefully run campaign (that was waged here too) to mark it, falsely, as an attack on normal bloggers.
Clones are people two.
The difference is that that media eventually _did_ have to apologize and admit that they faked it. No, it doesn't make them trustworthy, but:
1. it does say that libel laws work. You can't run a major campaign to smear someone's or some company's reputation, let alone something of the calibre of "product X is killing people", and be left alone for long. And I fail to see why they shouldn't apply to bloggers too.
2. Doubly so since it's not even as much a freedom of speech issue for the masses, as in, thousands of people saying what they really think. It's a case of a company basically astroturfing to disguise their smear campaign. Instead of publishing their own lies and opening themselves to a lawsuit, they just hide behind some faceless bloggers to do it. I fail to see why that would give them some kind of immunity.
Especially _if_ you see blogging as some great liberation of the masses and chance to get on your private soapbox and say what you really think, methinks you should be very disgusted by this kind of stuff. It's nothing less than deliberately looting, burning and polluting that medium for some company's profit. It's something that diminishes the value of that resource by a lot, to make a tiny profit for someone. Even as bandits go, this kind of company is the _stupid_ destructive kind of bandit that causes a huge loss for a tiny profit.
And that a lot are willing to just bend over and help spread the damage, if they get paid a few bucks, well, now you see one reason why traditional media has earned a right to have a heartfelt sneer at them.
3. some of the safeguards of traditional media just don't work for bloggers. E.g., the right to have them also publish your response to whatever accusations they made against you, is worthless when it's just some random page someone found while surfing. The chance that someone comes back to a week old post, reads all comments to your own response, is clever enough to skip past the "no, I'm the real Brandybuck and I really make patches that kill people" or "nah, I know Brandybuck, he really makes patches that kill people" trolls, etc, is close to nill. It also places an undue and disproportionate effort on the victim: you don't just have to contact one newspaper to publish your objection to what's been said about you, you have to troll a few thousand blogs. It's an undue waste of your time.
4. sometime at the beginning of the 20'th century the real media discovered that it's actually good for business if they at least pretend they're impartial and only do _reporting_. That's why they have policies like always including an opposite point of view, for example. Or why if it's a personal opinion piece, it tends to be clearly marked as such, and not as news. At any rate, they've distanced themselves quite a lot from the blatant smear campaigns that previously passed for journalism.
That's also another reason why they publish those apologies, btw. It's not just libel laws, it's that the newspaper or TV station itself wants to distance itself quickly from anything that taints that impartiality image they've been building. Even if you're not really impartial, you want to at least look like you are, or it will affect your business big time. So you'll want to distance yourself very fast and very loud from any dumb thing you've done that looks blatantly overtly partisan.
Now that impartiality not entirely true for everyone, of course, but it's still a step up from what happens in the blogs nowadays. Blogs by and large are at the point where journalism was in the 18'th century. Lopsided partisan pieces, ostensibly carrying only half the story, fictional fabricated "news" to support a pre-conception, rumours passed off as "news", mouth-foaming fanboyism, etc. And now a good helping of people just taking the money to copy-and-paste whatever material some astroturfing company gave them, too.
So basically, sorry, but I can see why a professional journalist would sneer at the "I r a journalist 2" blogger gang. Believe neither if you will, but one at least does have some higher quality work to justify that sneer. No, the professional media aren't saints, but it takes an extreme case of OCPD to lump them both in some "neither is perfect, therefore both are equally crap" pot.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I am pretty sure that you have missed the intonation here... It definetely was not someting like "OMG!!! I cann't wait till anonymity is banned on internet OMG OMG!! LOL".
It was more like "Crap, FTC promissed to enforce blogger discosure and now they have yet another pretext".