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?"
I'm going to put on my Andy Rooney hat and say "you ever notice that people don't make money pressing widgets anymore? In my day, we mostly made money by manufacturing. Now we make money by blogging make believe opinions on the internet."
LaLa Girl, who was profiled in the LA Times article, has her blog here.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Paid bloggers are almost as trustworthy as, I dunno, fake critics from even larger corporations..
If neither TV nor papers are legally obliged to report only true stories, why should bloggers?
Why would anybody *believe* something they read on the Internets?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Anonymity breeds distrust in public communication. Whether it's trolling for fun or misinforming for profit, the upshot is a building general distrust of the communications channel itself. It is literally communications breakdown.
The only solution to this is full authentication of every user on every computer throughout the net, with some government controlled centralized database. In other words, DRM on steroids. And the total end of anonymous political dissent.
Which is worse? I have my opinion.
Not all anonymity is used to troll for fun or spread misinformation. Those two behaviors lead to the defamation of anonymity, though, and that's what causes people to be so upset.
If only there were a way to weed out the trolls and misinformers. Well, there is. It's called moderation. Now what do we do when the mods themselves share opinions with trolls and misinformers? What do we do when the mods actively participate, for whatever reason, in the trolling or the spread of misinformation? Theoretically the mods are objective judges but I don't think that quite plays out into reality.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
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.
It's a real shame truth-in-advertising law hasn't caught up with them yet.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
How long before the FTC follows through on their promise to enforce blogger disclosure?
/.'ers.
Is that saracasm, or is this something you actually want?
I thought anonymity on the internet was an inalienable right to most
I guess it only applies to people saying things you agree with.
I'll post this as AC, while I still can.
Recent issues with blogging, such as these PayPerPost people, the scandal over the PSP blog, and recent political considerations by congress, has made me rethink my position on blogs, and I've come to a conclusion (barring other insightful thoughts from others or further pondering):
Nothing has changed. Nothing at all.
The thing is, this isn't new. Ever since blogs started, hell, ever since anyone started reviewing products, some people were bought and paid for. Previously, it wasn't this obvious. A company would send a "demo" model to a person or publication for review, and let them keep it. The publication might then want to spin the review in a positive light, in order to keep getting more freebies or get in closer to the company.
Politicians have paid companies to make commercials, or people to spread rumors or plant thoughts. In the past, companies and individuals alike have hired people to protest, likely for things they didn't even care about, to try to get something changed in their favor. Product placements are all over; celebrities get paid all the time to wear some new fashion designer's clothes to a big event to get them press.
And not just celebrities, but regular press, too; trained reporters with oversights and editors and accountability partake in these dubious activities (no, I don't have any specific examples).
All that's happened now is that it's more straight forward and available to the common public. They've cut out the middle man and the distracting cloaks and are saying "We want people to say this, we'll pay you $X, you write Y words. Any takers?".
Whether this is good or bad is up to you. My immediate position is leaning towards good, as there will probably wind up being a list of bloggers being paid to advertise products or morals. This will make it easier for those who read blogs and don't want to deal with paid posts to filter out those who do this kind of thing. More innocent ads such as "Try new BrandX Soap!" can actually help bloggers who have a good message to get out to the public, but might not be able to afford their hosting limits. (The problem, though, is over time how do they keep the advertising from blending with the real content?)
Nothing has changed, we're just doing this on a much larger scale.
On a side note, I do enjoy this quote:
15,000 bloggers just lost a large quantity of traffic.
what we need is an impartial clearinghouse to tell us which bloggers are now paid astroturfers...
it could be to blogs like another site is for general news
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
You expect me to believe that special interest groups are masquerading as normal individuals on the internet? That's about as realistic as global warming.
Really good blogging and podcasting etc are the result of good editing. Encouraging volume goes against that.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Karma police, arrest this man. He talks in math. He buzzes like a fridge. He's like a detuned radio.
Before flaming me down, I'd appreciate if you could read my post in its entirety.
I am from India and my site targets a world audience (we offer hotel booking service for Indian hotels). Its difficult for me to judge how users from other countries are liking or disliking the site and what we are doing right or wrong.
I use this service as a sort of marketing research/Focus group and the review has helped me immensely to know what needs to be changed, to make it easier for our customers abroad.
On the net, when you get a feedback, you take it very seriously as only 1 in about 1000 users who have the thought send you the feedback. But i don't want to wait knowing that 999 users may not have liked some aspect of the site. We are small and financial resources are always scarce, so this is a good way to get feedback on our site.
I actually only ask for an honest review, and in fact encourage them to blog their criticisms.
A couple of points from what i have seen.
The group of bloggers there will most probably have at least seven degrees of separation from the average slashdotter. So you got nothing to worry about ever being mis-led by them.
They honestly mention if a particular post was paid for or not.
Most of them are not anonymous.
Though an brutally honest review of the site may have been asked for, lots of them don't give one. Their editorial reads like scripted by a marketing droid.
I feel they are really not much of a threat to the blogosphere.
You should be more worried about paid, anonymous, astroturf(er)s whose sponsors are not known and their intentions are at best of times unfathomable.
I neither own any stake nor am i in any way connected (other than having used their services) to payperpost. I also am not benefited monetarily or otherwise from this post.
And the reason i am posting this under my slashdot account with my web address is because i never do anything i feel is morally repugnant and as a result got nothing to fear.
So flame away.
PS: Do any of you know of an online service where you can hire or rent a focus group which fits a SMB's budget? I would love to get more info. Thank you.
Life is a mystery. There is no point having a mystery if you are not curious.
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.
No, let Google and all the other private sites go nuts, and then insure that the FTC and FDA and USGA, you name it, become trustworthy sources of information, that aren't in the hands of the people they regulate, by electing politicians who will turn them around. I don't care how many phonies are out there. The only part of the net we have a right to regulate is that run by government with taxpayer dollars. In other words, .gov and .mil are under public control.
What?
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.