Some of you may know that I’ve been writing sponsored posts for some time now. For those of you who don’t know how it works, this usually entails having an advertiser present you with an offer, the blogger (me, in this case) reviews the offer and sees if it fits in with the overall concept of the blog, and if it’s something that the blogger can (in good conscience) write about.
It was a long, hard road for me to come to this conclusion, after all, I’m a pirate, and information was meant to be free, right?
That got me thinking about one of my favorite category of sites: review sites. These are sites where a product manufacturer sends a demo unit to be evaluated and used. Sometimes they pay money for the review, sometimes the review stands on its own, monitized by ads or whatnot. To many geeks, just the ability to get a pre-release geek toy tool sometimes is payment enough.
So, what about me? I review stuff all the time, not because product marketing departments are knocking down my door, just to give my opinion about a product or service, list its pro’s and con’s, and try and provide a resource to the community from a fellow-geek. I have ads running on my site, and they bring in a little money here and there, but nothing substantial, almost enough to make it worth while. 😉
That’s where this new idea came up: rather than writing unsolicited reviews, there are some companies out there that match up advertisers with bloggers. The advertisers get their word out to the community of people that are best interested in it, the bloggers get a reason to write about it, and it (in theory) is more relevant and more helpful than just slapping an animated flash ad mid-way though the page.
This builds a company’s reputation and hopefully helps their bottom line. So far, so good, right?
The slippery slope comes in to play with not knowing what is or is not a review that’s being sponsored. If a blogger doesn’t disclose that a post is being sponsored, that can (in the eye of the reader) bias the blogger. Granted, the opposite of this is true as well: a post that’s disclosed as a sponsored review may bias the article. In the grand scheme of things, I think we all (readers, bloggers, and advertisers) can agree that we’re willing to sacrifice a little perceived bias of the post, but not of the blogger themself.
What do I mean by all that mumbo jumbo? Simply put, a blogger who writes a sponsored review and doesn’t disclose the fact will eventually be "found out" and their reputation is shot, their viewership dissolves, and it hurts the blogger, the advertisers, and the readers who would have gotten that information that wasn’t biased.
So, are sponsored posts biased? Ultimately, the answer is yes. Take this post for example, I probably wouldn’t have written it if it weren’t being sponsored by a company called Pay-Per-Post. Here’s where I agree with PPP’s approach to sponsored posts:
- first and foremost, if it’s a post escrowed through them, you’ve got to disclose that with a badge at the bottom of the post (see the one at the bottom of this post, for example). This clearly tells the reader that it’s a sponsored post and provides a hyperlink anchor for those who may not know what that means.
- Second, they give you the requirements up front, how many words, links to be included, and the "slant" or the kind of article they expect you to write, in this case it’s "neutral," it doesn’t have to be positive or negative, just somewhere in the middle, as un-biased as it can be. That I like, some require a positive slant, few require a negative one… in the future I’d like to see PPP disclose this on the badge as well.
- Next, PPP encourages a concept called word of mouth ethics that encourages bloggers to truthfully write the articles they’re being paid to, if you can’t write about it truthfully the simple rule is don’t write about it at all. This is the approach that I take. If I can’t be real about it, and if I can’t see how it applies to me or my readers, I don’t write about it. In that sense, I’m getting paid to present you with stuff that you probably wanted to know anyway. Win-win.
- Advertisers can request the content of the post be reviewed, but "[they] will not allow advertisers to request bloggers to make false statements or otherwise compromise the blogger’s honesty of opinion."
So I’m giving them a try. This is the first post to be sponsored by them, we’ll see how it all works out. So far I have only two basis for opinion:
- A friend and fellow blogger has his posts nit-picked to death (in other words, "unpaid for technical reasons") so that’s a little disconcerting (though it does indicate that they want high quality posts, not just monkey-cranked spam posts, and that’s a good thing).
- It’s taken months to get my blog accepted. This, initially, was very frustrating. In the end their review team had some very good suggestions about making my blog more accessible before they’d accept it. Their suggestions have helped my readers better access my content, so that’s good, too.
If you’re a fellow blogger, have at least a minimal set of ethics, and would like to learn more about Pay-Per-Post, their website is http://payperpost.com. Let me know how your experience goes if you decide to give them a try.
And, if you want to review my post, you can do that, too!
