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?"

You ever notice

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."

Yeah

"How long before the FTC follows through on their promise to enforce blogger disclosure?"

About as long as it takes these guys to get a clue:
http://eefoof.com/image/9932 [eefoof.com]

LaLa Girl

LaLa Girl, who was profiled in the LA Times article, has her blog here [paulnlaura.com].

A question of trust

Paid bloggers are almost as trustworthy as, I dunno, fake critics from even larger corporations. [wikipedia.org].

Re:oh rly?

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 [slashdot.org] here [slashdot.org] too) to mark it, falsely, as an attack on normal bloggers.

So?

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?

Re:So?

That's fine, but a "law firm paying bloggers to lie that a birth control patch is killing people" is just unconscionable smarmy stacked on top of smarmy.

People in that law firm, and their bloggers, need to go to jail.

The difference is...

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 i

Choose: anonymity or authenticated transparancy

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.

It's fraud

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.

Re:It's fraud

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.

Remember folks, we need to get rid of free speech to protect free speech! Right after we destroy the village to save it!

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?

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. 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 (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).

Re:It's fraud

You know full well that speech is controlled in many different ways to promote the common good e.g. truth in advertising.

Speech is never controlled for the public good... although censorship is always justified as being "for the public good". Speech is controlled to benifit the ruling class and the rich and powerful. So called "truth-in-advertising" laws are designed to make people less suspicious of advertising ("It is against the law to advertise falsehood... therefore I can believe commercials"), when in fact outright fraudulent claims happen all the time, the English language is ambiguous which makes it possible to make virtually any claim while at the same time being in compliance with laws, and there is no way the government can possibly evaluate all possible advertisment claims for falsehood.

A free society that admits there is falsehood in advertising, and there is virtually nothing the government can do to stop anything short of outright fraud, is one where people are skeptical and on-guard. The society where the government says "we are protecting you from false advertisment", are the people who will will blindly believe everything they see and hear, secure in knowing that the benevolent state is protecting them from any fraud.

Again, willfully misinterpreting what I said for your own ends. You know full well I was referring to his "business", not his opinion.

Do you have any understanding that laws are enforced with violence? That throwing people in jail destroys lives and families? That having large amounts of people in prison not only costs society billions of dollars, but leaves people open to exploitation as well as encouraging a prison-industrial complex? That prisons often act as criminal universities where people who have made a few mistakes are indoctrinated into a life of crime? There is also a terrible danger in any law of the law being used as a pretext for distructive policies like racial profiling, and for the eroding of civil liberties.

Criminal law is a very dangerous thing, to only be used when some behavior is such a clear and present danger as to warrent the social problems and risks to civil liberties involved. To suggest that we should throw people in prison for something as minor as paying people to blog a product is vicious, cruel, and authoritarian. Especially when all that is nessicary is to let people know that a company has been promoting fake blogging, and people will neither trust that company nor that blog for a very very long time. The only reason I can think of that you want to throw this person in jail is because you get off on that kind of thing.

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.

OK, so we rely on competitors and consumers to report it... So corporations will give false reports to harm competitors, and consumers will give false reports based on other issues (they don't like the blogger's race, their politics, their negative review of a product they like). This solution leaves people completly innocent of the crime open to terrible abuse, abuse that is worse than the crime itself. Doing statistical analysis of blog traffic? First, how are they going to do statistical analysis of blog traffic without compromising people's civil liberties by forcing non-suspects to turn in their web statistics to government? Second, how does statistical analysis of their blog traffic reveal that they were paid to give a product a good review?

Finally, make the penalties so severe that even a small change of being caught makes it unprofitable? You mean like the U.S. and its War on Drugs? Which put millions of people in prison (t

Wow

How long before the FTC follows through on their promise to enforce blogger disclosure?

Is that saracasm, or is this something you actually want?

I thought anonymity on the internet was an inalienable right to most /.'ers.

I guess it only applies to people saying things you agree with.

I'll post this as AC, while I still can.

Re:Wow

How do you intend to enforce a law saying that bloggers must reveal that they have been paid for a positive review, without compromising the anonymity and freedom that people enjoy on the internet?

In order to prove that a blogger is in fact acting against the FTC rule, you would have to show that they are explicitly receiving money in exchange for the review. Since neither people involved in the transaction have any incentive to reveal the transaction, you have go with a bunch of very expensive, and very dangerous (from a civil liberties standpoint) activities such as undercover sting operations like creating fake law enforcement blogs (which is the very crime they are supposedly fighting against), massive phone tapping and email tapping... or some sort of licensing and supervision scheme for blogs.

Of course, it is even harder than with something like drugs, because if the people involved don't explicitly agree to some sort of payment deal, and just have an unspoken understanding, you can't charge them with anything. Apple could easily just send out a check (or more likely, free "evaluation" Apple products), with no explanation or stated strings attached, to bloggers who give a positive review of Apple products. There would be absolutely no evidence whatsoever to convict Apple on any misdealing. Unless you want to throw people in jail or fine them on purely circumstantial evidence, which most would consider a grave violation of civil liberties.

There is no way to enforce any kind of rule on this in any effective way, without compromising the freedom, anonymity of the internet, and the civil liberties of those on the internet.

The More Things Change

I've always agreed with the notion of blogs. They allow normal people to get news and ideas out without having to spend many years in college or attaching themselves to a newspaper or television station. These people may not get wide exposure, but the good ones tend to stand on their own, while the rest of the crap gets drowned out.

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:

"PayPerPost versus authentic blogging is like comparing prostitution with making love to someone you care for deeply. [...]," said Jason McCabe Calacanis...

Re:The More Things Change

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.

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.

And in the latest news....

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 [slashdot.org]

Nothing wrong with this

While there are a lot of things wrong with this, there are measures that can be taken to protect people.

One, if someone is gettting paid - there is a papertrail however weak. Second, if they can track where things are being posted there is now a way to link the person being paid to the post they made. As long as this information can be subpoenaed, thre would be a way to unmask a person.

On the otherhand, removing people anonymity may discourage people from taking a stand against true insults and crimes.

Except for the most gullible people (bottom 95 percentile), these posts don't do much The top 5th will know better than to trust an internet post... of course by my own statement, only 5% will be smart enough not to believe this statement... scary.

Do no evil

to pay bloggers to write that a certain birth control patch is killing and injuring young women

Now I understand the context of Google's management saying they should not be evil - there are plenty of others doing it as part of business. Save it for the pulpit guys and don't play nasty evil games with the excuse that it is ultimately for good by exposing people to God's punishment. God is big enough to look after himself and really doesn't need to be told what to do by funded mentalists pretending to be pious for profit.

Oh please

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.

Isn't it ironic?

Oh, the irony of an anonymous Slashdot blog talking about the ethics of possibly fake, misleading or simply poorly researched blogs. Surely anyone knows that anything you hear from the news should be somewhat suspect, and anything you hear from blogs must be able 10x more suspect than that, since bloggers don't even have their future credibility on the line. Slashdot included. Blogs should never be seen as anything more than a vague starting point, about as reliable as overhearing a conversation in a bar.

I have used their service.

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.

Disclosure

I may be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure that PayPerPost requires disclosure by participating bloggers. There are probably other outfits that don't disclose, but these guys try to walk the ethical line. I consider that better than most sites out there, given the glut of gadget review sites that almost always glorify whatever product they're pimping. Hell, all the PC hardware sites tend to use the same nerfed wording whether a product is better or worse than its competitor. They don't ever say "Geforce 42-XXX Uber-Leet edition sucks", instead they'll say "NVidia's product offers competitive performance with ATI's high-end offerings" leaving lots of room for interpretation. What they're really saying is "I'm going to sell this review card on ebay for 900 bucks, so I'm being ambiguously nice to the NVidia Santa Clause".

The other thing is that bloggers choose what they write. If PayPerPost is paying to say "Democrats eat babies" and you don't agree, then you don't write about it. You won't get paid, of course, but there are other paid posts you can choose from that better suit your views. Blogging is all about credibility... if you blog about stupid stuff, your readers will go somewhere else and then your advertisers will pull out, so it's in the blogger's best interests to behave responsibly. CNN wouldn't air anti-military propaganda because it doesn't fit their slant, bloggers have to make the same decisions.

a less useful www

Even if we do have a law that forces bloggers to disclose who pays them does anyone seriously think that will reduce paid blogging? Deals will still happen - discounts or free test units/samples "encourage" blogging about your product, just paid for with cash or heck farmed out to India blog center that does not have laws about paid opinions. The article mentions someone being paid $12 for a post about a movie - heck thats less that a price of a dinner. There is no way to enforce any law that requires disclosure of paid for blogging because its hard to follow the money to begin with and worse its impossible to reliably tell the difference between what paid opinions and actual opinions.

Worse there is plenty of incentive to have paid blog posts - they can be more effective, more detailed than a regular ad, cheaper, and as the number of people blocking regular flash and banner ads increases this method of advertising is basically guaranteed to become more widespread. The only way this law will be of any use is if there are really astronomical penalties for failure to disclose paid for opinions anywhere(yeah right that will happen). Right now all that happens is you get bad publicity.

Excessive advertising has this effect of making me abandon the media through which its being delivered. With radio, magazines and TV thats been possible but I don't think it will remain possible to successfully avoid the www much longer. I'm guessing in the interim we will see spam-blocking type software for webpages but that won't work forever (if at all). I think the result will be that people are just vastly more skeptical and we will each have our own trusted sources of information (however you want to define trusted - objective tests, no anonymity, an effective moderation system, majority opinion from several different sites...) And this is entirely useless against things like slashvertisments or the woman accepting $12 just to mention a movie. There isn't a right answer or a good way of dealing with this. The internet is just going to end up being less useful and there isn't much we can do about it.

Scared!

I, personally, am scared of the day that the Fed requires bloggers to disclose their affiliations. First off, it would be next to impossible to enforce, second it limits freedom of speech for a specific, typically harmless, group and beyond that opens the door to further restrictions on critical speech.

Like everything else, people are typically smart enough to distinguish the NY Times from the Weekly National Enquirer. People should be smart enough to separate fact from fiction without a full disclosure wrapped in legalese and buried somewhere on someone's blog site.

So?

There's nothing wrong with paid blogging, just like there isn't anything wrong with traditional advertising. The only thing that's not acceptable is misleading people about your motives, your impartiality (or lack thereof), and so on.

odd article

It mentions the LA times, yet links to the Baltimore Sun. Heres the link:

LA times [latimes.com]

FTR, my opinion of lawyers wasn't that high to begin with. But spreading lies and deceit about birth control that's beyond tacky, it's sick, pond-life. Long live the Christian States of America.

Newspapers have always done this, what's the prob?

If you want a newspaper (from the biggest to the smallest) to review your movie, play, product, etc., you have to buy advertising in that paper.

I've worked in promotions. I have the experience of calling a major paper up and asking if we could get our play reviewed. "If you buy an ad, we'll consider it," is their answer.

I've also worked in the editorial department. If you think that ad buying doesn't influence editorial, then I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.

This is nothing new. There's nothing to see here, move along.

What this does show is that blogging is maturing as an industry. Advertisers are willing to invest in ads. This is a good thing. (Unless you think the way all major newspapers do business is unethical as well.)

Sometimes things are very, very simple.

Unconscionable? Sure. Illegal? Possibly.

But there is one thing that is absolutely certain: This is no different then anything else in the world before the internet.
You have to pick your sources based on a history of reliability and integrity.
For 100's of years there have been the naive, gullible, and downright stupid wondering how on earth they got ripped off by that seemingly nice young man in the ally. Why would we think anything is different now that 'the nice young man' is on the internets?