Are Paid Posts Polluting The Internet?
For the record: this isn’t a paid advertisement although you will find this article under the Paid Advert category. I don’t want to incur the wrath of the Google gods for doing something that violates their TOU.
What this article is about is PayPerPost and ReviewMe, two paid blogging models that are popular with some bloggers. I’ve participated in both programs previously, but discontinued paid blogging about the same time that Google announced that penalties were forthcoming. Penalties or not, I was no longer interested in monetizing my blogs through paid posting.
|
Matthew Mullenweg, who is one of the architects behind WordPress, recently discussed on his Photo Matt blog TechCrunch’s decision not to accept PayPerPost/IZEA advertising after surveying their readership. Mullenweg added, “Their readers made the right decision and voted that it would be disingenuous to accept advertising from a company that, in Michael’s words, pollutes the blogosphere.”
I realize that the words uttered were from Michael Arrington who has a “history” of airing his overwhelmingly negative opinions about PayPerPost, founder Ted Murphy, and the PPP model. Oddly, TechCrunch works closely with TextLinkAds, the company who started ReviewMe. I’m not sure why one business model would be different enough to justify then the other one or whether what PPP does pollutes the internet, while ReviewMe is deemed acceptable.
I’m not taking a position in this debate, but I would hate to be in Ted Murphy’s shoes as the entire PPP model is under attack (talk about job insecurity!) Google has penalized bloggers who use PayPerPost and Murphy is finding himself responding to these attacks by leaving comments (diplomatic ones, at that) on blogs discussing PPP.
Google has changed the way that many blogs do business, leaving some bloggers scrambling to make up for lost revenue. It’ll be interesting to see whether the paid posting model can survive or whether it will be abandoned by bloggers, advertisers, and by the companies providing this service themselves.
Google has penalized a lot more than PPP and paid link blogs. A Writer’s Edge never contained these “offenses” and yet the PageRank dropped from 5 to 3 and now 0. It also lost its advertiser.
Thanks for the TechCrunch post link. I read it and the comments and feel a tad better knowing I’m not alone. I still miss the income, though.
Georganna, I was surprised to learn what happened to your blog. Your site has always done very well, ranking at PR5 for quite some time.
Losing ranking is one thing, but losing a paying customer can be devastating.
Why you are being penalized to the same degree as PPP posties is a mystery to me.
It’s true, some blogs not involved with PPP or TLA were also slapped by Google. Like you say it’s a mystery only known to Big G. Of course, many blogs doing PPP were hit. So where do we draw the line regarding paid posts? I’m inclined to think there’s more to it than meet the eye. Like blogs that linked to bad neighbourhoods and so on.
The whole controversy stinks. Obviously the only reason (some) people use the forms of advertising they do, such as payperpost, is to get the link for google juice. While some genuine companies are doing it for the actual advertising purpose of it, I would be suspicious of the percent.
Markk, Perros — I just noticed that PPP has developed something called “RealRank” to get around PageRank problems. Oddly, they’re still promoting their PostieCon event on their home page. This event was held three weeks ago!
I wonder if this RealRank will take off. I’m not sure how it works but it seems to me that google is such a beast that people will always trust PR more than anything else.
I don’t care whether people do pay per post or not. What was getting annoying was the fact that it’s become so widespread that I have been accused of doing it and not disclosing it.
Almost every post on the candle blog I write for I link out to another company, product or website and sure others do the same.
Anyway it does seem like several people took PR hits for other unknown reasons and all people can do is guess about them.
Sandra, all of the finger pointing regarding paid links, paid posts and online advertising has detracted from what we do online: share useful information to our readers.
Isn’t that odd that you are getting penalized for sharing information through helpful links to other sites? I try to link out liberally with no thought to getting compensated or expecting a link back in return.
Google’s model is broken; unfortunately serious bloggers are being penalized.