The ethics of blogging for $

Since coming back for South by Southwest, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about sponsored posts by bloggers. There were several events there that made me think about the topic, from Jeff Jarvis and others lampooning clumsy astroturfing to meeting the folks at Izea who run a pay per post service with a strict ethics code to attending a session on SEO for social media that mentioned that paid blogs can quickly bump up your Google rank for a new campaign. And I think that we’re finally reaching the point where the idea of blogging for money may be finding the right equilibrium to work.

The key requirement that bloggers and the rest of the social web seems to be asking for is disclosure. They don’t mind if you’re paid to shill for a product, just that you point out that you’re doing so. This is little different from the long-standing practice on political blogs of requesting that users disclose if they’re paid by a campaign when posting and commenting – it helps users understand the context and take the remarks with the appropriate amount of salt.

I look at some of the ways to provide this disclose, as well as why non-profits should consider paid posting, after the jump…

Users also have come to expect that if a blogger does endorse or favorably review a product for money (there really hasn’t been a market for negative pay for post, though I’d be interested to see how long that lasts – paying a blogger to trash the opposition seems like something people would be less willing to disclose), it’s something that they also personally endorse. Most bloggers would balk at pitching a product that they weren’t actually a fan of, and I think that most companies would shop elsewhere for bloggers rather than sponsoring a half-hearted review or implausible endorsement that readers won’t believe. And while there’s an implicit contact (or sometimes explicit) that if you’re writing a sponsored post, you at least make it mostly positive, including some negatives in a review can make it more real for readers.

A key element of the Pay per Post product offered by Izea is a mandatory disclosure on every blog that participates. While I think that many readers would prefer a more open disclosure (like requiring the sponsored posts to indicate who specifically paid for them) over the blanked disclosure that somewhere on this blog, there may be some posts that are paid for by someone, their system does allow advertisers to require these additional disclosures.

Even without using networks that connect blogs with advertisers, most bloggers that write sponsored posts include a disclose. Note how on this post sponsored by SEIU, a graphic (albeit animated) is included at the top and bottom, along with a note in the text itself. Similarly, Jarvis himself maintains a pretty solid disclosure on his “about me” page.

For bloggers, paid posting is a useful tool toward financial sustainability. Traditional ads bring in some revenue, but it’s often not enough to completely support a blogger. By adding a revenue stream from sponsored posts, bloggers can bring in additional money while simultaneously filling in a need for content.

For advertisers, paid posting can be a valuable tool to get buzz, as well as a quick way to improve your search engine rankings.

For non-profits, there’s still another incentive: building up the sector of the blogosphere that supports your policy area. While a few thousand a year might be a drop in the ocean of your media budget, it could mean the difference between blogging once a week and once a day for bloggers interested in your cause. And the free media dividends they’ll pay in the years to come could be more than worth the cost of sponsoring them now.

So while there are still some purists who detract from pay per posting, I would argue that as long as a healthy disclosure is included, it’s worth the effort.

Update (5.8.08): This was originally mistakenly posted under the wrong user acct.

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