PayPerPost pays
bloggers to be shills
By Haroon Hameed on Friday, September 14th, 2007 at 7:17 pm.
We’re
participating in the TREC blog track
this year. The challenge is to find blog posts expressing an opinion
about a given topic, which might be a named entity, concept, product or
event. This is a task that is the basis for some marketing intelligence
companies (e.g., Umbria) and web services (e.g. opinmind).
Retrieving or tracking sentiments on the blogosphere seems like a good
idea because it represents the unfiltered raw opinions of millions of
ordinary netizens. At least that’s the current theory.
PayPerPost is a new service
that matches
advertisers with
bloggers who are willing to mention their
products. Jon Fine describes it aptly in Polluting The Blogosphere and TechCrunch invokes selling one’s soul. (We have not been paid to cite this article.) Here’s the way PayPerPost pitches it to advertisers:
“PayPerPost is an automated system that allows you to promote your
Web site, product, service or company through the PayPerPost network of
bloggers. Advertise on blogs to create buzz, build traffic, gain link
backs for search engine ranking, syndicate content and much more. You
provide the topic, our network of bloggers create the stories and post
them on their individual blogs.”
and to bloggers:
“You’ve been writing about Web sites, products, services and
companies you love for years and you have yet to benefit from all the
sales and traffic you have helped generate. That’s about to change.
With PayPerPost advertisers are willing to pay you to post on topics.
Search through a list of topics, make a blog posting, get your content
approved, and get paid. It’s that simple.”
Well, it’s a little more involved than that. After you post describing Nacho Libre as a modern classic that will establish Jack Black’s reputation as America’s greatest and most subtle comic, PayPerPost
“… will review the content and either approve or deny the post. If
it is denied, you will be given a chance to revise and resubmit. Once
approved, the clock starts ticking. Your post must remain live on your
blog for 30 days. Keep blogging as usual… eat a sandwich; go get a
haircut. After thirty days (and also at random) we will check to see if
the blog post is still live. If the post is live, you have satisfied
your agreement and you will get paid.”