The Commercial Side of Blogging
In what seems like a bad virus, the Pay Per Post meme has kicked up again and is causing for much bellyaching in the blogosphere. I've covered this many times before and, fortunately, someone has finally also addressed some of the true underlying issues.
Apparently, the fracas was kicked off by Jeff Jarvis with his post "Pray Per Post". As Jeff notes at one point:
He [Ted Murphy] also said that he saw no difference in Amanda Congdon making commercials on her old or new vlog and a Pay Per Post person making a commercial on her blog. Fair point. But one of the panelists said that Rocketboom is clearly a show and a commercial makes sense in that context; the relationship is clearer. David Weinberger said that marketers and the public have been at war for a century and the internet and blogs were to be his refuge from that: a place to have conversations with friends. I asked whether Weinberger, who takes no ads, hates me for doing so. He said, no, because the relationship is, again, clear: It’s about someone buying space on my page, not about buying my endorsement. He called Pay Per Post “corrosive†to the conversation. Pressed again on the demarcation, I brought up the rules I was taught as a journalist (emphasizing strongly that I was not trying to call all blog talk journalism or to hold it all to the same structure and rules): Simply put, the rule is that no one can buy my voice and with it my credibility.
Quite the dilemma, it seems. This of course relies on the base premise that journalism is an uncorruptable force perpetuated by not just the moral sensibilities of the reporter but also the "Chinese Wall" dynamics inherent to the news business itself. Interestingly enough, both Jeff and David seem to complain citing the nature of the relationship between the reader and the publication. Granted, each medium provides its own unique constraints on that relationship - doesn't the bi-directional nature of blogging actually provides for a deeper relationship than previously afforded us.
Scott Karp, increasingly the voice of reason in my book, chimes in with some interesting dissection:
Bloggers, almost by definition, create their own niche communities — they create content, readers comment, other bloggers link — it’s a deeply symbiotic relationship where participants get to know each other. There’s a direct connection between bloggers and their communities — so who better than the blogger to create marketing messages that are relevant and interesting for their communities?
[...]
So just to play out this scenario — let’s say a blogger who writes about life and family, and has a number of readers outside of friends and family, occasionally writes a post through PayPerPost and properly uses the equivalent of “Special Advertising Section†to disclose that the post is paid. In the context of the entire blog, what’s wrong with that relative to how it has worked in other media?
Should Bloggers Create Commercial Content? at The Blog Herald
This is my point exactly - as I've made it many times before. It is ultimately the responsibility of the publisher to understand their community and to continue to deliver to them a consistent, accountable experience to them. While it is certainly possible for the wrong thing to happen - and it WILL indeed happen - I think that the best, most successful personal publishers will actually have the common sense to stay true to this mandate.
technorati tags:blogging, pay-per-post, jeff+jarvis, ted+murphy, scott+karp, monetization