WebProNews » Disclosure

Google’s Blogger Adds Amazon Affiliate Monetization Option

Chris Crum — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:09:59 +0000

Google-owned Blogger has added a new revenue generation option: direct integration with Amazon Associates to search Amazon’s product catalog and add links to products where Bloggers can earn commissions when their readers buy products they recommend.

"Making it easy for our Associates to advertise relevant content on their websites is the foundation of the Amazon Associates program. Our goal is to help our Associates earn the trust of their followers by giving them the tools to search through the millions of products on Amazon and select those that are most relevant to their audience," says Dave Cotter, General Manager of the Amazon Associates Program. "If you’re a Blogger and you’re writing about the new Michael Crichton book, ‘Pirate Latitudes,’ you simply highlight the text you want linked to Amazon, click on ‘Go’ in the Amazon Product Finder, and click ‘Insert link.’ Setting up Associates links to Amazon and earning referral fees is now that easy."

"This is something that Bloggers of all shapes and sizes will benefit from as they look for ways to add compelling content to their blogs and make money," said Rick Klau, Product Manager for Blogger. "Our goal is to do more than simply give our bloggers the easiest tools in the market for creating blogs, it’s to make Blogger the easiest platform for bloggers to make money on. This integration is a testament to that commitment."

The timing of this partnership is somewhat interesting, as the FTC’s guidelines about disclosure recently went into effect. Klau does make it a point to encourage openness, however.

"A quick note about trust: affiliate programs work well when readers trust you," he says. "You should avoid promoting products simply because of the referral fee you might earn — readers may lose some of that trust if they sense your posts exist solely to make you money. You may also want to disclose to your readers that you will earn a commission on their purchase — some readers even prefer knowing that you benefit from their business."

Amazon Associates integration is not the only way Blogger offers its users to make money. Blogger has a "Monetize" tab in the Blogger app. Users can use AdSense of course, and they recently added AdSense for Feeds as an option.

Related Articles:

> FTC Guidelines Raise Big Blogging Questions

> Key Perspectives on the FTC Blogger Guidelines

> Products/Brands Atop Blogger’s Most Discussed Topics

The State Of Paid Review Blogs

Frank Reed — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 20:30:43 +0000

Posts for pay, reviews for cash or whatever you want to call them are a part of the blogosphere and have been for quite some time. The amount of attention that it gets is often directly related to the amount of other news that is happening in the space at the time. Well, we are in the middle of the summer and other than Twitter running around with its security briefs around its ankles there has little news to truly examine.

Enter Ad Age and its video feature “Three Minute Ad Age” which interviews BlogHer co-founder and COO Elisa Camahort Page on the eve of their 5th annual conference in Chicago. While many turn up their noses at the idea of ‘mommy-bloggers’ there is power in numbers whether it is real or perceived. Ask Motrin. BlogHer.com is a online community that gets 15 million unique visitors per month so there is nothing to sneeze at there from a pure quantity measure.

The focus of this interview is ‘blogola’ or the practice of being paid for a review of a specific product or service. Others like Chris Brogan have gone through some significant debates about the merits or demerits of this practice. BlogHer’s Page is anticipating that the subject will be top of mind during the conference because many influential mommy-bloggers can help sell a lot of products for companies if they mention and / or review a product on their blog.

While everyone agrees that full disclosure is paramount, Page is seeing that the context of the review is critical as well. In other words, disclosure is not enough. To that end, the BlogHer community cordons off the reviews in separate review logs where there is no advertising sold. These ‘sponsored conversations’ are clearly defined as such because Page that not only disclosure but context matters when it comes to paid posts.

I agree for the most part. The only real crime to me in this type of environment is if there is literally no mention or a very weak mention of ‘blogola (which by the way is a dumb name, anyone have anything better they would like to ‘coin’ here?). As long as the post is clearly marked as a paid discussion or whatever at the start and the conclusion of the post then there should be little trouble. Where you get into trouble is if the mention is brief and buried in the middle of the text or simply non-existent. Having a title that reads “You Have to Get Brand X!” may be all that someone reads so there needs to be the best shot of someone seeing that the post is paid for. Otherwise, we are in a gray area where a blogger can say they mentioned the nature of the post but didn’t make it really obvious. Starts to sound like a sleazy sales practice at that point.

So Pilgrims, on this fine Monday, what is your take? Should bloggers ever take pay for posts? If they do how should it be handled? What are best / worst practices you have seen? What are the potential consequences? Not surprisingly, the government has chimed in through the FTC on the matter so we better pay attention (I guess).

A discussion amongst the type of readers that come here could beneficial to all so please let us know your thoughts.

Comments

Responding to Paid Link Post from Cutts

Andy Beard — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 19:17:25 +0000

I have had a chance to deal with the odd email over the last 2 weeks whilst moving house, but I knew I should respond to this paid links post by Matt Cutts as soon as I was able to do so with some level of detail.

So far the best estimate for having a landline for internet access provided by the Polish national carrier is 10 months, so I am using a GSM solution which in my remote part of Poland seems to clock in slightly faster than what I would expect from UMTS so might be giving me a slow HSDPA signal.

I really wish I had been able to respond sooner, because I am actually quite disappointed in the way "facts" were portrayed, and because from what I can see no SEOs actually did any in depth research of what Matt was presenting.

I Did Some Homework

Two weeks ago, I think on the Sunday after Matt posted I read the post and the first 400 or so comments, plus all the stories related to it that appeared on Sphinn. I am going to try to cover a few different angles that I haven’t seen elsewhere, though that doesn’t mean these opinions haven’t been already been voiced by someone. There is only so much catching up you can do after 2 weeks out of the trenches.

Was This Really Cleared By Legal?

Maybe Google have run out of PHDs to hire in the legal department, but it seems there is a real grammatical clanger here.

Now I’m going to ask you to put on your regular user hat. If you’ve just learned that you or a family member have a tumor, would you prefer that radiosurgery overview article from the Mayo Clinic, or from a site which appears to be promoting a specific manufacturer of medical equipment via paid posts? My guess is that you’d prefer the Mayo Clinic.

The site in Matt’s screenshot isn’t the one that might appear in the search results as a result of the "paid" links. The site that would appear is the one being linked to. This one which has been around just as long as the paid reviews when checking on archive.org

The oldest version of the site even seems to have a link to investor information, though that is not in the archive, so it seems very strongly to suggest that the domain was intended for use by the manufacturers of the Gamma Knife in some way.

I notice Matt didn’t link through to the final site so people could do a fair evaluation. Matt was certainly suggesting Google’s line was that the site in some way was junk that didn’t deserve to be in the search results and that the other sites linked to had more reason to appear.

Another site that also seems to be by the manufacturer is this one on GammaKnife.org

It seems to me the manufacturer, Elekta, the registered trademark and patent holder were trying to do some understandable reputation management and SEO work, or someone was doing it on their behalf, because at least from my location if you search in Google for "Gamma Knife" Elekta’s corporate website doesn’t appear.

That is about the same as John Chow not ranking for John Chow.

Maybe they have some problems with their website design they might want to fix first, and maybe they should have done that before thinking about paid reviews, but to suggest any of their sites don’t deserve some kind of placement is misleading.

They are not "just one manufacturer" – they hold the trademark for what they wanted a satellite site to rank for.

Language

Lets face it, the people who generally need money enough to write reviews for $10 are not normally PHDs, though many people who write for PayPerPost are highly qualified, certainly more than I am.

Then again my wife just finished her Masters, and though in Europe it is not looked on as politically correct to brag about how well you pass a masters, she averages over 4.5/5 so walked away with an A or 5/5 overall grade.

Most people look on her being fluent in English, though she doesn’t write English as much as she should and thus makes stupid mistakes.

If she was under pressure to write 200 words in 15 minutes she would struggle without my help to write flawless English.

Payment

There is no way to prove whether the person writing the paid posts actually received payment. The posts might have been rejected for all kinds of reasons, such as the number of reviews that seem to be paid posted one after the other, and the general low quality.

Disclosure

I checked 2 of the posts depicted in Matt’s screenshots. The first had a very clear disclosure in the sidebar, and the 4th had a disclosure policy badge that links to a clear disclosure policy.

As far as humans are concerned I would class that as better disclosure than Matt personally uses for posts such as his recent recap of everything Google and how often do you see Matt openly criticize his employer.

There are lots of posts on Matt’s blog, if you were wearing a "regular user hat" and just appeared on a permalink page from a search result, where you wouldn’t realise that Matt is writing as an employee and shareholder.

In fact, if you stumbled across these entries on the web, you might not know whether someone got paid for writing these posts.

Matt has a disclaimer, but it is not in the content of every post (yes I am also guilty that my disclosure policy plugin is currently switched off due to a bug I haven’t had time to fix, but I have in post disclosure of some kind regardless for every paid post/review)

A Blacker Than Black Example Flawed, How About Grey?

I might be biased, but I think the gamma knife example whilst at first glance was a travesty, when you delve into it a little you realise that Google’s argument in that particular case was just as equally flawed.

What would happen if they tried to explain the links their own media buyers bought from the recent Leweb3 site, or various SEO conferences without nofollow.

Those are clearly advertising links, and if you take either the spirit or the letter of "Google’s Paid Links Law", they are guilty. If Google doesn’t set a good clear example, how can they expect the rest of the internet to understand what exactly is or isn’t allowed?

I do agree in the case of the gamma knife that the posts were most likely ordered for SEO reasons, just like many press releases about mundane events get published, or junk articles get syndicated.

The saddest thing is that none of the trusted resources Matt listed actually link through to the manufacturer of Gamma Knife, Elekta other than Wikipedia… with a nofollow link.

Comments

*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu

Blogging, Payment, Incentives & Disclosure

Christine Parfitt — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 15:19:08 +0000

Meg has opened up a discussion on the growing trend for bloggers in Australia to receive pitches from companies seeking to form relations with bloggers and use their blogs as a vehicle for product promotion.

Co-incidentally the same weekend there was a heated debate on the issues of payments and disclosure as they apply to bloggers. The story centres around a Microsoft ad that features quotes from several prominent bloggers. The quotes all answer the question “when did you know your business was people ready?” with “people ready” being a phrase promoted by Microsoft to describe their business philosophy. The bloggers received payment for providing the quotes and their ethics in doing so were questioned by valleywag. There were mixed reactions with some agreeing with valleywag that it somehow crossed a boundary and broke readers trust in the bloggers. Others claimed it was a storm in a teacup, it was clearly an ad and should have been apparent that the bloggers received payment.

So, why does it matter?

There is a perception that bloggers provide a personal, unbiased opinion and, in the eyes of their readers, this makes them more trustworthy and credible than mainstream media and corporate websites. It’s not surprising that companies seek to capitalise on this trust.

It can be a fine line for bloggers to walk particularly for those who run ads on their blog or who provide paid reviews. It makes sense (and is covered by the law in some countries) to disclose when payment is received for a blog post. The reader can then take this additional information into consideration and in fact it might not make any difference if enough credibility and trust has been established. There are quite a number of grey areas though, for example posts that are not paid reviews but that mention a company advertising on the blog or with whom there is a business relationship. There are also other motivations for writing something which might not be apparent to a reader and which nevertheless provides some tangible benefit. Link baiting can fall into this category.

It’s good that these issues are being discussed and I expect that more bloggers will publicise disclosure policies. My opinion is that it should and will be self regulating. Individual bloggers can decide where they stand in terms of incentives for blogging and how and when they should disclose payment. The audience will in turn make up their own minds on the trustworthiness and credibility of the blogger. I’m in the camp of believing honesty and transparency is the best policy and I think it’s the best business decision as well as the fairest. I would be stupid to assume that this is the case with every blog I read though.

Comments

Bloggers Criticized for Microsoft “Spokesblogging” Ads

Andy Beal — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 14:35:47 +0000

If you’re reading this post on Monday morning, boy did you miss a flare-up over the weekend. I don’t even know where to begin!

The summary is something like this. Some well known bloggers provided quotes for Microsoft ads run by Federated Media. Valleywag jumped on the opportunity to question the ethics of said bloggers. Some bloggers, such as Om Malik, apologized, while others stood their ground. Federated Media’s John Battelle apparently tried to explain his actions and apologize, which annoyed the heck out of TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington.

There’s so much more to this story, but it’s Sunday evening and, well, it would take a huge post to summarize everything. I’ve not read every detail, but here’s what I’m thinking.

It should be obvious that a quote in an ad unit is a paid endorsement. It should be, but it isn’t always the case. There should be a hard line between editorial and advertising. There should be, but that’s not always the case. Perhaps you should make a disclosure statement, any time you sign a deal with an advertiser – regardless of whether the ad appears on your blog or some other site – although that’s not always practical. A general blog disclosure statement is a safety net for any blogger who accepts advertisers or paid endorsements. Having a disclosure statement tells your readers, “hey, listen I may actually have my unbiased blogger’s hat on right now, but you should know that I do, at some point, receive money from the company I’ve just discussed.”

If you’ve read the blogstorm, leave a comment and let me know where you stand in the debate. In the meantime, here’s our disclosure statement. We link to it whenever we mention an advertiser and it’s linked to from every blog page, in case we forget or you’re just curious.

Comments

Shoemoney & SEOmoz Debate Link Disclosure

Kevin Gibbons — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 17:04:31 +0000

This week everyone seems to be talking about the debate between Shoemoney and SEOmoz following Rand Fishkin’s post last week about disclosing paid blog recommendations. This continued when Shoemoney and Rand Fiskin discussed their opinions today on Net Income.

Here’s a bit of background into both of their views, Shoemoney say’s you should assume every recommendation on his blog has some sort of method of making cash behind it:

"So yea you should not trust me… or Rand… or Andy Beal… or John Chow… Or Darren Rowse… OR ANYONE like we are Jesus Christ who you should do whatever they say and not use your own head. you should try EVERYTHING and let the money show you what works the best."

While Rand believes that he provides users with a more honest review by not taking payment for posting a link about a product or service:

"Even Indextools, which I love, and am very fond of talking about, doesn’t give us anything beyond the usual free account for re-sellers and discounts for having many clients with them. When I link to them, I never use an affiliate link or have them track that traffic. I like their service; I share my experiences honestly; end of story."

The main argument is about the disclosure of whether a review is paid for or uses an affiliate link, Jeremy Schoemaker has an affiliate marketing background and if he promotes a ringtone affiliate I don’t think there is any need to state that a commission will be taken from each sale, it’s probably assumed by the user as the main purpose of the site is to make a profit. It’s a bit different however with a news or blog site, both Shoemoney and SEOmoz have built up a very large reader base who respect the opinions posted and in this case I agree that it’s important that users know the link you are reviewing is paid for.

To a certain extent I agree with Shoemoney but Rand’s reasoning makes more sense to me and I think you have to admire his integrity by not accepting payment for reviewing a product or service. By doing this SEOmoz readers should be able to trust the website’s being linked to without questioning the honesty of a review. I don’t actually think there is a one-fits-all answer for this as in my opinion it depends on the circumstances, the example made on Net Income about CNN accepting payment to mention a pharmaceutical company was a good one as there are some sources you need to trust 100%. Personally I don’t have a problem promoting affiliates or writing paid reviews providing I think the advertised product is of interest to the blog’s readers and of a high enough quality so that if it did refer new customers they’re unlikely to be disappointed. For example I’ve just wrote a review about Search Marketing Standard magazine, this is unpaid but does contain an affiliate link, I thought the magazine was very useful and I feel that most people reading this blog would probably agree so I don’t see a problem in using this link, if they didn’t have an affiliate program I would still have wrote the same post. The URL clearly shows an affiliate link was used, I’m not sure if it’s necessary to clearly state this as well as it’s not like I’m hiding the fact by cloaking or using an internal redirect.

I also think it depends upon the type of product reviewed, I don’t feel as strongly as Rand about this and as a reader I wouldn’t mind if an affiliate link was used to promote IndexTools if I genuinely believed the review. I probably wouldn’t feel the same way however if a direct payment was received instead though as I think this comes across as more of a bribe. I also think the amount of products recommended is important if the SEOmoz list of recommended companies contained two or three affiliate links I would question why they were in there if others didn’t have this and at the same time if there was a large list of only affiliate links I’d probably ask which companies should be listed but didn’t have affiliate programs. While a single affiliate link based on a positive experience wouldn’t raise as many questions into the reasoning behind a review, at least in my opinion anyway.

I think a lot of this has got blown out of proportion a bit as they both probably agree on a large part of this too. Shoemoney has previously said he turns down most offers for paid blog reviews as they wouldn’t be of interest to his readers so it’s not as if he’s promoting everything possible, just perhaps not always being clear on what he’s getting paid or making a commission upon. It would be good to hear what everyone else thinks? Is there a standard yes or no/SEOmoz or Shoemoney answer to this?

Comments

Tag:

A Paid Link Disclosure Solution

Michael Jensen — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 21:03:36 +0000

There is a big brouhaha over Matt Cutt’s recent postings (yes, 3 of them) about the disclosure of paid links (big one here, another here, and one more here).

There’s been a lot of postings about it, with a great summary here by GrayWolf at SEOclass.com, some here by GrayWolf at Wolf-Howl.com, more here from Todd Malicoat of StuntDubl.com, more here from Matt McGee of SmallBusinessSEM.com, and another here from Andy Beal of MarketingPilgrim.com.

Essentially, Google wants you to disclose paid links to both users and to search engines. Google wants to know which links are “paid” instead of “natural” so they can discount their weight.

My feeling about it is this: Paid links are advertisements, and as such should be distinguished in some way from other links that are not advertisements. The disclosure should not be deceptive to users or to search engines. Disclosure can be subtle and is okay to be undetectable (not deceptively) to search engines/machines.

Google’s own webmaster guidelines specifically discusses that we should not do things specifically for search engines, but focus on the users:

Make pages for users, not for search engines … Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

If we look at other forms of marketing and advertising, there must be disclosure for advertisements. If you read a newspaper, it reads “This is a Paid Advertisement” somewhere on/near the ad. If you watch infomercials, it says “This is a Paid Advertisement”. If you listen to the radio and hear a political ad, it is disclosed as a political ad. If you look at Adwords and other text ads by search engines it has some form of disclosure, like “Ads by Google”. If you see a banner ad, well it either screams “I’m an ad” because it’s an image and it looks like an ad, or it says “Advertisement” somewhere. These advertising property owners do not make these statements because they are pretty or interesting, but to obey laws for advertising disclosure.

And now, for what you all have been waiting for…

The Perfect Solution to Paid Link Disclosure

So, I have the perfect solution for you to disclose your paid links to users and not search engines, that anyone can implement quickly and easily. This method makes it virtually impossible for a machine to implement an algorithm based on this code, but makes it fully disclosed to users.

To see the paid link disclosure in action, click on the following link (the next page has the link examples):

SEE EXAMPLE PAID LINK DISCLOSURE HERE

How to implement Paid Link Disclosure

Step 1

Copy the CSS code below and paste it in your existing CSS file for your site. (or create one, or put it in the template of your site so it shows up on each page).

a:hover.linkx {    background-image: url(/images/solop.gif);    background-repeat:no-repeat;    padding-left:10px;}a:hover.linky {}

Step 2

Change the name “linkx” to something else and don’t include words like paid or ad or affiliate. This keeps variability from site to site and gives it no semantic meaning. “linky” can be changed to something else also, but essentially all that is doing is giving your other links a class so that all links have a class assigned to it and cannot be “filtered” based on having a class attribute.

Step 3

Create an image that in some way reflects that the link is paid. Don’t just copy my $ image here, use a unique image and rename the filename to something else (keep it ambiguous). You may want to use a star, an asterisk, an exclamation point, or a turtle. It should be unique to you so again there is no regularity for the search engines, but at the same time it gives appropriate disclosure to your users. Place this image file behind the folder you created in step 4.

Step 4

Create a folder (give it any name, just be creative) and disallow search engines from access to this folder (learn how to do this in your Robots.txt file). No this is not deceptive, you just don’t want them to go there. This is for step 5.

Step 5

Create a file in the directory you just created and include a disclosure about paid links, describing that you disclose paid links by using an image icon next to links when a user mouses over them. I wouldn’t even include the icon on the page, just describe it with text, like “A dollar sign icon will appear when you mouse over a paid link”.

Step 6

Add the class attribute that you renamed in Step 2 above to the anchor tag of your paid links and any new paid links.

This solution would be incredibly difficult, and I would go as far as to say “impossible”, for Google and others to detect on a wide scale basis (which is what they face). Their problem is that this code is ambiguous, and could be doing any number of things besides attributing a paid link, and so they cannot fully determine that it is actually a paid link based on the CSS itself. But you’re still being ethical because users are aware before they click on the link that it is a paid link.

If you want to disclose paid links without having to hover, just modify the CSS code above and take out the “hover” part (see live page here of it in action):

a.linkx {    background-image: url(/images/solop.gif);    background-repeat:no-repeat;    padding-left:10px;}a.linky {}

If you have any improvements or other suggestions, add them to the comments below.

UPDATE: Matt McGee gives his idea for a solution, which is quite novel too.

Comments

WOMMA Blows It On Disclosure Issue

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 18:33:33 +0000

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association takes aim at the blogosphere’s favorite target, PayPerPost, but Andy Beard found some reasons to be concerned about their choices of disclosure exemplars.

WOMMA took some time to blast PayPerPost after an article about one of their participating bloggers, Colleen Caldwell, made it to the Los Angeles Times. Her offense? Posting a disclosure policy generated by PayPerPost to disclose her acceptance of compensation for blogging about various topics.

Beard took a peek at the WOMMA statement, and at the LA Times article in question. He noted the participation of Jeff Jarvis and Jason Calacanis in the Times interview; their commentary subsequently made it into WOMMA’s piece.

There are some deeper issues in play, especially when it comes to disclosure. Beard found that Calacanis, and Jarvis to a lesser extent, have room to improve in that area. First, Jarvis:

Jeff is collecting email addresses every time you place a comment, so you would expect some kind of privacy statement, especially with the amount of tracking going on.

You would also expect some kind of physical mailing address, because in some ways his blog is performing WOMM for the various businesses in which he has involvement.

Beard’s issue is more with privacy at Jarvis’ BuzzMachine; Jarvis has a lengthy disclosure page, but it is not accessible from single blog posts.

Now for Calacanis’ site, where Beard finds much more to poke:

I can’t give you an example of Jason Calacanis’ disclosure policy, he hasn’t got one.

It is well known that he has financial connections with www.ThisNext.com which is present all over his website without disclosure.

Jason’s ThisNext connection is also important, because in many ways ThisNext is a competitor to PayPerPost, and online reviews sites are not immune to problems with shilling reviews.

When Jason attacks PayPerPost is it really just because of ethics and his concern?

Beard wraps up everything by going back to the WOMMA piece, and what he saw as a contradiction between their recent statement and point number 5 in their FAQ.

That section of the FAQ answers the question about why there aren’t specific rules about what people should say. But in their anti-PayPerPost commentary, they call for "strict guidelines" on disclosure.

It would be instructive if WOMMA could deconstruct the PayPerPost disclosure policy as Caldwell has posted on her site, and indicate what may be construed as deceptive, unfair, or unclear. Along with why WOMMA should be the ones qualified to do so.

A List Bloggers Shouldn’t Throw Stones

Andy Beard — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 17:23:03 +0000

There are a number of fatal, hypocritical or naive flaws in almost every attack on paid posts by A list bloggers and it is time to show them their Achilles heel(s).

I am going to highlight Matt Mullenweg in this post, but please understand that this isn’t a personal attack, it just highlights many of the problems that the A-listers wouldn’t recognise if they looked at their own activities.

Matt is recognised as a major influencer, and whilst it is hard to get exact numbers for various reasons, there is a good chance 2 million or more people might have had a chance to see the headline "Selling Links" in their WordPress account.

Selling Links

Links have value for as long as clicking on them will transfer visitors from one site to another, and for as long as they are used by search engines as part of their relevancy calculations.

(Links are becoming less and less relevant, especially in Google – I have seen hard evidence)

A disclosed paid link within a review is actually the most transparent link and ethically pure on the internet. Most other forms of linking do not have a disclosure of any kind, yet more often than not some kind of compensation has occurred that is not transparent

Friends – you link to your friend, your friend might link to you

Your employer – if your company does well, you benefit

Promote a social media platform to your readers, and you suddenly get lots of friends on that platform, and possibly more prominence or authority.

Gone are the innocent days of the internet when people linked through to others purely based on it being good content, and that is especially true of the blogosphere. You link through to people and trackback/pingback because you want to express your views, and for other people to read them, and maybe respond in turn.

Gaming Search Engines?

The Yahoo directory has for years been a pillar of support for the Google algorithms. For over 5 years it has been paid inclusion only for commercial sites.

If I ran a blog on WordPress.com and tagged it "blogging" I would gain link equity from Robert Scoble, via the WordPress.com tagging system, whether Robert had read my post or not.

Thousands of affiliate programs gain link equity from affiliate links

WordPress.com is currently skewing Google’s index to the tune of 750,000 blogs, and thousands of tag pages.

Content Choice

People often choose content for financial reasons because they are controversial/topical and bring them more traffic and subscribers, or just to be evangelical on a particular topic.

Many sites were created to target specific subjects because they are lucrative.

Matt Mullenweg attacks PayPerPost >> Matt morally is on higher ground >> WordPress.com is an ethical service >> more WordPress.com users >> $$$

Matt doesn’t disclose that he is financially linked with WordPress in his blog posts – Who are the investors in Automattic? Does every employee at Automattic declare they work for Automattic within every blog post they write about WordPress?

Michael Arrington is at least blatantly honest that he often writes about Pay Per Post because it brings in more traffic and subscribers. The most valuable currency for Michael Arrington isn’t money, but access to information, preferably before anyone else.

Why don’t solutions to disclosure get more links? I have invested time and money into developing solutions for disclosure. I think my disclosure policy plugin site has so far generated approximately 10 links from bloggers, and 21 unique blogs according to Technorati, though some of it is syndication, feed errors or splogs.

People attack paid post companies because they have no intent to receive a pay check from them. In the same post Matt highlighted, a mother of 2 in the comments has technical problems using the Pay Per Post disclosure, and that is affecting the income she needs.

What a great gift to mankind, we have more pseudo ethical commercial blogs, but increase poverty by imposing ethical stigmas on services that provide income for people that need it.

Disregard for Legal Issues

In the wphackers mailing list a while back I suggested that WordPress should contain some boiler-plate legal terms, and the idea was effectively shot down. I know that legal jurisdiction would make them more complicated, but GPL seems to be usable worldwide.

WordPress.com didn’t even have a terms of service when it went live, let alone during beta, and how many bloggers have a privacy policy for all those email addresses they are collecting? In the UK there is the Data Protection Act, I am not sure of the US equivalent. Can you comply with that if you use a blogging service provided by a 3rd party?

MyBlogLog was recently attacked for not having a clear ToS and for cancelling the account of one person without warning. WordPress.com do that on a daily basis.

Who owns the comment content on a blog? How is a blog owner allowed to use the comment content? What rights to moderation?

There are blogs on WordPress.com that have been publishing content with affiliate links for over a year – I have even seen them listed on the front page.

WordPress.com uses a lot of tracking, not only on the main site, but also on the subdomains of blog owners. I have never seen a privacy statement on any wordpress.com hosted blog, then again I have never seen a privacy statement on blogspot hosted blogs either that gave details about what they were tracking. Does a blog owner have the option not to have all the demographic data of their blog visible?

Affiliate Marketing

Clickbank only recently changed their terms to include a mention of disclosure being required, but this is not the case for other affiliate program whose members practice word of mouth marketing. In fact they are not specific, they just require what is required by the FTC.

PayPerPost currently require more than is probably required by the FTC, and certainly much more than is practiced by 95% of affiliates.

Why are Pay Per Post getting a hard time over disclosure?

Examples of Ethical Paid Reviews

I wrote a review for Arron Wall’s SEO Glossary – I have made as much from the affiliate links as from the review itself, and it got me a link from Aaron’s blog – how cool is that?

Volusion Shopping Cart Review – In my opinion I went into as much depth as was possible for a service with so many features, and didn’t pull any punches about features I felt needed improvement.

Review of the Sponsored Reviews Service – I tried to provide as much information as possible, and highlighted things I would like improved.

In every case the company requesting the review gained more than buzz or a link, in fact with all 3 companies the link they gained wasn’t even a concern, and a drop in the ocean.

Each one of these reviews

Was on topic for this blog

Unbiased

Well received by my readers

It would be easy to point out that there are bloggers that will write reviews that are rushed affairs, and just mention the product in passing.

You get what you pay for, and in my case I try to make every review I write "cornerstone content". If I can’t write something unique and original about a product or service, I generally won’t even mention it, no matter how much I am offered.

I actually turned down a $150 review yesterday for ethical reasons – I had received manual comment spam from people promoting the product.

There are also affiliates that write glowing reviews of products that they have only read the sales page for, but no one would dream of attacking Clickbank, Linkshare or Commission Junction over this. Google in many ways prevent disclosure for their referral units.
Have you seen fake book reviews with links to Amazon? That is obviously Amazon’s fault, and last time I looked Amazon didn’t require disclosure.

Would WordPress Exist Without Paid Links?

How many WordPress contributors make money for their contribution from paid links either in the sidebar of their blog, or within the content? 80%? 90%?

I am sure every single one of them makes more money from paid links than donations.

Suggested Reading

Seriously? Every single post on this blog tagged with Disclosure and a lot of the posts tagged nofollow

Personal Challenge

Give me any^[1] A List blog, and I will find problems with their disclosure or legal terms, on a paid post consultancy basis through either Sponsored Reviews or ReviewMe.

I should note that I am not a lawyer, so this is for entertainment purposes, and anything I point out could well be subject to interpretation and there is no guarantee. Also note that the review would be published on this blog without prior approval, and that rates will be increasing to $200 soon.

That is nothing compared to the hourly rate of many WordPress consultants. I can’t advise on code solutions for platforms other than WordPress. Review length will really depend on what I have to work with.

If I can’t find anything wrong, you will get a free review that I will publish anyway.

[1] I won’t link to content that is in my opinion inappropriate for this blog

Oh, and to make this really interesting, you don’t have to be the blog owner to order a review.

In closing, no one is perfect, and that includes myself – I have only just added a privacy statement and it is not formally worded.

Comments

*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu

Your Blog – Does it Have a Disclosure Policy?

Andy Beal — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 22:21:27 +0000

With more pressures on bloggers to disclose their business relationships, Weblog Tools Collection points to a neat WordPress plugin that helps bloggers set up their own disclosure policy.

Just last week, I added a disclosures page on Marketing Pilgrim, so there would always be a place where you could view my relationships with any company discussed (in case I forgot). With pay per review becoming a hot option for bloggers, it seems that if you want to blog with integrity, you should disclose who you’re in bed with.

So, what do you do on your blog? Do you have a disclosure policy? Do you keep partnership details a secret? What should be included in a good disclosure policy?

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.