A Modest Blogging Proposal

If "pay per post" lets online writers shill for cash, why not go all the way and sell real-life opinions, too?

By Ben Kunz

It all started with a simple question from Forrester Research (FORR) analyst Jeremiah Owyang late in the afternoon on Friday, Dec. 12. A few days earlier, blogger Chris Brogan had written about his decision to accept $500 from Kmart to find out what's cool to buy at the discount retailer and then write about it. Owyang posted a question to his readers on microblogging site Twitter, asking whether it's O.K. for brands to approach bloggers in that manner.

With that began one of the most vociferous recent debates in the blogosphere. Owyang is a top analyst on social media. Brogan is one of the world's top bloggers (with more than 180,000 readers and another 27,000 followers on Twitter). Within hours, thousands of online bloggers, including some of us at media planning and Internet strategy firm Mediassociates, joined the often heated discussion.

By the end of the weekend we came to the realization that few bloggers see any conflict in being paid to write a post, even if payment comes from the same company being reviewed.

Your Mind for Sale

So, in the interest of furthering the discussion and helping to illuminate where we stand on the matter, we offer this modest proposal. Let's take this pay-per-post advertising model to its logical and most extreme conclusion. Let's sponsor real-life opinions too, far away from your computer.

Starting soon, your mind will go on sale.

Sponsored Opinions. Earn Big Cash!

Think of the potential. You can be paid to drop brand names into conversations! Traditional media is dying; newspaper circulation is down and 1 in 4 U.S. homes has a DVR that lets consumers skip commercials. So advertisers understandably need new ways to intercept people. How better to compensate for an eroding media base than by paying for real-world opinions? By inserting a brand promotion directly into a blog post, a blogger is giving the recipient no choice but to receive the message. In one swoop, we've just solved the monetization challenge of social media and prevented the global ad industry from imploding. Yes!

Before we explain how the revolution works, let's review similar models. "Advertorials," or paid ads that look like written opinions, have been around since the 1940s. Such shenanigans started in newspapers and you hear them still today on radio talk shows, when celebrities such as Howard Stern or Don Imus break into a riff about steaks or iced tea that mention a brand name. The basic rule of advertorials is that while they intend to look or sound like a real opinion, they must be clearly marked as sponsored ads.

It didn't take long for marketers to eye the Internet as well. By the mid-2000s there were more than 100 million blogs on the Web and the company PayPerPost.com, founded by Ted Murphy, offered to pay bloggers to write reviews. Unfortunately, this first business model didn't ask for clear disclosure. Bloggers could write without noting the comments were funded. A backlash ensued. In June 2006, the popular technology blog TechCrunch ran the headline "PayPerPost.com Offers to Sell Your Soul" and in fall 2007 Google (GOOG) removed the page rank of bloggers affiliated with PayPerPost.com for their posts—the kiss of death for online writers seeking fame.

Sponsored Opinion: "I'm Writing Late. Need Starbucks."

Brogan didn't think much of the first PayPerPost model. "I was one of those guys hating Ted (Murphy), thinking this will ruin blogging, right there with the crowd," he says. But Brogan knew that the ad landscape was shifting and eventually met Murphy in person at a conference, where he discovered a kindred, innovative mind.