Once upon a time, so legend* has it, there was a French foreign minister who used to make all of his decisions in the genuine and sincere interest of
France and then only afterwards try to work out whether there was
anyone who would want to bribe him to do what he had decided to
do anyway. I've always rather admired the idea. Taking money from the criminally corrupt for doing what you were planning to do anyway is practically the perfect crime.
I mention the story because today I first heard about Ebuzzing, a new blog monetisation tool that aims to pay bloggers for posting about Ebuzzing clients.
We've been here before, right? Obviously this is just the old evil of PayPerPost in a slightly different hat.
Actually, I'm not sure it's that cut and dried. Talking to the company today, there seem to be some important differences. Colour me hopelessly credulous, but this looks like a genuine attempt at PayPerPost without the evil.
First, disclosure is required - you've got to admit you're getting paid for the post. Second, there's a search "no follow" policy. (This is clearly just to stop Google clobbering ebuzzing like it clobbered PayPerPost but still - it really does mean the posts don't create a lot of spurious search mojo.) Third and most importantly, according to Dan Levy at the company:
"We insist that our bloggers
post only about things that they genuinely are interested in. If it's
not a product or service you wish to draw to your readers attention,
you don't back the advertisers campaign. That way even when you are
paid for blogging about something, it's because it's something that you
actually want your readers to know about."
See, that's the bit that I think might work. To return to my French foreign minister analogy...once he's decided the course that's really in the best interests of France, why shouldn't he find someone to bribe him for it?
Of course, there's lots of possible answers to that. Motivation is complicated and once you know there's money on the table you'll always be second-guessing yourself as to whether it affected your judgement. And if it's problematic to prove to yourself what in order you made the decision, it would be horrendous to have to convince a third party. (Imagine for a moment committing a bank robbery for the sheer thrill of it and with the sincere intention of returning the money the next day, but being caught by the police before returning it. Somehow it seems unlikely you'd be believed.)
And yet...ebuzzing seems to me to be making a genuine attempt to solve all of those problems. Dan at ebuzzing again:
"We read all articles and will to the best of our ability decide whether
a blogger is feigning interest if it appears that way. In the few cases
where we have felt it was happening, it was fairly obvious, and we
asked the blogger in question if they really were interested in the
product. Most of the people in these cases decided to drop the piece
and it therefore never left our platform (and hence never went on their
site)...If bloggers feign an interest in something then it is obviously
likely to be very apparent to their readers, likely more so than it
will be to us. It is of course possible that some bloggers who don't
blog regularly will decide to cash in if they can. We cannot reach into
their heads and see what they really think. But we've found so far that
it's very hard to fake that kind of approval in a blog post without
sounding ridiculous, and even harder to fool your regulars. The proof
is always in the editorial pudding, for everyone to see."
It feels...plausible. When he first slammed PayPerPost Jason Calcanis said "the currency of blogging is authenticity and trust... you pay folks to blog about a product and you compromise that." And there I think lies the solution. I trust the bloggers I read to be authentic. If they occasionally tell me they've decided to write about Apple or Coke or some cool new start-up and then found that ebuzzing is willing to pass them a few quid too, I think I'd be prepared to believe them. I doubt I'd trust a stranger's ebuzzing-flagged post. I doubt I'd trust even a blogger I knew quite well if he started doing it more than very occasionally. But on the handful of occasions when I've sat down to write about the excellent customer service I got from my bank or how much I like an online service I use - perhaps three or four times in the two years I've been writing this blog - I think on balance I'd have been happy to take money from the company I was writing about, given the protections ebuzzing appears to provide.
*Or if not legend, history graduates who don't have the original source to hand
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