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Has The Business of Blogging Gone Too Far?

Is it a dog or kangaroo in disguise?What started out as a personal weblog has now bloomed into business ventures for many bloggers out there. There are countless debates on how monetising a blog (eg. paid reviews and advertisements) can affect the acceptability of new and even current readers of a blog. Darren Rowse recently did a poll study from his readers on whether his readers have ever gone into paid reviews on their blogs.

 

That’s not really new to me as I have also indulged into paid reviews at my blogs, though I have somewhat reduced the frequency of such reviews as the opportunities do not match the niche of my blogs. For those who participate in paid reviews, there are reasons for doing so.

 

What is new to me, however, is the business of paying “quality bloggers” to leave comments on niche blogs linking back to the payor’s blog. In order words, assuming your identity in leaving comments on other blogs so that these comments get the attention of readers to want to visit your blog. Dee of Net Business Blog recently wrote about the hiring of blog commentators. The power of commenting on blogs was highlighted by Darren Rowse recently and I guess when Darren agrees with the power of certain methods, many would agree with him. The difference with the latter is that the blogger makes the comments herself, not hiring others to do it.

 

Whilst I do agree that having visitors coming to a blogger’s site due to the blogger’s comments would be attributed to the attraction of the very words used by the said blogger, the morality or ethics of paying someone to comment on blogs using the blogger’s identity (nick) is another thing. As a blogger myself, I would rather have genuine comments coming from blog readers than commenters who were paid to comment on my blog. It is not so much that the link goes out to another blogger (after all, this blog has dofollow) but I would feel cheated to be communicating with a bogus person impersonating (for a fee) as another blogger.

 

As I have mentioned previously, blogging is primarily communication between the blogger and the reader who comments. If I were to know that the person who has been dropping comments in my blog has been paid to do so, I would immediately remove all the comments made and even boycott visiting the paying blogger’s blog.

 

Why should a blogger stoop so low to get traffic to his blog by paying someone else to leave comments leading to a link trail? I have utmost respect for Dee but I think this business part of blogging is taking it a bit too far. I have no qualms when bloggers place advertisements on their site. I have no issues with them doing paid reviews in between their usual postings. These things are done on their blog and it’s their turf. But I would have a serious issue with paid commentators here. Nevermind if the comments are genuine. At least with paid reviews, there is usually a disclosure statement. Just imagine a commentator leaving a note at the end of the comment saying “This is a sponsored comment“!

 

If you are a paid commentator here, own up and let me give you a spank or two!

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. 13 Nov 07 | About Money

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Intelligent Replies

  1. ParisB | November 13th, 2007 at 6:11 pm

    Ok this is new to me - sponsored comments. hmph! What will they think of next?! Nope, not a sponsored comment :P

  2. helen | November 13th, 2007 at 7:23 pm

    Hmm, thanks for highlighting it here. I’m not aware. I’ve no idea there’s such thing.

    It’s like hiring celebrities come cut ribbon at your shop opening. Or some high end restaurants do invite famous people to dine at their place to get the exposure.

    I’ve not given thoughts about the morality of the whole thing. :-)

    Think I’ll think it over.. psst need interim post. :-P

  3. Wayne Liew | November 13th, 2007 at 8:31 pm

    Money can just make anything works nowadays. Do you came across the buying RSS subscribers buzz on the blogosphere recently? There is a huge debate for it but there are still bloggers who pay for that.

    With all these being set up, the Internet or the blogosphere is no longer a genuine place. I do agree with you that blogging is a communication between the blogger and the readers but with blogging revolutionized so much, we can’t run away from such things.

    *This is a sponsored comment!* :-P

  4. shyam | November 13th, 2007 at 10:14 pm

    nice information,,great job!

  5. Michael Woo | November 13th, 2007 at 10:30 pm

    Yeah it’s booming and expanding. It’s great in present years because you get to make lots of money with several paid programs out there unlike in the past..

    I got friends who sell so many kinds of different services such as digg, feed counts etc.. he’s making LOADS of cash man!

    I hope that this would stay the same for more years to come.. I myself am a full-time blogger :D and loving it!

  6. Adino | November 14th, 2007 at 11:07 am

    This is an eye opening post for me… paid comments, paid diggs, paid feed counts?

    Somehow… it just feels very fake to me if you need to pay to get comments and feed counts. There’s no real ‘love’, just paid love. Kind of like looking for a prostitute.

  7. pablopabla | November 14th, 2007 at 11:21 am

    ParisB : I know you are for real :D

    helen : No, no. Perhaps I did not make it clear enough. This is where you hire someone to pose as yourself to go and make comments at other niche blogs as yours. Eg. I hire you to go to other blogs like this and make comments under the nick PabloPabla with the link to Blogsreview.

    Wayne : How would the blog owner be able to monitor each and every paid RSS subscriber?

    Michael : Do you have a secondary plan if full time blogging does not work out in the long term?

    shyam : :D

    Adino : Watch out for fake PabloPablas soon. LOL!

  8. Dee Barizo | November 14th, 2007 at 2:45 pm

    This is the real Dee :)

    Thanks for joining the conversation. I should’ve been clearer in my post.

    The blogs I do the paid comments for are not personal blogs. They are informational or news blogs that could be written by anyone with passion for the niche. They are not personality driven at all. Also, the name on the blog comments is name of the blog rather than the blogger’s name.

    I would not use this outsourcing tactic for a personality driven blog unless I had the commenter post frequently on the blog.

    Also, I agree with you about commenting under someone else’s name. That’s definitely an ethical issue. I don’t think it’s okay to comment under someone else’s name but commenting under the blog’s name is okay with me as long as the blog is not personality driven.

    Sorry for my miscommunication. We may still disagree but I hope I’ve cleared things up a little.

  9. pablopabla | November 14th, 2007 at 2:58 pm

    Dee : Hello! Thanks for the extra explanation. However, I still have trouble accepting the notion that informational or news blogs could be differentiated from a personality driven blog. With due respect, I don’t see much difference between the two.

    As a blogger who reads comments placed in my blog, I take it that whoever leaves a comment is the author of the blog which is linked to their name (whether it is their name or blog’s name, it doesn’t really matter). The element of trust is placed there.

    But I guess, at the end of the day, it is very much up to the individual on how he wishes to manage his blogs (which may include hiring paid commentators).

    We may disagree but that’s the beauty of an engagement of words :D

    And I am glad you are You!

  10. merlia | November 26th, 2007 at 6:21 pm

    Thanks for your interesting post, i never heard about the sponsored comments, through this post i came to know about this very informative, well me too going to give-up a try in this…

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