When Ted Murphy started PayPerPost (now called Izea) in 2007, he immediately raised hackles by proposing that companies pay bloggers to post items about their businesses.
Izea CEO Ted Murphy
(Credit: Izea)ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick described Izea as a "Search Engine Optimization scam that threatens to torpedo the reputation of the already widely questioned blogosphere. It may also be a perfectly fair way for small time bloggers to make a living, depending on who you ask."
"None of us are pure and there are few firm lines established regarding what is and is not acceptable when you're trying to make money blogging (I called a paid review service brilliant just last post) - but disclosure of payment is one of the most basic requirements for paid blogging to be ok. Even with disclosure, PPP is a sketchy operation; the disclosure story at PPP has always been a little murky."
Truth be told, that was among the milder critiques of Murphy's business, which critics attacked for blurring the separation between advertising and original opinion.
So it's been a while since PPP, or Izea, was heard from. More recently, however, it was back in the news when it facilitated a Kmart-sponsored free shopping spree in December for bloggers who wrote about the experience. Here's the transcript of a recent conversation I had with Murphy, who counts a roster of 265,000 bloggers ready for future assignments.
Q: Why did you change your company's name from PayPerPost?
Murphy: When we originally launched, we were just PayPerPost, but now we have a variety of different properties, like SocialSpark and Bloggers Choice, so we wanted more of a corporate umbrella to house our different operations.
When was that?
Murphy: In November 2007
It's a recession out there, obviously. How's the company doing?
Murphy: This down economy has really been a good thing for us. A large number of bloggers are looking to make some additional money and supplement their incomes. Advertisers are looking for alternatives to more expensive media. So, it's a bit of a perfect storm.
What was the genesis of the idea for starting your company?
Murphy: I started an interactive agency prior to Izea in 1999. In 2004, I started doing some blogger outreach programs, things like giving away movie tickets and gift cards. And I quickly realized that while it was great and people would blog about our clients, it was also incredibly resource-intensive and really impossible to scale those efforts. Depending on the client, it was hard to find the right bloggers. The base of bloggers would constantly have to change. Just because we found a blogger who blogged on entertainment, our next client might not be in the entertainment business so we'd have to start from scratch.
I looked at what Google was doing with all those self-service ad tools. and thought it would be great to create a marketplace where all those bloggers and advertisers can find each other.
Describe how this works in practice. Let's say that Charlie Cooper Enterprises makes thumb widgets and they come to you and want to contract with Izea. What happens?
Murphy: You would create an opportunity in one of our marketplaces and you would say, "I'm Charlie Cooper enterprises. We've got this thumb widget and here are its features as well as a link to the Web site. We'd like you to check it out and tell us what you think and then link back to the site." The people who are part of our network would browse through the opportunities and if it would be a good fit for them and their audience, they'd post it on their blog and submit the URL back to us, which we would provide to you.
How do you handle payments?
Murphy: It's an electronic payment to us and then we pay the blogger through PayPal.
Why do you think that the practice of companies compensating bloggers in this way is not any longer considered taboo?
Murphy: I think a lot of it has to do with the frameworks that have been put in place. It's not just us, but the PR folks as well as other governing bodies to make sure that there's a certain level of transparency and disclosure happening with these transactions. And the freedom of voice with the person writing these posts being protected. When people first heard about the concept, they thought it was all about shilling. But when you're shilling, you're trying to kind of hide that relationship. We try to be totally open with readers and give bloggers a sense of protection so that they can say something they don't like about the product and still get paid.
So a blogger can a slam a company and its product?
Murphy: They could do that. Typically, a blogger's not going to slam a product or service. They're typically going to shy away from those if they don't like the product or a service, but it's not going to all be roses...
Every once in awhile, we will get someone who slams a product or service. But more usually, it's a case of being balanced. You have to take the good with the bad.
And what are their marching orders when they receive the assignment?
Murphy: Typically, we just point them in a high-level direction: Here's the Web site, here's what we think is important...share your experience. These mostly are Web sites or existing products that people may have. It works particularly well for Web sites because anybody can do it.
And how are they compensated?
Murphy: You're going to get paid on a per-post basis, depending on how big of a blogger you are or how well known you are. It's a sliding scale. We track the clicks and the advertiser gets to see that information back in real time. When you sign up for SocialSpark, we give you a piece of code to put on the site to give you a rank against other bloggers on network based on their traffic.
Do you require them to note high up on their blog posts that they are essentially hired hands?
Murphy: Every single post has to be disclosed and we give them a disclosure badge. That's a little piece of code they embed in their posts that lets readers know it's a sponsored post.
The argument you hear against the idea of "compensated conversation" is that if marketers pay bloggers to write about their experience with a brand, that sends a buyer beware signal to people reading the blogosphere for insight.
Murphy: I think at the end of day it comes down to the bond between blogger and the reader. Any site that I happen to stumble upon, I don't automatically give that a high level of trust. But the Web sites I go back to on a daily basis, as long as that blogger is being transparent and disclosing those relationships, I feel comfortable that they're telling it like it is. People in our network are compensated on connecting to their audience...so it's very much in the bloggers' interest to be true to the audience and share their experiences.
Just as many of you settled into your seats to watch Thursday evening's debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, Allen Stern of CenterNetworks was attracting his own crowd on Twitter after raising a question that strikes at heart of the blogosphere.
(Credit:
CNET News)
"It's clear the link economy is broken," he wrote, pointing to a write-up CNET News published on Friendster's support for Facebook applications. The piece contained nine links, six of which pointed to previous CNET posts.
Not long after, Matthew Ingram piled on with a post dinging us for attempting "to prove how authoritative" we are "by making it look as though the only stories worth linking to are their own.
"To say that their internal links are better than anything else they could possibly link to is just ridiculous. It's obvious that they either didn't even bother to look for other information to link to, or there's an internal policy to promote their own material."
Actually, not so obvious.
In a response posted in the talkback area on Ingram's page, CNET's Dan Farber set the record straight:
At CNET we link to our stories and to others. Generally if it is a standard news item that everyone has, we link to our version. If someone has the seed of a story or a take that helps to carry a story forward or deeper, we link to whatever. A challenge for all of us is finding and linking to content that we should point our readers at...often we don't have the time to go figure who has the best take or where a story came from before it got refactored by the blogosphere...so we continue to improve on it every day.
Still, link etiquette is basic to the integrity of the ongoing conversation in the blogosphere. One can honestly ask why not feature more outside sources? But let's consider the question from another perspective. Under deadline, we make informed choices based on our best judgment at the time. In this instance, my colleague, Caroline McCarthy, who authored the post, trusted her previous reporting and went with what she knew to be accurate.
Would she have improved her story by including even more outside links? Perhaps. Then again, we don't operate in a laboratory environment. It's a 24-7 competition where we all work under often severe time constraints. One approach is not necessarily better, but each tries to engage the community in the best way it knows how.
A nuanced commentary on all this comes courtesy of TechDirt's Mike Masnick. In his response to Ingram's post, Masnick explained his own site's link policy in a broader context:
Almost every one of my posts has external links, but I also do plenty of internal linking. But there's an important reason for my internal links: I know the internal links will survive. External links I can't guarantee. And I get tons of complaints from people who came on an old story where the link no longer works. So I can trust my old links because I know they'll be there. But I have no problem linking out when it's appropriate. And, in fact, the main point of the story is almost always a link out (and, of course, if I find a story from someone else, I always try to give credit). But internal links aren't always done for nefarious purposes...
Amen to all that. Earlier today, I spoke with Stern to get a better handle on his complaint. What I heard was less a general critique of CNET than a larger worry about the direction of the link economy. He is particularly troubled that as blog sites grow larger, they are pulling back from linking to outsiders.
"To me, when you're linking to other sources or viewpoints, I think that's where linking really matters. And you're not seeing it that much," he said. "From my perspective, it's very disappointing...People need to see diversity of opinions on a topic."
No disagreement here. But Stern suspects that larger blogs (or Web sites) believe that linking out would make them appear less credible and are reining in the practice.
"Let's get down to the raw facts. It's about search engine optimization," he said. "They want to keep you within their network as long as possible. A lot of that works into it."
No doubt, a lot of sites--ours included--devote a lot of attention to search engine optimization. But Stern is right to wonder whether that ambition to improve SEO scores may get extended in ways that hurt the wider blog ecosystem. Can you imagine what would ensue if the blogosphere descended into a beggar-thy-neighbor free-for-all? What's more, it would take place at the worst juncture, considering the existing financial strains caused by the credit crisis.
As the economy skids into a (add your preferred noun here), there's mounting worry about Silicon Valley's ability to weather the credit crunch. If past is prologue, I suppose that most of the biggest companies will find a way to slog through. As always, the folks on the bottom of the food chain have the most to worry about--especially the legions of bloggers who make a full-time or part-time living through their writing.
Later, I put the same question to Om Malik, the impresario behind GigaOm. He said there are no rules at his shop limiting outside links.
"I don't even think about it like that. Every time we see something good, we link to it. If someone has the better scoop or better story, we constantly link to that," Malik
A meritocracy of links. However imperfect, it's a recipe that's worked until now. It's about giving sunlight to the best content.
I spent Tuesday afternoon as a guest of Beet.TV impresario Andy Plesser, who hosted a fascinating colloquium at Stanford University. It was a small group, maybe a couple of dozen people altogether, drawn from the technology industry, the venture capital community and media to discuss the state of online video.
(Credit:
CNET News)
The conversation was thoughtful and there was no shortage of intellectual firepower in the room. But as I listened to these bona fide A Listers grapple with the new economics of a rapidly shifting media landscape, I couldn't escape a sense of deja vu. Questions such as: How would mainstream content providers ever build a profitable business for their video content on the Internet? Should the rise of amateurs, or citizen journalists, be treated as potential friend or foe? Would the advent of online video and citizen journalism erode the role of the "traditional" journalist.
Yes, I'd been there before. Years ago these questions got a thorough airing and, truth be told, I thought the discussion was over. Citizen journalism was here to stay, so-called amateurs were now part of the conversation and any media organization worth its salt should be manic about opening itself up to new ideas and new ways of doing the job.
Of course, the complicated reality is that the big networks now struggle with enormous cost structures built up over decades. The equipment used to produce and distribute their content doesn't come cheap and it's not at all clear what they should do in order to monetize their stuff on the Web. Meanwhile, the likes of YouTube are enjoying viral growth. Steve Grove, who heads up news and politics at YouTube, said the company receives some 13 hours of video every minute.
That's a telling sign of the times. How much local and national news do you still watch? If I want to find out what's happening in the world, the boob tube's the last place I'll check--and then only if I can't find it first on the Internet. TV knows it's losing its hold on what used to be its bread-and-butter audience. That's why their executives are nearly manic about figuring out the Internet before it's too late.
William Hearst III
(Credit: Kleiner, Perkins)"The thing I find hardest to struggle with is how the different business models will work," said Kleiner Perkins' William Hearst III. "I still think there's value to people who make a career out of news gathering and don't make a lot of mistakes."
"How do you monetize a lot of these changes...where's the money in these changes?" added Richard Moran, a partner with Venrock. "That's the question that the venture world asks. You have infinite demand for the unavailable. And when it becomes available, is there any money there?"
"Twitter's not going to change the world. Twitter's never, ever going to change the world," says Loren Feldman in a recent video post.
Loren Feldman: Not buying the BS
(Credit: 1938 media)Amen, bro.
I think Tech's Last Angry Man--actually, he's a very nice guy in person--is on to something important. Of course, Feldman's cri de coeur is less about Twitter, per se, than about the increasingly banal state of tech "conversation," circa summer 2008.
Loren says that he's become bored by most of the debate churned out in the echo chamber. Chalk up part of this to the inevitable warp and woof of techdom. Great breakthroughs occur at irregular intervals, and you run across inevitable intellectual dry patches. (You don't invent something like the World Wide Web each year.) But I part company with Loren here. Actually, I think we're living through one of the more interesting times in recent years, what with the advent of cloud computing and the move, in fits and starts, toward a more intelligent Web. But that's debate for another time.
Back to Loren's main point, anyone who has followed the incessant bleating about Twitter's supposedly existential meaning to our lives--let alone the silly debate over Twitter versus FriendFeed--has to wonder whether tech's chattering class has lost its sense of perspective. Are we guilty of navel gazing to the point of silliness? (David Risley has a different take on the topic.)
For that matter, Loren could have extended his critique to the equally inane holy wars that periodically erupt between a familiar cast of bloggers. The squabbles would bore the other 99.9 percent of humanity to tears--that is, if they ever bothered to tune in. Happily, they've got lives to live.
There's a fascinating discussion going on about the rights and prerogatives of bloggers and the people who leave comments on their Web sites.
Hank Williams has a good recap on his always entertaining blog of the incident which triggered a contretemps featuring--who else?--none other than Robert Scoble.
That raised the logical question: Who owns your comments--the blog owner or you? Again, Williams:(Credit: CNET News.com)
This issue came to the fore recently when Robert Scoble commented on a post from Rob La Gesse's blog. The problem is that Scoble commented using Friendfeed instead of the standard blog comments. La Gesse and Scoble had a discussion where Scoble wanted him to move the discussion to Friendfeed. La Gesse did not want to do that, and at some point deleted his feeds from Friendfeed. This prevented the discussions about his blog from happening on Friendfeed. Unfortunately, as Mathew Ingram explains, this had the effect of deleting from public view Scoble's comments on LaGesse's blog. Scoble was upset that his comments had been deleted because he feels like he owns his comments.
What about when one comment will be viewed and under the control of more than one party, as in the case of Disqus. For example with Disqus you have the ability to edit your comments. And in some sense when you add a comment you are building a site for yourself (your collection of comments) and you are contributing to someone else's site.Let me confess my bias right at the start. I'm with Matthew Ingram in that "something doesn't feel right" about all this. Once you press publish, that comment becomes part of the public record.
As you can imagine, there was little agreement about any of this. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson spotted an opportunity to promote one of the companies in the Union Square Ventures portfolio, pointing to the discussion of a "Bill of Rights" for commenters over at Disqus. But no matter. It is an interesting conversation--and Disqus offers up some interesting ideas, which deserve quotation in full. To wit:
a) The ability to edit and remove their commentsb) Access to all of their comments, even if it has been deleted on a blog
c) The right to use their own comments as blog posts. After all, a commenter is just a publisher not writing on his own website.
d) A life for the comment beyond a single blog. I want to take my comments with me, even if the blog shuts down. This may seem threatening to the publisher, but it really isn't. A commenter should have rights to what they post, but bloggers should still have control over content that appear on their blogs. Bloggers should still control: a) Whether or not someone is allowed to comment on his blog
b) The deletion of a comment
c) The modification of a comment, as long as the original copy is still accessible and the edit is transparent
The suggestions about ownership of a user's comments are worth further discussion. But I'd be less than candid not to acknowledge that the concept of revising or deleting comments after they go live really troubles me.
This isn't a face-off between "old media" and "new media" (though some surely will reach for that tired analogy.) This debate inadvertently hits a couple of important nerves--namely, the concept of objective truth and the risk of airbrushing history. I'm not clear what qualifies as a "transparent" edit. Cleaning up bad language? A deletion of a nasty word typed out in anger or frustration? A wholesale replacement of verbs and nouns? Or to take the most extreme example: "Comrade Trotsky doesn't exist."
The idea that you can modify or subtract a comment without impacting the conversation just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. A comment is part of a larger conversation; you tug any one thread and you affect everything which came before and after.
Just because we're writing and arguing online doesn't mean that the words are any less valuable. But there is a historical record to respect. Otherwise, we risk losing ourselves in a relativistic hodge-podge with no real start and no real ending. Just whatever strikes your fancy at that particular moment in time.
From the counterintuitive files, the Project for Excellence in Journalism came out with its fifth annual look at the media, and it's a doozy of a report.
"Read all about it"
(Credit: Project for Excellence in Journalism)The study contradicts most of the assumptions we've grown to accept about the impact of technology on media and journalism in the last few years.
Among its findings:
• News is shifting from being a product to more of a service.
• The days when news sites were final destinations are over.
• Prospects for user-generated content now appear more limited.
• Madison Avenue does not yet grok the world of new media.
• U.S. media coverage is becoming increasingly narrow.
Digging down further, the study takes specific aim at the belief that audience fragmentation is breaking the grip of "media elites."
"Some people even advocate the notion of "The Long Tail," the idea that, with the Web's infinite potential for depth, millions of niche markets could be bigger than the old mass market dominated by large companies and producers.
The reality, increasingly, appears more complex. Looking closely, a clear case for democratization is harder to make. Even with so many new sources, more people now consume what old-media newsrooms produce, particularly from print, than before. Online, for instance, the top 10 news Web sites, drawing mostly from old brands, are more of an oligarchy, commanding a larger share of audience, than in the legacy media.
The verdict on citizen media, for now, suggests limitations. And research shows blogs and public-affairs Web sites attract a smaller audience than expected and are produced by people with even more elite backgrounds than journalists."
But don't take that to mean all is well in the world of the mainstream media. If the authors are right, advertising isn't accompanying the online migration with the consumer. Translation: Media faces both a shrinking audience as well as a "decoupling of news and advertising."
Happy days. So, what's next--the meltdown of the economy? Oh yeah, I forgot. That's already started.
Hey, you should have seen my breakup e-mail with Jimmy Wales.
Just kidding.
Of course, as all of Silicon Valley likely knows by now, Wikipedia's major domo is getting razzed over at Valleywag. The geek gossip site got its hands on a breakup note and IM text Wales apparently sent to ex-squeeze, Rachel Marsden.
The Wales' post was par for the course since Valleywag revels in the online agony of others. (Owen, I'm a kung fu expert, so do yourself a favor and keep me out of your headlines. :) ) But the correspondence came to light just as The New York Times decided to publish a piece about the suicide last month of Paul Tilley, who had been the creative director of DDB Chicago.
The Times piece examined whether nasty comments made by a couple of bloggers played any role in this tragedy. That struck me as odd. Were readers supposed to learn that the blogosphere resembles a rude locker room--or worse? Not much of a revelation. But the piece appeared to suggest that cruel words posted on the Internet may have been enough to drive Tilley over the edge. It reminded readers that a 13-year-old girl killed herself in 2006 after being insulted and dumped by an "online boyfriend" on MySpace.
"Gregory K. Brown, a specialist on suicide at the University of Pennsylvania, said that public humiliation could play a role in suicide because "hopelessness is often a major risk factor, and if you've been publicly humiliated and your reputation has been tarnished forever, you could see how someone could become hopeless." Such situations, he added, could contribute to feeling that life is unbearable.
And unlike some other forms of public humiliation, online insults can live in perpetuity. Whether that increases suicide risk, Mr. Brown said, is an open question, adding, "Although it's plausible that's the case, we know very little about the role of the Internet."
Let's be careful. The Times headline, "After Suicide, Blog Insults Are Debated," borders on the sensational. That's not to say it doesn't get rough out there. Check out the TalkBacks in the piece my colleague Elinor Mills wrote after returning from a interview with Google's Eric Schmidt. Hiding behind a cloak of anonymity--let alone the distance of a wireless connection--the trolls came out of the woodwork and let the bile flow.
The depth of their animosity floored me. Elinor's a delightful person, not to mention a hard-working and conscientious reporter. I couldn't contemplate the demons that drove these folks to jump ugly. But this is cyberspace and people are free to express their opinions. All you need is a keyboard and a connection.
So it was after reading the Times story early Monday morning that I clicked over to TechMeme.
The news led the page where I came across a pointer to a brief piece by Mike Arrington of TechCrunch titled, "When will we have our first Valleywag suicide?"
"So how long will it be before Valleywag drives someone in our community to suicide? My fear is that it isn't a matter of if it will happen, but when. Valleywag and Nick Denton, though, will likely look forward to the event, and the great traffic growth that will surely follow."
"There's a market for this kind of content, obviously. And nothing can stop it except significant changes to our libel and defamation laws. That isn't something I support. But the valley was a much nicer place to live and work before the days of Valleywag."
I wonder about that. If someone's contemplating jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge because of something posted on Valleywag, they've got serious issues. Arrington is a frequent target of Valleywag's barbs and I can understand his frustration. But he's missing the bigger point. Think back to Cassius' warning: the fault really is in our selves. If folks failed to click on the stories, I'm sure Nick Denton would have folded Valleywag eons ago.
Maybe the real story is that Silicon Valley types seek out the personal and the salacious because, well, they like it. Chalk it up to too much time spent staring at a computer screen each day.
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