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October 27, 2004
Marc's Heresy III
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Marc Canter's plan to create a little controversy around his "pay for ink" proposal has created a firestorm of contention, and my last post on the subject received pings from Marc, and J Luster, as well as a bunch of good comments by Zbigniew Lukasiak, TDavid, rick gregory, and Richard MacManus (Suw's wisecrack doesn't count).
The lines seem to be pretty clearly drawn, On one side, those that contend that "pay-for-ink" is bad, because it will pollute the trust and athenticity that bloggers live by. This camp includes Jason Calcanis, David Weinberger, J Luster, and me. On the other, Marc is pretty much on his own.
However, some interesting middle ground:
- Zbigniew points out that marketing departments do pay for survey information even when you check "this product blows" -- so in some aggregated way any ink might be considered good. But do companies actually want to pay someone to say that their product sucks?
- TDavid lists a number of services and sites that do blend content and product: "Epinions, WayPath, Lockergnome ... all sites that utiltize affiliate text links in and around content (and effectively, BTW). Calcanis's crusade is well-intentioned but misguided and comes off looking absurd considering the abundance of websites (and blogs too) that are already inserting advertising inside blog entries effectively for advertisers." But I think the difference here is that the ads are insinuated into the content automagically, and the authors are not being paid to make the comments. It happens the other way around: they make comments on something -- a Sony device -- and the content is then hyperlinked to some click through mechanism, and any micropayments are delivered to Epinions. This is not a blogger being paid to blog about the device
This is a debate that will never be over, because we all want to move beyond just selling real estate over there in the margin. But jumping all the way over to being a shill is too far to go, Marc.
Comments (3)
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1. Bona Sijabat on October 28, 2004 06:04 AM writes...
Opinions are a dime a dozen. Everyone has them, but are they of any value to anyone? By incentivizing bloggers to generate more "mentions," you devalue those "mentions." Are bloggers likely to invest more time in their analysis to make more insightful (valuable to the reader) "mentions"? Unlikely, if they're paid by the "mention".
Then there's the Power Law rule (80/20) rule. 20% of blogs get read by 80% of people. Perhaps the skew is sharper - 10% of blogs are read by 90% of the population. It will be those 10% of blogs that will wield power of influence over the masses. If 10 out of 10 of those blogs have only bad things to say - you've killed your product in the eyes of 90% of the population, irespective of whether the other 90 give you raving reviews.
My initial feeling is that the risk of such losses will outweigh any opportunity cost arising from a possible converse situation where the top blogs have good things to say. Especially if the firm has more capital at risk.
On the other hand, if the product is the production of a fly-by-night company or a firm with many disguises, i'm sure they'd try their luck at scoring positive reviews in the majority of the top blogs.
Of course this is why marketing departments of firms with large capitalizations pay top dollar to get onto panels - because the "mention" becomes controllable.
While the idea of a "conversation" or "dialogue" between customer and company is great, it's unlikely to happen so long as a company doesn't have *control* over what gets said. That's essentially what marketing (to date) has been about. "Listen to me so I can tell you what I want you to know about my product".
Unless Marc has a keener vision of the future where he can see firms paying bloggers to equally badmouth and praise their product, I don't see this happening.
Becoming a blogger is costless. If we can somehow tie the compensation to some notional form of "reputation," firms might take interest. A blogger has to have something to "lose" (reputation, reader audience - essentially some form of barrier to entry) to balance this equation.
Issues I haven't addressed here in depth include blogger -> reader relationships. Maybe someone else can throw some light on these.
Permalink to Comment2. Julian Bond on October 28, 2004 06:29 AM writes...
My take on this.
http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=33342
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Give me money. If I like your product I'll promote it everywhere I can. I'll write blogs about it both here and elsewhere. I'll mention it on mailing lists. I'll post about it on other people's blogs in the comments. I'll mention it in forums I belong to. I'll promote it to people I meet at networking events.
Just give me money and I'll do all these things.
But I have to like the product.
And you have to "not be evil".
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Which is to say, I and most bloggers do this anyway. We promote products we like. What exactly is wrong with taking a little beer money for doing what we do anyway?
Permalink to Comment3. Jeremy C. Wright on October 28, 2004 10:16 AM writes...
Dunno, I just find this shocking that you guys are debating this as if it's new. Douglas Rushkoff covered this over a month ago (http://www.rushkoff.com/2004_09_01_archive.php#109415347543929625).
The opinions are out there and documented (by smarter people than myself even).
To me it will ultimately come down to Why You Blog. If you do it out of some kind of puritan mindset that you're open sourcing your brain and that any attempt to change that (including people emailing you thoughts) will corrupt the art... Then yeah, this idea is bad for you.
But it won't corrupt you any more than AdSense where you know that if you write about breast implants and webhosting that you can get several dollars per click.
The whole “commercialization by definition will pollute the voice of the artist” is, to me, a crock. Pick any other artform (or form of “self expression” if you happen to believe blogging isnt’ art). Painting. Does selling your painting, by definition, pollute your voice or compromise?
Gah. This comment is to long. Time to blog this.
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