Blog-stituting Your Soul?

By Rob Baker (South Africa).
Biblical folk say that the love of money is the root of evil. Some bloggers seem to agree. In the middle of 2006 the blogosphere was shaken to its roots by a United States-based company called PayPerPost.

Cashing in
PayPerPost's business model works as follows - advertisers wishing to promote their websites approach PayPerpost. PayPerPost pay bloggers to write entries into their electronic journals, which include a link to the advertisers' websites.

"Opportunities" which PayPerPost offer bloggers range from writing about Las Vegas to websites offering Russian Brides. Payments for a blog entry range from some R30 to R7000.

This article's author tested out PayPerPost by writing 2 blog entries a day for them during January, pocketing some 3500 Rands. Not bad for some 40 hours of work.

Heck, if enough South Africans joined PayPerPost President Thabo Mbeki might just reach his employment targets (he can help by lowering bandwidth costs).

Slightly irritating
An irritation for South Africans thinking of joining PayPerPost is that they pay you through PayPal. Now considering that PayPal was co-founded by a South African (Elon Musk), it's a miserable shame that they don't cater for making payments to South African bank accounts.

This effectively restricts one to using the money received in PayPal for making payments for online purchases through PayPal, unless you're lucky enough to have a PayPal-friendly offshore bank account.

To join PayPerPost you need a blog that's been around for at least 90 days and has at least 30 blog entries. The high-paying articles stipulate that only blogs with high enough Google pageranks can take on the "opportunity" - the author's blog had a google pagerank of 3, which restricted him to a maximum payday of R140 for his highest-paying article.

A nasty was to follow, the google pagerank of his blog dropped to 2 in the middle of the paid posting (it seems Google is penalising blogs being used for paid blogging?).

If you don't like PayPerPost there are other options. With PayPerPost's success, along have come the inevitable copycats. Blogitive, Reviewme and Loudlaunch numbering in their ranks.

"Where's the ethical issue?", you may ask. The rub is that PayPerPost's advertisers often insist on the blog entry being "positive" - if you don't write positively, you don't get paid. Paid bloggers are thus forced to express enthusiasm for a product, which they may not like.

Whereas previously you could pretty much count on bloggers to write from their hearts, many of them are now prostituting their viewpoints for a fistful of cash. Cry the beloved days of innocence for the blogosphere, for they are no more. (Independent Online)

# Rob Baker glogs at http://www.p4s1.com/ and blogs at http://www.southafrica.to/
# You can flame him at yzerfontein@gmail.com.

****** Disclaimer by The Malaysian: The above report is meant purely for information and is neither an endorsement nor criticism of paid postings.
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