Clickz reports today that Pay Per Post is readying itself to launch some new features this Monday including the following:
- 3 new video ad products – where advertisers can pay bloggers to create videos about their products, where they can run ads before and/or after the video reviews and where advertisers can give bloggers multimedia elements for their reviews.
- targeting capabilities – letting advertisers target their opportunities to different segments of the blogosphere – categories.
- a unit that combines disclosure of ad affiliation and a format giving more advertiser control – a pop up style box that shows who the message is sponsored by and that shows the advertisers logo (something that advertisers control the look and content of).
- tiered blogger ranking payments – ranking blogs by their Alexa, Google and Technorati rankings so that higher profiled bloggers are paid more.
I’m glad that PPP has moved to a disclosure model over the last month or so and think that some of these new features make their service more useful both to bloggers and advertisers.
I’m not really a fan of pop up elements on a blog so the pop-up disclosure unit doesn’t appeal – however until I see it in action I’ll with hold judgement on it.
As I’ve said previously – I’m not really into writing paid reviews on a blog – however I’m not completely opposed to the idea IF there is disclosure. I also think bloggers should think carefully about the relevancy of the review they are doing to their blog and should put considerable effort into genuine and useful reviews.
I’ve actually see a few paid reviews lately that have both impressed and frustrated me. On the one hand I’ve seen a few bloggers writing genuine and useful reviews for products on their blogs.
In other instances some of what I’ve seen produced as paid reviews have been nothing much more than republished press releases or promotional materials – all this second rate ‘review’ does is frustrate and anger readers.
The key with successful paid reviews is similar to the key to successful content of any sort – make it worthwhile for your readers and you’ll not only earn a few extra dollars for your review but also help grow your blog into something worthwhile.
I think PPP just moved to a model that was more appealing for bloggers and advertising. They had to do it, and they did it. I’m hoping the new models will be better for bloggers in terms of monetization
Hope the pay per post features may be more advantages to bloggers and can maximise monetization also ..
How much did PPP pay you for this post Darren? was it good money?
Yeeez, that was quick, did they pay you to delete the comment as well?
no payment for this post – just reporting the news.
and the comment was in the moderation queue – not deleted :-)
Hey Darren, thanks for the monetization tips. Thanks for the lead in to MyBlogLog too. That’s how you build a blogging community the way I imagined it should be done.
Have a great one!
Nice reporting Darren…
Those are some neat features………thanks for the reporting! I still have 1 month before I can become a PPP member
Darren, with this recent post, would you have considered paid promotion if it were offered? It seems like you are mellowing a bit on the topic?
I’m considering doing PPP with my new blog but need to wait the minimum 3 months of having the blog online. I’d like to get feedback from others using it though, before I just chuck them up on my site, so I’ll be lurking the forums of their site for a while to get a better feel for it and see if it is worth my time.
My take on Pay Reviews is that you’re hiring someone to give you their opinion on your product. The minimum cost should be fairly high to get quality reviews, payment should be disclosed, and links should be NOFOLLOWed.
The $5 a post payment schemes do nothing but encourage people to generate human spam the search engines can’t find.
Personally, I do advertise with PPP and now that they require a disclosure, I won’t be advertising as much.
All I wanted was the links, and was willing to pay $5 per link to get them. Now all you have to do is search for the PPP disclosure text and devalue those links…bad for me.
I wasn’t very impressed with PPP. They won’t allow you to take part if your archives use anything other than a month-by-month-based display of posts. Simply having a full blog listing with dates in reverse chronological order isn’t good enough. I can’t for the life of me understand why they can’t just search for the month.
[…] After reading Darren’s latest post about recent PayPerPost developments, I decided to check out the service again. It’s been a long time since I last visited this site, and back then, I couldn’t even sign-up to test out the programme. […]
I’ve recently experimented with the PayPerPost folks, as an advertiser, and it was interesting.
Although it is relatively simple, there are some confusing aspects to all the new features and capabilties that require more help for a first time user.
Because I was trying to announce a blog directory I think there was a synergy between the bloggers and the advertising opportunity that was offered to them. In such a case, as you mentioned, it can work very well. However, while reviewing the blogs that took advantage of my opportunity, I did notice that some of the reviews didn’t mesh as well with the content of the blog or simply didn’t come across as believable.
Of course, the better bloggers write their post in such a way that only the disclosure makes it clear that the story is actual an ad – unless you’ve seen the same product mentioned many times already!
I don’t understand why people use Pay Per Post. Don’t they know that they take a HUGE 35% from advertisers, when that money should be going to bloggers?
Thats why I started buyablogger.com a free service for advertisers and bloggers. Cut out the middleman, put advertisers in touch with bloggers directly, and pass the savings on to the bloggers.
Check it out at http://www.buyablogger.com
Good and really useful post for all readers and specially for me, thanks!
;)
Money for posting? I think that is no good, especially fo blog-readers.