Paying bloggers for their opinion as a form of product / service marketing seems to have taken off in the last 6 months. I have heard of a couple of services like ReviewMe, take off, but I haven't personally written anything ReviewMe or PayPerPost.
The Washington Times just published an article covering the effectiveness of this form of "blog" marketing.
"….Over the past few years, a number of businesses have been connecting bloggers with advertisers who recognize how the cross-linking that goes on in the blogosphere can be a good way to spread the word about their products. Some advertisers have covertly tried to generate buzz with bloggers with under-the-table payments. But newer firms are starting to move their online marketing into the mainstream, with full disclosure from bloggers and a willingness among advertisers to accept that not all reviews or buzz will be favorable.
If someone will pay me to give the review I'd give anyway - fine. It seems to me any opinion, even a negative one, is better than no opinion, no press, in many cases.
"….Rob Lenderman, the search engine optimization architect at LendingTree.com, said his company understands that not every review will be a good one. But marketing by blog "allows us to expose new products that we have to audiences that are not really mainstream," he said. "Rather than wait for buzz, we can go create it ourselves."
I have to wonder if, 5 years from now, all the MSM reporters are going to be bloggers and posting their "stories" (unedited, BTW) to online newspapers like the new "Washington post blog dot com" or "blogging New York Times dot com" or something like that.
Could it be, instead of bloggers ending up as Press, as reporters, reporters end up as bloggers and end up posting to blogging newspaper. I mean, now it's almost moving into a hybrid of that - a little bit of both.
Getting back to the issue of being paid to give an opinion / assessment - I'm paid for my SEO opinion, for Web Analytics assessment of a site, should I be paid to offer an opinion, however frank, to an advertiser? In a way, I prefer the transaction being transparent. If a blogger is being paid and gives their opinion you can weight how accurate that information is. So maybe, it's ok. I still think that being paid for an opinion probably colors your judgement in subtle ways - but then again, judgement can be impared by a lot of things, not just money.
