Blog Propaganda
Source: Wired 02.08; “Hawker Media: Advertisers paid me to blog about them. Is that so wrong?”
Turns out you don’t need a degree in marketing to get paid for advertising. Apparently, PayPerPost is willing to pay its “members” to write endorsements for anything from the Alzheimer’s Foundation to an electric mixer. These endorsements come in the form of blogs by seemingly normal users. Members can earn money by blogging about how great liposuction worked out for them. The really deceiving part of these blogs – it doesn’t matter whether the member has had, or knows anything about liposuction. Bloggers are suppose to “disclose their relationship with PayPerPost”, but some have “accused (them) of destroying the authenticity of the blogosphere by disguising paid messages as candid blog posts.” By the way, Murphy recently changed the name of the company from PayPerPost to Izea.
The way this ties into databases… I’m getting there. It all boils down to the mighty databases of Google and other search engines. The companies paying Ted Murphy are getting potentially useful advertising from member blogs, but they’re really paying “just to win links to their sites and boost their search-engine rankings.”
I’m beginning to feel that Izea may be a bit sneaky. It seems to me that they are trying to use what they know about how these online databases sort information and sell it cheaper. Rather than paying Google top dollar for a top ranking, Murphy is offering a way to essentially get rankings in a cheaper (and arguably shady) way. “In an attempt to protect the integrity of its search results, Google has launched a search-and-destroy on all paid links, demolishing the PageRanks of Posties everywhere.” So, this stage of spam may be over, but database administrators should stay on their toes. There are always people looking for new ways to get rich quick.
