There was a lot of discussion yesterday about PayPerPost’s recent announcement that they had raised 3M. I think it’s been interesting that the tone of most of these messages, while still negative for the most part, are not as vehement in their opposition.

The one comment which I was most surprised to hear was from Dave Winer. He makes a very interesting and valid point:

When I was a contributing editor at Wired, I went to parties where advertisers and writers mingled. The advertisers would tell us how cool their products were. Could you go to the parties if you weren’t an advertiser? I forgot to ask.

In other words, this is hardly a new practice, but at least now it’s out in the open. Readers know to ask the bloggers if they are members of PayPerPost. They also might be aware that there are less visible ways of buying influence.

Scripting News: 10/2/2006

I’ve always been of the mind that people ultimately have to pay their bills at the end of the month. Most people would be lucky enough to earn their living doing the thing they love the most – it’s just so rare in our lives.

Most of the objections seem to circulate around ethics. I think there’s a built in control system that prevents this from getting out of hand – common sense. If I spend time building an readership and a connection with an audience, I am disincentivied to do anything that will fundamentally piss them off. If I decide that PayPerPost is a viable method for me to make money, then I’ll choose the opportunities that I think would benefit my readers. It’s hard to conceive that I am willing to shill all that much for $5.

The argument that Google will eventually remove the benefit of this model – that I full agree with. On the one hand, the advertisers won’t see the same traction in the organic search side (negated potentially by the fact that there’s live, captive audience members already there). On the other hand, I’m more concerned what it does for the individual blogger (getting reduced pagerank, for example) and for bloggers in general (getting domains blacklisted and margined downwards).

Ultimately, these last factors are the real items worth discussing when it comes down to populating your posts with links to interested parties – isn’t it?

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