Regular readers of my blog would have noticed that at times there are ‘sponsored’ posts. Sponsored posts are posts which I get paid for – and I have complete freedom to say what I want. More on this later.
It all started in 2006 with a company called PayPerPost Inc. Blogging was becoming popular and there were companies which wanted to advertise on blogs. PayPerPost (PPP) provided them a marketplace where interested bloggers could sign up. Advertisers set a price they were ready to pay – say $x for n number of works with y number of links inserted. That was the basic idea. For the first time there was a viable source of revenue for blogs with fewer number of visitors – programmes such as Google AdSense don’t result in significant payouts unless you’ve a healthy amount of traffic.
I’m the first to admit that their initial system was flawed. This was the first time anyone was trying out this concept so it was inevitable that there would be hiccups. Spam blogs started cropping up. Advertisers could define whether they wanted a positive tone post or neutral tone post, thus limiting what bloggers could say. Readers started revolting when they found out posts were sponsored. This latter bit was solved when PPP tweaked its rules to make disclosure (of the fact that it was a sponsored post) mandatory.
The biggest blow came when Google decided to penalize all blogs it analyzed to be using PPP by setting their PageRank to 0. (Google assigns ‘importance’ to pages by assigning a PageRank from 0-10.) My blog was hit too – with a reduction from high of PR 4-5 to PR 0. A lower PageRank doesn’t necessarily mean lower traffic – traffic levels remained steady; in fact, they went up. And my blog still cropped up at the top for searches in specific areas. A drop in PR for most bloggers was nothing but an ego issue. I didn’t care. Google did give a way out of this by giving you the chance to delete sponsored posts and then beg Google (literally, via a web form) for mercy. Google’s sneaky, you know. The pretended as if the reason why they were reducing PR was because they thought it was ethically wrong. Bullcrap. They did it because for the first time there was a serious competitor to Google AdSense.
PayPerPost Inc then renamed itself as Izea Inc. Learning from its mistakes it launched a new service called SocialSpark. All current sponsored posts that you see on this blog are from this particular service. Similar to PPP, there was a marketplace where advertisers could set a price for a review. The crucial difference was that in the case of SocialSpark you can say anything you want. You can make negative / critical statements and the advertiser is still bound to pay you provided you met technical criteria (such as minimum number of words). This gives freedom to us bloggers to speak freely about what we really think about a service / product. For instance I recently did a post on Learn.com’s Personal Edition. I didn’t like the service, and I mentioned that in as many words in my review. Another crucial difference is that SocialSpark mandates bloggers to use rel=”nofollow” in all links used in sponsored posts which means that such posts cannot be used to game Google’s ranking system – it is only for reaching out to human readers. I feel that the current model that Izea has developed in SocialSpark is fair to all parties involved – reders (mandatory disclosure), bloggers (freedom to say what you want), and advertisers (genuine feedback coupled with social media buzz).
SocialSpark will continue to exist, but Izea has given a reboot to PPP as 
PayPerPost v4.0 *the link takes you to the new PPP v4.0 site which is separate from the PPP version shown on the main site). PayPerPost v4.0 is based on the idea that instead of having a marketplace where advertisers set a price and bloggers who qualify certain criteria can take them, PayPerPost v4.0 allows bloggers to set the price – how much they want to be paid for each word, each link, whether they want follow / nofollow, etc. Advertisers who would like to advertise on blogs then select which ones they want; bloggers are contacted with offers and choose the one they want. (In a sense, PayPerPost v4.0 is like an older programme called PPP Direct which functioned along similar lines but with lesser flexibility.) Also this newer version of PPP allows you to say whatever you want (just like SocialSpark).
PayPerPost v4.0 is currently in testing stage. It’s a good complement to SocialSpark – one where bloggers opt-in and the other where advertisers opt-in to choose bloggers. Izea has taken care to see that things which were done in less-than-savoury ways in earlier iterations don’t get repeated this time. I hope that larger tech blogs overcome their collective hatred of Izea (probably borne out of jealousy) to welcome this this initiative. Who the fuck are they kidding when they say they don’t take money for posts? All of them keep fawning over corporate sponsors all the time.
That’s nice!
Anything you want to say, AND getting paid for it.
So how do you figure out the Page Rank? Like, say I want to know what my blog’s Page Rank is, how do I do that?
The only ‘official’ way according to Google to find out PageRank is to install Google Toolbar. That doesn’t stop a lot of other sites from providing PageRank query services. One example is checkpagerank.net. I use this one, but really, there isn’t really anything to choose between services. Enter the domain name you want to check up and it shows you the current PR. I see that yours is currently 2.
There are many other measuring standards, all of them quite arbitrary. After Google penalized blogs by reducing PageRank, Izea started a new ranking system called RealRank just for blogs. This is based on the actual traffic that a blog gets. There’s Technorati ‘authority’ based on how many blogs link back to you – system is very unreliable, doesn’t count all links. Also there’s Alexa which tries to ‘guess’ the amount to traffic that a site gets using samples taken from a small test base.
Izea requires signing up, then placing codes and things on my blog. Yeah! It’s 2. So is yours, I see.
That’s 2 more than 0. :P
Izea Rank just needs you to insert a small tracking code. It bases its rankings on actual traffic data. Useless to insert though unless you sign up for SocialSpark / PayPerPost.
[...] paid bloggers to blog about sponsors and linking to them without the no follow rel tag. Result: Google struck back by reducing the participating blogs’ PR to [...]