On Monday, we covered an embarrassing pay-per-post campaign Google launched in Japan with the aim of boosting awareness of a new keyword hitlist box on the Google Japan top page. It now turns out the move, which was (to my knowledge) first brought to light by Japanese super bloggers Masato Kogure and Akky Akimoto, triggered a number of repercussions.
The aftermath in a nutshell: The campaign is… → Read More
Google is undoubtedly the dominant search engine globally, but in a few countries such as Korea (Naver), Russia (Yandex) or Japan, local competitors are winning. Especially Nippon, the country with the world’s third biggest Internet population (about 100 million people are online), still seems to be a tough nut to crack for Google.
Nielsen Japan reports that in October 2008, Yahoo Search saw a… → Read More
Like much-criticized PayPerPost for blogs, German/UK startup Be-A-Mapgpie will pay you to insert advertisements into your Twitter stream.
Advertisers pay on a cost-per-thousand-impression basis, and the ads are promised to be delivered to relevant audiences based on keywords. That means Be-A-Magpie will analyze the content of your Twitter messages to see if there is a match to particular… → Read More
IZEA (formerly PayPerPost) has soft launched their new social network for “posties” Social Spark. Social Spark brings the PayPerPost scheme into a candy colored social network. There’s little need to describe all the features as there’s nothing really innovative: think MySpace or Facebook but in bright colors. The key difference is the focus on shilling; center stage is… → Read More
IZEA (PayPerPost) have suspended Zookoda, the blog to email service they acquired in April. According to CEO Ted Murphy, the service has been suspended due to “elevated levels of abuse on Zookoda.com” and goes on to explain that the service is being used by spammers. For those that think that PayPerPost pollutes the blogosphere with spam content, the following from Murphy is rich with… → Read More
It’s been less than two weeks since Google penalized PayPerPost bloggers in the most devastating way possible – by resetting all of their PageRanks to zero and effectively removing them from the Internet. PayPerpost, now called IZEA, is in the process of launching RealRank, an alternative way to rank blogs. But their advertisers are still looking for blogs with an actual PageRank to… → Read More
Update: Ok, the poll is now closed. It was close, but the “Nos” have it with 55% of the 3,437 votes cast. No IZEA ads on TechCrunch. In 2006 PayPerPost CEO Ted Murphy emailed to ask if we’d take their ads on TechCrunch. We said no and that was the end of it. Yesterday I heard from Ted again on the subject of advertising. His company, which has been renamed IZEA, wants to… → Read More
If participating in PayPerPost wasn’t questionable enough morally before, today it’s now a poisoned chalice as Google has commenced punishing PayPerPost bloggers by completely removing their page rank. IZEA (the new holding company for PayPerPost) CEO Ted Murphy is not surprisingly calling foul on the move, claiming that it’s part of some sort of censorship conspiracy by Google. → Read More
PayPerpost, which has renamed it’s parent company IZEA, says they’ll be launching a new social network in January 2008 called SocialSpark. Bloggers and advertisers (the company says they have over 85,000 bloggers and 11,000 advertisers) will create profiles. Users visiting the site will then “browse the public profiles of advertisers and bloggers along with their associated… → Read More
We heard about a new service from PayPerPost today, and while it’s a little boring, there is nothing about it that I can take particular issue with at first blush (we often find things to criticize with PayPerPost – our past posts are here). Like the popular site TinyURL, URLbrief lets people exchange a long, difficult to communicate URL for a short one. They’ve added a couple of… → Read More
Controversial startup PayPerPost makes another misstep this weekend – they became verbally abusive with an employee candidate who turned them down. A couple of weeks ago we wrote about how CEO Ted Murphy took all employees on an all-expenses-paid offside to Club Med, where they got drunk, inexplicably dressed up as Native Americans (complete with red face paint) and then posted video of the… → Read More
Ah, PayPerPost. The controversial Florida-based startup that is leading the effort to tarnish the blogosphere makes another PR blunder. And this one’s a whopper. The company has been chronicling their startup days on a video blog called RockStartup. There have been some embarrassments before with the video blog – such as when a viewer noticed that the company had purchased $700 chairs… → Read More
Controversial pay-per-post startup PayPerPost has raised $7 million in a second round of financing, bringing their total raised capital to just over $10 million. Like their previous round from last October the financing was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, with participation from Inflexion Partners and Village Ventures. New investor DFJ Gotham, a fund affiliated with Draper Fisher Jurvetson, also… → Read More
PayPerPost, the controversial blogging service that lets advertisers purchase commentary on blogs, has released a new product called PayPerPost Direct. The new product is a widget that bloggers can add to their blogs that announces their willingness to sell blog posts. Previously, bloggers perused listings on the PayPerPost website, looking for opportunities to make a few extra dollars. Now… → Read More
Controversial startup PayPerPost will announce the acquisition of Zookoda, an Australian blog-to-email service, tomorrow. We wrote about Zookoda last year, and the company put the product up for sale last September. There were reportedly a number of offers for the service when it was originally put up for sale, but the asking price of US$500,000 was too rich to close a deal. Now, nearly seven… → Read More
New service BegForPost takes on the ethically questionable PayPerPost service that allows advertisers to pay bloggers to write about their products. BegForPost promises none of the ethical hassles of PayPerPost. There’s no payment, just begging for coverage: You’ve worked for months building a startup on a boostrap budget and the launch is near. How will you get an initial influx of… → Read More
The blog payola virus is spreading yet again. In addition to PayPerPost, ReviewMe and CreamAid, a newcomer with the catchy name SponsoredReviews is preparing to launch. The Blog Herald got a good first look, and notes that it differs only in the details from the other services. Disclosure is required. Bloggers can choose to write a positive or negative review. And, in a business model change, it… → Read More
It’s not often that a company announces the acquisition of another company and then subsequently walks away from the deal, but PayPerPost isn’t a typical kind of company. In a post on the PayPerPost blog today, the company said “We…dug into the Metrics platform and regretfully found that it wasn’t what we were looking for right now.” That came just a week after… → Read More
PayPerPost, the controversial startup that pays bloggers to write about advertisers’ products, will be in the news again tomorrow. They will be announcing the acquisition of blogging tools and services company Performancing (see our earlier coverage of Performancing). The main purpose of the acquisition appears to be for PayPerPost to get access to the 28,000 Performancing users, most of… → Read More
PayPerPost, a marketplace for advertisers to pay bloggers to write about their products, will make a significant policy change on Monday: Bloggers will now be required to disclose that they are being paid for their posts. This looks to be at least partially due to recent moves by the FTC to force word-of-mouth advertisers to disclose any financial incentives to promote products: “FTC”… → Read More
The Washington Post is reporting that the Federal Trade Commission issued a staff opinion yesterday saying that companies engaging in word-of-mouth marketing, in which people are compensated to promote products to their peers, must disclose those relationships. We are working to obtain the opinion to see how this might affect the PayPerPost business. This might force their hand and require their… → Read More
Florida based PayPerPost just launched a new site called RockStartup, which chronicles the birth (and I hope, ultimate failure) of their ethically-challenged startup. RockStartup seems to be heavily influenced by the movie Startup.com, which tracked Kaleil Tuzman and his team (and multiple girlfriends) through a web 1.0 startup. Some of the scenes in the first two episodes of RockStartup are near… → Read More
ReviewMe, which is a PayPerPost-like service that pays bloggers to write about advertisers’ products, just launched moments ago. The company is backed by TechCrunch-sponsor Text-Link-Ads, which was recently acquired. ReviewMe has a somewhat different model that PayPerPost. Where advertisers on PayPerPost set a single fee that is paid to all bloggers regardless of their size, ReviewMe uses an… → Read More
Many commenters in previous TechCrunch posts on PayPerPost compared their business model to payola in the music industry. At PayPerPost, bloggers are offered cash to write about products. Disclosure is optional, and often the bloggers are required to only express positive comments. The company is now well funded, and a number of competitors have launched. This “virus” seems here to… → Read More
Two new services that are similar to the controversial PayPerPost have announced their launch in the last few days: ReviewMe and CreamAid. PayPerPost, a marketplace for advertisers to pay bloggers to write about products (with our without disclosure), recently gained additional attention when they announced a $3 million round of venture financing. The PayPerPost model brings up memories of payola… → Read More
We first covered PayPerPost when it launched three months ago. The service is a marketplace for advertisers to pay bloggers to write about products for a fee. Commenters to our original post were polarized into those violently for and those againt the product. The key area of controversy is the fact that advertisers can mandate that posts be positive on the product, and disclosure of payment is… → Read More
Ted Murphy, CEO of advertising firm Mindcomet, has launched a new service called PayPerPost.com. You guessed it, it’s a marketplace for companies to connect with bloggers who are willing to blog about a product – for a price. The companies can set guidelines for their requests such as whether a picture must be included and whether they will only pay for positive blog coverage. There… → Read More
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