Am I a two-dollar whore?

[This post is entirely mine and mine alone. I have not been paid to write it, think it, or post it]

I seriously want your opinions on this.

I’ve written reviews of Vox, Flock, books, Blogher advertisers, web calendars, and computer stores. I wrote a post about Scoble’s recent Podtech show featuring Thomas Hawk. I wrote them because they were of interest to me and so I thought they might be of interest to you, or to visitors to the blog.

More recently, I let you all know that I was going to experiment with the PayPerPost model to try and make money for a better lens for the camera and also to see whether a model based on actual sincere blog posts was as solid as the AdSense model. Those posts are here, here, here and here.

Now the “big boys” weigh in. Robert Scoble says “…the blogosphere is being bought off” and [he] “sure won’t buy something just based on one blogger the way I might have if, say, Dave Winer said he liked a product.”

Matthew Ingram writes,

In other words, it made them worse from a marketing point of view. But the hard part for me is that the posts we’re talking about are payola — although the PayPerPost people would obviously like you to think that all those bloggers chose to receive money for things that they were already going to blog about positively anyway because they just love those products so much, gosh darn it.

Over on DrewMeyerInsights.com, the reasons for pooh-poohing it go like this:

I think bloggers that get paid to write about something will produce crappy posts for the most part. Forced blogging hardly ever works. Just relate forced blogging to a forced job to get an idea about how bad of an idea this is.

So I leave it to you to decide. Compare the unpaid posts with the paid ones and tell me honestly — does writing posts for pay somehow undermine the integrity of those I wrote for free? Is there a difference between how I wrote the ones for pay and the ones I wrote for free?

Or am I a two-dollar whore? If so, I’d make a heckuva lot more money walking the streets…at a limit of three posts per day max, I’m a pretty cheap date.

Update: Dave Winer thinks it’s a better way of what’s been done “informally” for years because it’s out in the open.

Update #2: CrunchGear calls it “shilling” and gets the facts wrong.

Technorati Tags: payperpost, robert scoble, web20, advertising

Tagged as: Internet