Gawker: valleywag, pay per post

BuzzTemple wants to convert top Digg users to PR agents

Jackson West — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:20:00 EDT

Reportedly started by a pair of heavy Digg users who were tired of landing stories they promoted to the front page and not getting paid for it, BuzzTemple PR is looking to recruit heavy users of social services from Digg to Facebook, AIM to Second Life. While the site promises "We are not and will never be 'Pay Per Post,'" the jobs on offer basically amount to shilling for clients online, and words like "disclosure" don't appear on the site. But then Edelman flack Steve Rubel's job is shilling for clients online, and that firm has paid for coverage. So, yeah, sounds like yet another PR agency.

Pay Per Post pawn's party-crash ploy played out

Melissa Gira Grant — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 12:40:01 EDT

After the line to get into PureVolume Ranch hit capacity around 2 a.m., the RVIP Lounge played host to a raucously geeky afterparty. As we idled outside the Hilton, this fellow from Pay Per Post, a company even Arrington thinks is evil, tried — and failed — to board. Party maestro Jonathan Grubb denied him. The grounds? Part of the fun of owning an RV is that you can decide who not to share it with. The dude's response, after pouting that he "wasn't interested in [Grubb's] RV anyway"? Slinking out of his Pay Per Post t-shirt and attempt to sneak in later. I snapped this photo of him hovering in the doorway, mid-fail, for your pleasure.

TiVo discovers money can't buy it love

Tim Faulkner — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 14:11:01 EDT

TiVo has cancelled a Pay Per Post advertising campaign promoting its new TiVo HD digital video recorder. One wonders: Was it because of concerns expressed here and elsewhere? Or was it because Pay Per Post, a startup which pays bloggers to tout customers' wares in posts and videos, isn't actually that effective? Regardless, TiVo's effort appears to be an experiment gone wrong. Even though TiVo embraced a spirit of disclosure — each paid video was supposed to include a five-second "bumper" segment explaining that it was a paid post promoting TiVo's "Hook Up with TiVo" campaign — the mere fact of working with Pay Per Post may have ruined TiVo's good intentions.

The entire mismanaged process can be viewed in Pay Per Post's discussion boards. Pay Per Post failed to include the bumper in the original call for posts. When the company realized its error, Pay Per Post continued to allow posts to be created without it, hoping to email the bumper after the fact.

At TiVo's request, Pay Per Post's "Director of Customer Love" Karen Allen sent emails asking posters to remove all videos, but the email didn't explain why, how , or when. Despite the takedown requests, Pay Per Post continued to list the "opportunity" in its directory of advertisements. Said one user:

Why is that post STILL available then? It's looking at me and WINKING! Saying ... take me! Feign ignorance! Get the money!

Some posters said they never received the takedown emails. One admitted that a similar takedown request never made it to her, but no one ever noticed that she hadn't removed the material:

There was another opp that was supposed to be removed and I had taken it, but didn't realize that until I got the payout with an apology weeks later. Weird.

And others remained confused about whether ads with the explanatory bumper needed to be removed at all.

But really, the mismanagement of the TiVo campaign is beside the point. Certainly, Pay Per Post's antics didn't help matters. But more to the point, why would TiVo even have to pay bloggers to express faux affection for its video-recording devices? While TiVo's gadgets remain superior in their user interface, cable and satellite-TV providers are renting similar devices for much less. Having gone from life-changing to run-of-the-mill, TiVo no longer evokes genuine passion. The fact that it's now paying for fake testimonials from bloggers merely reinforces that it's getting no real love.

TiVo pays to get "hooked up"

Tim Faulkner — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 13:21:50 EDT

TiVo's latest advertising campaign, "Hook Up with TiVo," personifies the new Tivo HD as seeking personal companionship. The taste is questionable; the feel, desperate. Could it be that TiVo's marketers are realizing that the company's buzz is fading? The ads themselves, featuring Chris Harrison, host of ABC's "The Bachelor," to select the perfect match for the device, are bad enough. But it gets, unbelievably, sleazier than Harrison.

TiVo, you see, has tapped Pay Per Post, the controversial startup that pays bloggers to shill for advertisers' products, to help boost a YouTube contest accompanying the campaign, The contest purportedly called on TiVo users to post video testimonials to TiVo. The problem is that their testimonials are fake, generated by TiVo's cash, not customers' passion. The move was revealed when Sarah Hendrix opted to disclose she was being paid through Pay Per Post for her video. TiVo, we thought, already had a substantial community of fanatically loyal users. One would think the contest's prize, a free TiVo HD and lifetime subscription, would be motivation enough. No matter what you think of Pay Per Post as an advertising platform, the fact that TiVo is employing them to gin up fake interest speaks loudly to the fall of the TiVo brand.

Paid blog posts may put Accoona's IPO at risk

Tim Faulkner — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 17:31:14 EDT

Saul Hansell of the New York Times was surprised when numerous blogs chastised him for his coverage of search engine/electronic retailer Accoona and the questionable history of its founder, a felon sometimes known as Armand Rousso, as a stamp dealer and stock promoter. Why would anyone bother to defend such a questionable man and such a negligible company? Because they're apparently getting paid to do so. Most of the blog entries openly label themselves as paid posts — a practice that is itself highly controversial. What's even more controversial is who is footing the bill for these sponsored testimonials. Regardless, Accoona is likely to pay for them in the end.

Hansell reports:

Valentine Zammit, Accoona's chief executive, said that company had nothing to do with the posts. He added that Accoona's employees, directors and consultants aren't supposed to be touting its stock while the company is trying to sell shares to the public.

Nevertheless, someone is, in fact, touting the company via paid blog posts. With his lack of response to Hansell's call for comment, Rousso is making himself a prime suspect. Technically, he is not an employee. Accoona's prospectus goes a long well to spell this out:

Armand Rousso, one of our co-founders together with CDIC, and one of our significant stockholders and an option holder, is not and never has been employed by us or any of our subsidiaries, and has not been a director or officer of us or any of our subsidiaries since October 5, 2004.

However, it also makes it clear that he is a consultant:

Mr. Rousso has been connected with us only by virtue of ... being an officer, director, employee and the sole stockholder of S.P.B.D. Consulting Corp. ("SPBD"). SPBD provides consulting services to various companies in which Mr. Rousso is an investor, including us...

It's hard to imagine someone paying bloggers to promote Rousso and Accoona out of the goodness of their hearts. The most logical suspect is someone with an interest in burnishing Rousso's reputation and Accoona's IPO prospects — someone, in other words, with a financial interest in the company and its IPO attempts. Far from greasing the way for Accoona to go public, these paid postings are likely to throw up a major roadblock.

It's niiice!

Tim Faulkner — Wed, 09 May 2007 19:37:28 EDT

Pay Per Post, the sleazy blog payola network backed by DFJ, continues to try to sell its human side via its web-based reality show RockStartup. This time with the even more human than human outtake reel. It's quaint to see people tripping, or flubbing a line, or ordering too much swag with that VC green. On the other hand, most businesses wouldn't be proud to show their Chief of Sales telling a woman that she "could make a lot of money stripping" or Ted Murphy, the company's founder and CEO, recycling Borat's ubiquitous "It's niiice" when asked about a woman taking off her jacket at their conference. When you are trying to dampen the negative perception of your company, it's probably best to avoid filming, editing, and uploading to the web proof of womanizing behavior. Of course, one would hope that it could be avoided in the first place.

The simple stink of Pay Per Post

Chris Mohney — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 15:00:38 EST

Whatever our differences with Jason Calacanis, we're foursquare on his side when it comes to the ickiness of Pay Per Post. PPP's Ted Murphy has been on a tear vs. Calacanis lately as part of a continuing campaign to prove the worthiness of PPP as a business. Certainly Murphy must be making money, but that doesn't make his business any less off-putting. The problem with PPP isn't that it's not effective, assuming it is effective versus other kinds of product promotion. The problem is that it's sleazy manipulation, pure and simple.

You either recognize that sleaze for what it is, or you don't. Too many PPP critics try to engage it on the merits of disclosing commercial relationships, and to Murphy's credit, he's quick to point out endless examples of gray-area shillwork by other bloggers. But the elemental success of the PPP model stands or falls on the ability of its bloggers to gloss over the fact that their posts are paid advertising. Not outirght deception, or overt manipulation. It's just subtle word-of-mouth-ish goodness that appeals based on its amateur, unpolished presentation. PPP is not designed to reach smart, savvy consumers. It's designed to reach large masses of indiscriminate blog readers on the cheap ... people who reflexively avoid obvious advertising, but who are easily drawn in by a regular-joe blogger.

Murphy's love of his "transparency" initiatives — such as the laughable "disclosure badges," which are in fact widgets for selling yet more advertising — should be further proof that the concept of disclosure as inoculation against impropriety is dead as a doornail. All the disclosure in the world won't justify the fact that Hewlett-Packard paid a woman to write their logo on her face. If you don't recoil from that, then you're not going to object to anything else PPP does — or anything they pay anyone else to do.

Disclosure: The aspiring shill's best friend

Chris Mohney — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 11:39:09 EST

Former Microsoft evangelist turned Intel pitchman Robert Scoble last week announced a new gig: keynoting Postiecon, a conference promoting the ideals of heinous blog-shill outfit Pay Per Post. Scoble casually mentioned that Pay Per Post was not only fronting his travel expenses, but also forking over an honorarium — which Scoble bizarrely characterized as Pay Per Post "paying my salary," as the cash was to be filtered through check to Podtech, Scoble's employer. But does disclosing make it all fine and dandy?

Unfortunately, despite blog-media's near-sexual fixation on transparency, disclosure is not a means toward absolution for ridiculous acts. Disclosure is actually a test of your audience's tolerance for chicanery. Most embarrassing is the naive assumption that simply disclosing the payoff somehow made it kosher. Fortunately, the mechanics of disclosure operated properly in this case, as Scoble was roundly abused for his paid performance; he has since issued a corrective update. Neither he nor Podtech will take money beyond expenses for the speech, and such is now Podtech's "policy" for such engagements. Future shillwork to be disclosed as it happens.

Jason and Jeff Are Jerks

rabruzzo — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 22:43:57 EDT

I was cruising youTube looking for clips of Jason Calacanis' keynote speech today at the Blog Business Summit. Some of the blogs covering the talk had mentioned Jason was filmed and hoped it would be posted online in the near future. I didn't find JC at the BBS, I found something much better, 1938 Media going off on Netscape's Jason Calacanis, Buzz Machine's Jeff Jarvis collectively call them both a-holes for going after PayPerPost. I don't know who 1938 Media is, but he's my new hero.

WARNING, VIDEO CONTAINS UNCOUTH LANGUAGE!

Jason And Jeff Are Jerks [youTube]