Paid Blogging Market Review

The market for paid blog posts received a lot of attention lately. Services like PayPerPost created an innovative, albeit sometimes polemic, business model to connect advertisers with bloggers. Advertisers gain publicity, traffic and improve their search engine rankings. Bloggers, on the other hand, receive an extra opportunity to generate revenue from their website.

Personally I am still evaluating whether advertisers should buy posts or reviews directly from bloggers (in fact I refused to publish sponsored posts a couple of times already) but some of the companies offering paid blog posts do have a legit advertising model behind them. Below I will cover the main paid blogging services, check it out:

SponsoredReviews.com: As you can notice from the sidebar SponsoredReviews is a sponsor of this blog (although this is not a paid post). The reason why I accepted the company as a sponsor is pretty simple, I do believe that their business model is credible. SponsoredReviews, in fact, require full disclosures and they accept both positive and negative reviews. Another advantage of SponsoredReviews comes from the fact that they allow bloggers and advertisers to negotiate the price directly, reducing the transaction fees.

ReviewMe: ReviewMe is one of latest entries to the market, and apparently it is performing really well. According to their website: “We like to keep the guidelines loose, so bloggers can write in a way that makes sense for their unique niche and audience. We do require that all reviews are at least 200 words long, and that the review post is disclosed as being sponsored in some fashion”. The main difference of ReviewMe is that they automatically calculate the review prices based on a couple of parameters (pagerank, traffic, etc.).

PayPerPost: The company deserves the credit for making the pay per post model popular across the blogosphere. Unfortunately it received a lot of negative feedback when it launched its services without requiring bloggers to publish disclosures. Lately PayPerPost has been redesigning its offering though, including some interesting features like a “Top Earners” section where you can see who is making real money with the service. PayPerPost also has a lot of venture capital backing it up.

Blogvertise: Probably one of the first companies to employ the pay per post business model. If you search across the Internet you will find both positive and negative feedback about their service. They do have a vast array of advertising options, but some of the requirements are problematic (they require 3 outgoing links to advertisers, for instance). People also have complained about receiving late payments.