Comments on: True “First Movers” are Rarely Accepted

By: PayPerPost Keeps on Chuggin' | White African

PayPerPost Keeps on Chuggin' | White African — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 23:06:06 +0000

[…] know this is off-beat from my normal posts on Africa-tech, but I just love the rule-breaking ways of PayPerPost (that, and I get some inside info since I know […]

By: John Powers

John Powers — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 01:26:01 +0000

Cluttered and messy, I don’t think so. You do such a good job with this blog exploring where “Africa and technology collide.” Africa is huge and so is technology, but you’ve got a knack for picking differences that make a difference.

I’m not sure I’d pay much attention to Pay Per Post if not for you. There’s a great blog called Indexed, which I think I discovered from you. I doesn’t seem to be coming up right at the moment but this http://indexed.blogspot.com/2007/01/i-do-believe-its-not-butter.html diagram reminds that we’re pretty skeptical about advertising and it relationship to the truth. Whether or not PPP takes off the many to many medium of the Internet is changing our relationships with advertising; really with companies in general, in ways that are revolutionary.

There are a couple of links off topic I might as well add here. sorry for the clutter and mess;-) Ethan Z linked to this article about mobile phones and banking http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/3131

And this article about a Zaghawa–French Dictionary http://bahaibeach.blogspot.com/2007/01/bahai-beach-37.html is something to pass on to your parents.

By: HASH

HASH — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 13:41:53 +0000

I’m tracking what all of you are saying, and I want to make sure you understand that I’m not claiming that PayPerPost is the answer. The point I’m trying to get across is that they are “first movers” in a new area of marketing platforms. Final implementation, and best execution might be by another company 2 years from now – just as Google did with the Overture idea.

So, I can agree on the non-disclosure thing (which they do require now by the way), and I can agree that using PPP on your blog might dilute its value for certain bloggers, I can still say that I think the idea is revolutionary.

Oh, and no, I was not paid to write this. I pretty much distance this blog from any monetization schemes. It’s already to cluttered and messy all on it’s own. 🙂

By: The Muso

The Muso — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 10:34:59 +0000

In my mind I find it easy to draw a line between the two though it’s more difficult to articulate and is quite subjective. Firstly, I take issue with pay-per-post allowing non-disclosure. I know that this kind of thing goes on in traditional journalism all the time, but that’s the point. For me Blogging is different and special because it is supposed to reflect a personal or collective opinion that is not swayed by corporate allegiance. If we allow this kind of material into the blogosphere, we risk ending up as just another bunch of self-important hacks. The problem is that I think the success of the concept relies to a large extent on non-disclosure – I for one don’t think I’ll bother reading a post that’s there for revenue reasons alone.

From a completely different angle, I also don’t like the implications for seo, the feeling being that if the concept is widely popularised, then link popularity and related satellite content ibecomes a measure of ad budget rather than the strength of the subject.

I do have an overriding feeling though that this won’t become as pervasive as people fear. I think users will quickly learn to spot a paid for post a mile away and so popular bloggers will shy away from it as they will feel that it impacts their credibility.

You weren’t payed for this were you? 🙂

By: Ntwiga

Ntwiga — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 21:15:46 +0000

Nice post Hash and you capture the essence of the issue beautifully: everyone in hindsight can make a determination on how good or bad an idea/platform is/was. This is what Google did, they saw that targeted advertising was a good idea and got on the bus. I can't help but want to play devil's advocate though. There are still lots of bad ideas out there and we see them manifest themselves when first movers take them up and try to build businesses out of them. Examples you ask: well, how about pets.com, webvan and a ton of other companies not all of which were on the web. Some platforms are just plain bad and I think that this may be one of them. I do not like the idea of paying bloggers per post since among other things, it muddies the waters about just what is motivating the blogger's writing. - Steve

By: ribaldmanikin

ribaldmanikin — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 20:38:22 +0000

As an advertiser, PayPerPost is going to have to provide some real value for the money. Right now that’s questionable. The big difference between paid blog postings and payperclick like Overture, is that one is easy to measure. If it’s easy to measure, it’s much easier to justify spending marketing dollars on it.