Nearly 2 months into my 3-month Marqui sponsorship, so I thought I'd write down some of my thoughts at this point. There's been a fair amount of controversy about it, notably from two people who run publishing businesses using weblogs: Jason Calacanis and Stowe Boyd. Jason went so far as to unleash a flock of righteous chickens onto us paid bloggers (it would make a great movie: Attack of the Ethical Chickens!). And I can understand why Jason and Stowe are so upset about the Marqui program: it threatens their business model. Both of them use blogs, very successfully I might add, as the foundation of their publishing empires. So the last thing they want is for weblogs to become, or appear to become, impure or tainted. That's not a good look when trying to attract advertisers and audiences.
Jason does bring up one very compelling point in the chickens post: what is the line between writing and advertising? He believes Marqui bloggers cross that line and that is the crux of his argument. While I disagree with his conclusions, I agree that it's something we need to consider very closely.
On this point, one of my fellow Marqui bloggers Molly Holzschlag, calls her Marqui-sponsored posts "Clearly marked advertorials". I have to admit that I have never viewed my sponsorship arrangement with Marqui as one where I'm supposed to write advertorials. It's my understanding that we just need to link to Marqui once a week, but we can write anything we like about them. If we had to write advertorials, then I couldn't live by that model. One of Molly's readers summed up quite nicely my position:
"I’d rather read about a sponsor in THIS context ("These are my sponsors. They’re good people and they support this site.") than in the context where you talk about a product you’re not that interested in. In fact this is the only Marqui post on any weblog that has actually increased my respect for Marqui."
On this point, Lucas Gonze commented on my link last week to Marqui:
"In the open paragraph of his blog entry Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 16-22 January 2005, my fellow Marqui blogger Richard MacManus acknowledges our sponsor's sponsorship, then goes on to his normally scheduled blogging [...] I like how light his touch is -- there's a brief interruption, then it's on to normal blogging -- and I think it will become a standard model for paid bloggers."
The best part was that Lucas managed to slip in a "This is a sponsored post" at the end of that - heh. But seriously, I agree with Lucas. The future of Marqui-like blogging sponsorships is not in advertorials, but rather in patronage deals. When I googled to get some back-up on this, I came across a Ben Hammersley article for The Guardian back in 2003:
"Patronage, too, is returning as a way of funding the online writing and photography found on the most popular weblogs, although in a somewhat curious manner. Many of the more dubious internet sites - selling online prescriptions or cheap travel deals - are turning to the most popular webloggers with a proposal: link to us from your front page, and we will give you money. These advertisers differ from those using Google Ad-Sense, or BlogAds, in that they don't care where the links appear on the page, or even if anyone clicks on them. Rather, they are placing them on popular weblogs for the sake of increasing their own sites' ranking within Google. Giving patronage to writers for the sake of acquiring a search engine may not be the classical Renaissance model, but the Medici would have understood."
Ben of course has practised what he preached, having since acquired a sponsorship deal with a cigar company. And that's how I now think of my arrangement with Marqui. They're my patron - supporting my niche writing on Web Technology. And it works both ways, because the main benefit Marqui has gotten out of this (apart from all the free publicity from people arguing about the ethics of it all) is a big injection of PageRank. Any advertorials that people have written for them are of less value to Marqui, I believe, than the Google rank and sheer buzz they've gotten from this program.
Disclosure: this post is sponsored by Marqui... but then you knew that already ;-)
Comments
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I like your Medici patron analogy. I don't see any inherent dishonesty in what you are doing. Your critics seem to have their own axes to grind. I previously commented on this, and am still on your side, as I am sure many others are:
http://incsub.org/blog/index.php?p=98#comment-336
Since that post, I have created one pay-through link on my site to a software product. I think I'm being up front about this, and haven't lost my objectivity.
Posted by: Harold Jarche | January 31, 2005 4:07 AM>> And I can understand why Jason and Stowe
>> are so upset about the Marqui program:
>>it threatens their business model.
Actually, since we have the largest group of paid bloggers and blogs we would stand to make the most money from this! We get asked all day long to accept money to blog about things and we turn it down. We could make hundreds of thousands, even millions--yes millions--if we did this. However, this would come crashing down in a number of months when the audience realized we were in on the take and they couldn't trust us any more.
Take a look at the ethics of NPR, PBS, NYT, WSJ, etc. They don't let their writers pen for the sponsors--it's a conflict that confuses the reader. Once you start screwing with the readers you've lost.
Why wouldn't you just tell Marqui to pay for ads on your blog?!?!
Posted by: Jason | February 3, 2005 9:26 AMWell that's exactly my point - it threatens your *long-term* business model. Sure you could make loads of money short-term, but as you point out it would soon be the end of you.
Re your question "Why wouldn't you just tell Marqui to pay for ads on your blog?!?!"
I'd like to do that actually, but I'd have to convince them to buy into my 'patronage' model. ie agree to sponsor me for just publishing their adverts, even though I don't have the reader numbers that tradionally support that model (hence why I've called it patronage, rather than advertising).
Posted by: Richard MacManus | February 3, 2005 9:41 AM