Blogitive has been working on some upgrades to their system. Blogitive is one of the oldest paid to blog companies on the internet. They have been running for approximately 18 - 24 months, outdaing PayPerPost by an easy 6 months, possibly 12 months, despite PayPerPost’s achievements at attracting investment dollars.

Blogitive has been working to upgrade their system adding a directory to allow advertisers to pick bloggers, blog by blog (as best as I can understand this program that is). If this is truly how it works, then it will be somewhat similar to the business plans first offered by ReviewMe, and then emulated by SponsoredReviews. Blogitive launched their next, but PayPerPost followed a few weeks later and seems to have launched a little faster, that $10 million dollar of investor capital has to be good for something, right?

See How to Setup a Blogitive Directory

Blogitive’s upgrade has brought their operations to a slow down this week. Their ad placements came to a halt about 7 days ago. They were running an approval backlog with bloggers dating back 2-3 weeks at that time for most bloggers with a few bloggers claiming a backlog of over a month and one claiming a backlog dating back to March.

Without approvals there is no payment, and payments were delayed as well as a result. A few partial payments trickled out last Monday for some bloggers including myself. Then everything was silent for several days with rumors that payments would start again after the upgrade on Friday.

Friday was yesterday and the new rumor was that it would be the middle of next week.

Today we saw some progress. A few advertisements were approved. Payments have not gone out yet as its Saturday and the PayPal processing probably will not kick in until Monday. Some bloggers still have a backlog of approvals so maybe Blogitive will continue to put in some overtime this weekend. They have been known to work around the clock seven days a week.

Today also saw the launch of a new theme for the site, once you are logged in. The external theme remains the same. Internally you get the same data, but its overlayed within a new theme. The look and feel is nice but would look nicer without the backlog.

PayPerPost and PayU2Blog also both launched new themes on their sites as well within the last month. PayU2Blogs new theme came with new functionality, or maybe a better way to describe it is that it came with functionality as their online system had almost no functionality before (it was email based to the bloggers running on what appeared to be an Access database in the background).

PayPerPost rolled out new functionality including PayPerPost Direct and added in a number of upgrades to their system, which always causes a major production full of problems and stress. Watching PayPerPost go through an upgrade is very similar to watching Microsoft come out with a new Operating System upgrade. You know you will get more once its out, you know it will crash things initially and be full of bugs, but they are the 800 lb gorilla for now and so you go with the flow.

Another paid to blog company PayU2Blog experienced a slow down in payments this week as well. Their slow down only last about 3-4 days and related to an issue with PayPal that was rapidly resolved.

The key thing to note about this is that PayU2Blog was very agressive about keeping the blogging talent informed about the slow down, while Blogitive has barely provided a response to anyone, and nothing official published on their site nor any other forums or blogger hubs.

PayU2Blog, which is only a few months old as a paid to blog company, definitely gets an A for communications and is rapidly becoming one of Bloggers favorite paid to blog organizations, largely for utilizing a business model that is in fact a clone of Blogitive’s model from over a year ago. Blogitive used to pay bloggers to include a keyword and a link and the bloggers could write anything they liked. It was basically an inline text link ad inserted manually.

Blogitive now requires write ups that are focused on press release provided by their clients. These often get widely circulated and end up sounding very similar. PayU2Blog has revived the freeform inline keyword business model and is thriving.

PayPerPost has continued to evolve over the last few months continually adding things to meet advertiser demand. It has grown the company into something that is more and more corporate and less and less ‘blogger’. Its a similar path that the older but less funded Blogitive has traveled. PayPerPost and Blogitive could have learned a lesson from PayU2Blog.

When you start trying to please everyone, you please no one. When they try and be everything to every advertiser, they end up losing site of the important element in the equation. The blogger talent!

There is a fine line between a talented blogger and a person running a program to randomly generate blog posts to throw them out on the web and provide one way links. When you do not cater to the talent, you are left with the robots.

PayPerPost is not in trouble yet. Blogitive is not in trouble yet either. However, both are missing their potential if they do not take note of this lesson and act on it. Its very important to listen to advertisers as they are the ones buying the service. The thing is blogging is more art than service, more freeform than reporting, and when you attempt to regiment that type of thing, you lose the art, you lose the freeform, you lose the interest of the talent, and eventually you lose the advertisers all together.

Then there is the LinkyLoveArmy. What they are doing is anybody’s guess, but it looks like they are going to try and sell 1 million Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows books amng other things, oh and of course, they launched a new theme for their site too!

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ZDNet revealed last week that PayPerPost will target the top 100 bloggers with the rollout of a new system upgrade geared towards advertising segmentation and offering a new standardized disclosure policy that will trigger BubbleAds to appear when a user hovers over the disclosure badge in an article.

The increase in disclosure and transparency are noble advances in the correct ethical direction. 

However, Considering the PayPerPost business model, how will targeting their system towards the top 100 bloggers further business?

The Top 100 Blogs according to Technorati achieve their rank primarily according to the number of other blogs that link in to them.  At the high end of the 100 Engadget has 25,682 unique blogs linking in and at the low end the blog that has no English name has 2,995 blogs linking in.  For the sake of comparison, there is currently at least one blog in the PayPerPost network that has about 1,300 blogs linking in.  While this blog (Maven Mapper’s Information)  has 145 blogs linking in according to Technorati.

But what exactly will a new disclosure policy and a new ad delivery engine do to entice a blog like Engadget to seek sponsors from the same poll that Maven Mapper utilizes?

That I do not know and do not understand.  I do understand that one of the great powers of the type of Buzz Management or Internet Marketing 2.0 services that PayPerPost and many of its competitors such as Blogitive, Blogsvertise, LoudLaunch, iWebTools and others provide is the ability to connect advertisers with the leveraged power of thousands of bloggers and websites. 

Content is King on the internet and the strength in this model is in the vast army of content producers.  The Queen of course is Search.  If you cannot find the content then the king will be dethroned.  Building web buzz by leveraging the masses through both their discussions and their links is the second strength of this model. 

The fact that these services combine the power of the masses from all around the globe to generate content and push that content up such that it can be found is amazing.  Not to mention the fact that these blogs take their advertising sponsors and their keywords with them on that upwards journey in the Search engines.  This is truly where the power of the model comes into play.

The top 100 bloggers already have the ability to illuminate content they deem worthy, by shining a Google Page Rank 8 mega spot light towards a website or advertisers promotional link (using Engadget and Boing Boing PR examples).  They do not need a middle man.

From an advertisers perspective it would be the equivalent of purchasing a Super Bowl commercial from your local TV stations ad agency, and who does that? 

The top 100 bloggers cover their advertising sales and placements very well already.  Similarly, speaking companies that can afford a big ad spend are typically going to be covered in relationships already. 

The Real Penetrating Power of Buzz Management

PayPerPost can offer a buzz coverage and band width that is phenomenal (rumored to be over 10,000 blogs and growing every month).  Would a big company like to hit the same 100 blogs they are all ready hitting through a new middle man, or would they like to get access to the marketing bandwidth of 10,000+ bloggers downstream?  (Multiply that by two or three and elliminate duplicates to consider the entire industry.)

In the long tail model the theory goes that if you have blogs that have an average of 500 visitors a day (some on the low side an some much higher).  10,000 bloggers will bring you 5 million hits per day.  With an average ad spend of $10 per ad (including fees), a big advertiser could run a single campaign for $100k (10 x 10,000) across all 10,000 blogs.  Plus that is with an ad that is relatively permanent.  It will likely be there until the demise of the blog.  There are blogs that are in the top 500 that charge that kind of money for a single weeks worth of ads, with daily hits in the 1 million range.

An advertiser can get 35 million eyes on their ad in 1 week for $100k through PPP theoretically in the first week and long tail eyes for months and years to come compared to 7 million eyes through traditional top blogs.

So what happens to the bloggers in the long tail of the blogosphere when the service refocuses on the nub of the tail? 

The risk is that the long tail will be neglected.  Unless the systems and organization are built out to cover the long tail needs in an automated and streamlined manner.  Instead of focusing on growing the blogger base from 10,000 to 50,000 or 100,000, PayPerPost seems to be opting to push up the average ad rate for top blogs chasing after someone else’s pie.

Step in the Right Direction

Now to their credit PayPerPost is working to put on a mass training event called Postie Con in Orlando next summer.  The event will bring some of the PPP Army of bloggers to learn new trends, improve their skills, grow their blogging business and increase the quality and effectiveness of their work.  This is excellent.  Analogizing the blogger masses to the elite 100 blogs, this is taking the grass roots, growing the yard larger and fertilizing it to nurture a healthy ecosystem.  Importing a patch or two of high quality sod however, will only stick out like a sore thumb and prove a distraction.

PayPerPost and the other Buzz Management organization should be pushing their network of writers, which I refer to as a Writer’s Collaborative.  The push should be towards improvement and growth.   With these simple Goals:

1. Establish more segmented blogs
2. Write Better
3. Write more (but spread on the additional blogs)
4. Optimize, Promote, and Grow Readership and Subscribers
5. Reform the long skinny tail into a muscular fat wagging tail capable of shaking up the internet with every swing!

To accomplish this, the Buzz Management industry needs to sponsor more education and provide more support for their ecosystem.  Possibly even utilizing technology found in common elearning solutions and virtual conventions such as the EcomExpo.

Closing Perspective

The world is closing in on 10 billion people.  The United States will likely hit 400 million people in the next 15- 20 years.  A network of 100,000 experience content producers five years from now could significantly shake up the world of media as we know it.   That would be 1 content producer for every 100,000 people world wide.

The Missing Dynamic - Collaboration

Let me also offer that this is just one aspect of the dynamic taking hold on the internet.  These numbers all assume that the content producers are working in a vacuum.  If you add in the other major trend the internet has enabled, and these producers collaborate, well then you have an entirely different topic and a much different entertainment, news, education and information industry.

For more Information:  See ZDNet Article PayPerPost to Launch disclosure badges, new tools; targets top 100 bloggers by Larry Dignan - January 30, 2007.

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