First there was PayPerPost. Then ReviewMe.
Just this morning Jim Kukral blogged on ReveNews about Agloco, which “pays you to surf.”
Now, we have Pay Per Digg.
See why we need to kill links to help affiliate marketing survive as a brand?

N…

I don’t think you should try to cast PPP in a favorable light until they’re prepared to take some steps to improve their model. This isn’t even close to a half empty/half full discussion. In fact, it’s got very strong parallels to a conversation I had with people from BzzAgent about allowing stealth marketing situations to occur.

The blogosphere was founded on transparency as a core principle. Period. If you don’t have transparency, you damage credibility – not only for yourself, but for the bloggers around you.

To make this platform even remotely compatible with best practices and the core values of the blogosphere, PPP would have to insist upon full disclosure. To me, that would mean that each and every paid post carry the PPP logo, along with language to the effect of “This post is paid for by the marketer being discussed in the post. Thus, readers should understand that any opinions expressed here about the marketers product may be tainted by the fact that they’re paying for this.”

I suspect PPP would be resistant to doing this, as it would be detrimental to their effectiveness. But really, I don’t see any other way for PPP to become transparent.

To make sure we are talking about the same platform, I would share that your clients can use the PPP platform as a compliment to every bottom’s up approach you recommend — even prompting more bottom’s up feedback than they could accomplish one-off. I would also share that marketers can use this platform in accordance with disclosure policies as transparent as you can imagine/demand. In fact, the platform can help enforce disclosure in accordance with corporate, agency or association/WOMMA requirements easier than policing multiple one-off blog deals.

As with all half-full/half-empty discussions, I may not be able to make you see what I see. However, I will continue to help marketers (your clients or otherwise) understand that the quality and transparency of their PPP marketplace usage rests firmly in their hands.

I like the notion presented by Mike, above: perhaps the engines will regard this practice as Black Hat.

Here’s
my take on PPP.

But ultimately all PPP does is game the system. And the system won’t stand being gamed. If PPP does take off, I’d expect the relative authority of blogs in general – relative to Search especially – to take a hit. Maybe that’s a good thing – search is arguably too blogger-friendly right now. But it’s possible that initiatives like this could be regarded by the engines as a form of black hat SEO.

Maybe next time you can interview someone from Google about it. Better yet – I’ll make a panel at the next OMMA that you can moderate with PPP, LoudLaunch, Google and Jeff Jarvis. That’d be fun!