Do Ads Threaten Bloggers' Reputations?

Posted on November 27, 2005

The New York Times has an article about whether the growing influx of ad dollars into blogs will threaten bloggers' "rebel reputations."

The assumption in the headline that blogs and bloggers are outrageous rebels is misleading. Blogs do many different things -- update family members, provide news on a specific topic, share personal stories, etc. As studies have shown most bloggers don't blog for money. We've seen in past surveys, like this surveys, that the majority of bloggers are not concerned about money. The blogging for money bloggers represent a small minority of the blogosphere. That's good since there isn't much money to go around according to the New York Times article.

But the Times article raises some interesting questions. Many blogs have ads all over them and it is pretty obvious where there are ads. However, there is some debate as to how many people actually realize the contextual ads, like the ones from Google, are really ads. Many political blogs have ads on the right-hand side of the page and people aren't suggesting these bloggers are no longer independent because of them. However, there are some blogs that draw a fine line between being a splog and an actual blog. These being the blogs that do nothing more than regurgitate a couple paragraphs from a news article as a post and typically cover topics like mortgage loans and insurance so they can make money from Google AdSense clicks. But these kinds of blogs don't have a good reputation to begin with.

What would be the most likely to ruin a blogger's reputation is if they turned out to be writing editorial that was secretly paid for. The Times article does use an example of US Web, which it says pays $5 to bloggers for mentioning a company or linking to a specific company website.

There could be some risk to bloggers running a campaign like that and not mentioning it. But most of the bloggers that have something to lose would not run a campaign for $5 anyway. The other thing that could damage a bloggers rep would be to start having intrusive ads like pop-up ads or pop unders -- remember blogs are also popular for what they don't have.