The Federal Trade Commission Cracks Down on Paid Blogging

Do you surf the internet? Of course most of us do. Whether you are a casual visitor to the web or a bona fide addict, you would have encountered a huge variety of advertising. Not all advertising is as straight forward as pictures, flashing banners, and small videos on side bars; no, it can be much more subtle and devious than that. The one major place where you are likely to encounter subtle advertising is on blogs, those personal online journals that everyone seems to have. Blogs have given a new meaning to "don't believe everything you read."

Blogging became popular just a few years ago. People became aware that they could write a product or service review, put it on their blog, and be paid for it. Payments are typically between $5.00 to $2000.00 for a product review. The price is based on the amount of visitors you have to your blog or the Google PageRank of it. Several companies sprang up just to be the brokers for paid blog posts. Most companies required a favorable review and did not want the blogger to state that the review was a paid advertisement. Thus began the biggest slew of deceptive advertising campaigns on the web.

I am a professional blogger and earn a nice part-time income that way. I also know first hand what goes on in the paid blogging world. Most bloggers are choosy about what they write about, picking only products or services that they have either used or purchased themselves. But there are some that are so desperate for a few dollars, they will write glowing product reviews of an item that they have never used or even seen. It didn't matter that those few were deceiving their readers no they didn't care about that at all they only cared about that small paycheck they got once a month. I know of one young woman that wrote about baby products as if she had a baby, but in later blog posts mentioned she was single and had no children. Other bloggers were so devious that when you read their blogs you were never sure if they were male or female since they would often refer to their husband in one post and their wife in another post. If they were so mysterious to their own readers, then it is no wonder that they would find it so easy to lie to them. This type of blogging went on until just about a year ago, when at that time, a check cashing company started to use the paid blogging companies to have people write glowing reports of their over priced and underhanded business practices. It was then that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) started to get higher than usual number of consumer complaints about that check cashing company and found out that several hundred bloggers had written false information about the company and their business. The FTC then decided to implement a new disclosure law for all paid bloggers. The law states that a person must disclose in their blog post if they were paid to write it. The consumer would then have a better chance of an unbiased review of a product, or would they?

The one greatest drawback of the FTC ruling is the fact that it only covers bloggers in the USA. Some of the greatest violators of deceptive blog advertising are located in the Philippines. They are also the bloggers who will take the lower paid blog posts where the products are typically about gambling, adult toys, financial services, online drug suppliers and other less than stellar items. They don't always state where they are located, so a casual reader would be unaware if they are reading a true incident of that video game the blogger is writing about or just some made up story to entice the reader to buy the game.

Since the FTC implemented their new ruling, at the end of 2009, only one of the blogging companies has required that all bloggers put a disclosure sentence at the very top of their paid blog posts. Whether it will change how blogs are perceived by the online public or if advertising will continue to use blog reviews to push their wares remains to be seen. I for one tend to think that advertisers will come up with something else before long, like embedding advertising in cell phones so you have to watch a commercial before you make a call. Technology has changed the way that advertising is perceived and displayed. Blogging was only the first in line with the war of truth in advertising. It seems that the advertisers always manage to pull ahead until a government agency reins them back in, but only temporarily.