I have a personal blog and a professional blog. I’ll happily post on post sponsored reviews on my personal blog, but not on my professional one. I label the posts clearly as sponsored, and I’m honest in my review. If I don’t like a company, product, etc. I won’t post a review about it. If I like it, I’ll happy tell other people about it for free, but, hey, if they want to pay me to tell others about it, well, I’m not going to object. I’ll gladly take their cash.

And because I am a fairly nieve person LOL, I still believe that MOST bloggers will be the same, you have some that wont, but most likely thier blogs are not intresting, without the intregrity and the passion I dont think you could make very many great posts (unless you stole them)

So my answer is that I am not against the thought of paid posts, but I am against people taking advantage, you should never advertise something you dont believe in, nor should you lie to your readers about it. I dont think I would do this on my blog, just because I do not see how it would fit well.

So honesty and integrity should be everyones first goal in business… even if it might mean less money.

Where I draw the line is that I won’t be paid to endorse a product. The one site I’ve done this for (Blogvertise) says you can say whatever you want about a company as long as you link back. I know little about SEO, but I wrote a post. It satisfied Blogvertise, the advertiser, and my readers ( who didn’t go away en masse.)

I’ll take a look at some of these others, but I think the key is not to bog down your blog with extraneous material.

It’s really up to the indivual bloggers to either be honest or dishonest with their reviews. If they continue to give good reviews for bad products they will eventually lose their readers and their reputations. If they are honest they will gain readers and improve their reputation. I don’t think that the idea is bad in and of itself. I think it depends totally on the bloggers implemetation of it.

At least that’s my thought on the topic.

I would like to (respectfully) point two things to Ken:

1) At least in Argentina, from where I am, those special sections look a little different from the rest of the newspaper, and if they’re not enough different they’re frowned upon. The small notice “Espacio de publicidad” (I suppose it’s simply “Advertisement” in English publications) is not considered enough to make it “fair play”.

2) I certainly appreciate disclaimers at the beginning (preferably) or ending of paid posts, but I wouldn’t bet on them to be present on every occasion. Much to the opposite: for the system to work, it has to look as if the blogger were writing from his/her own heart, and so the company paying for the post will want it to look as if it weren’t paid.

Sorry for my bad English. We speak Spanish over here. :)

But my biggest issue is the money. If, as Staying Anonymous (comment number 8) says, they were offered $7.50 for a post and they couldn’t put Adsense on the same page, then no matter what — you are limiting yourself to a maximum of $7.50 for that blog.

You must make other blogs in between, so you are really only ever going to get half that amount at most. $3.75 per blog doesn’t seem worth it to me.

In fact, in many cases the sponsor’s only sipulation is the backlink: the blogger is free to give their honest opinion. This makes it really not much different that a paid text link ad as far as I can see. It could even been a source of writing inspiration and certainly a viable revenue stream.

Not sure what all the fuss is about really.

$9m in VC capital says something that is pretty tough to argue with…unless this really is Web Bubble 2.0.