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Yesterday I received a survey from one of the services that provides paid content. I thought it would be interesting to share the questions and my responses. I would love to hear your thoughts as well. My general take has not changed - I am all in favor of advertorials but not in favor of paid reviews. Advertorials would be full "posts" that a company purchases similar to full page ads in newspapers. Labeled correctly, advertorials could be a huge winner for blogs. As I do with all advertising on any of my sites, the ads would need to meet my standards before accepting. The comments below only relate to advertorials not paid/sponsored reviews.

Intro from email sender: I am trying to best understand what is most important to bloggers like you. I would greatly appreciate it if you could take the time to answer a few questions.

1. At what price point is making a sponsored post interesting to you? $100/post? $500/post? $2000/post? More?

Allen: In general terms, the price for an advertorial should depend on the site’s real audience (not the fake rss numbers, etc.), the site’s reach and what media the advertorial includes (i.e. video/audio). The other consideration to look at is how long the advertorial will run. Pricing should also be in line with the monthly sponsorship pricing. Each advertorial should be priced accordingly.

2. If you have no interest in including sponsored content on your blog at any price why?

As I stated above, advertorials would be ok in moderation. For a large blog, running one or two a week would be acceptable. I wouldn’t run sponsored reviews for any price.

3. If you were to include sponsored content on your blog would you rather write a review yourself or simply place an advertorial?

Answered above. Sponsored reviews are not healthy for the overall market. There will always be the question lingering as to why the review was positive. We are starting to see some interesting business going on with video bloggers and decisions they are making around sponsorship and what amounts to paid reviews. This type of business needs to be corraled before it gets out of control and puts a hurt on the overall blossoming video industry.

4. In addition to full in-post disclosure what other conditions would you have for accepting a sponsored content?

To properly handle advertorials, naturally in-post disclosure is required. In addition, I’d like to see an "advertorial standard" created - similar to the IAB ad format standards. This will allow search engines and other aggregators to properly handle this type of sponsored content. Whether it’s some type of microformat or a specific "rel" tag or some other technical means to handle, it’s critical that this is setup correctly from the beginning. If it’s not handled correctly from the beginning, it will not work over the long-term.

With that said, there are a variety of other concepts and ideas I have for ways to monetize blogs. I will begin to share them over the next couple of weeks. It’s time for the CPM ad to rest in peace.

More CN Coverage:
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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 11:30 pm and is filed under advertising, online advertising, Quick News, Insights, Social Advertising, advertorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.