Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

A while back I was talking about IZEA (formerly PayPerPost) who have recently been shaking things up a lot. I have to admire them their gumption, because they’re going up against Google.

By now it’s well-known that Google has attacked blogs with sponsored links, reduced their page ranking to zero. Page Rank is supposed to be a measure of how popular a blog is, how important it is. Says Google, let’s make it impossible for small blogs to earn income from their links. They had two options: they could require the paid links to be nofollow, which would fix the problem of false bolstering of incoming link numbers, or they could slap down even popular, high quality blogs. Well, gee–guess which one they chose?

Now, Google is targeting blogs that include the text “sponsored reviews” and the like. They basically seem to be waging a war on small-time monetized blogs…anything, oddly enough, that doesn’t have Google Adsense (which I removed some while ago having earned about $5 in maybe six months).

To be honest, I’m not best pleased with Google–and they used to be my favorite search engine, too.

Now, I’ve had my ups and downs with IZEA/PPP. They have certainly had some growing pains, but each time I have grumbled or made a point it has been dealt with cheerfully and politely and in some cases with a remarkable frankness that I don’t recall ever having seen in other companies. For example, you might remember my grumbling about a post being rejected because, while it had three posts between that and the next paid one, the direct neighbor was a photo without captions.

I pointed out that forcing the adjacent post to be a specific kind was a bit controlling, and the person who replied actually agreed–and then explained why. Basically, there are people out there for whom content is secondary to paid posts. The interim posts are poor quality. With over 80,000 bloggers in the network now, the reviewers have to have simple guidelines for the “next” and “previous” posts and just can’t be expected to flip through several posts to see what else is there. It’s an oversimplification, perhaps, but a logical one, and I’m very glad that they took the trouble to explain. It makes me feel better that it’s not about controlling what I write, but curbing the urges of people to do a paid post, write a few lines of whatever, and then do another paid post.

So, back to Google and the like. Because Google is going after those who monetize by doing sponsored reviews of various kinds, IZEA has unrolled a tool that they were saving for a January launch of their new site, SocialSpark. RealRank is a ranking system based on actual traffic, pulled from people’s own stats, and they are (or will be soon) making it available to everyone, for free, so that there is now a viable alternative to Google page rank and the rather innacurate Alexa data. (Hence the change of privacy policy to disclose that this data is being taken: I’m sure than most other bloggers won’t bother, but I have, so there.)

They hope that their own advertisers will start using this to pick which blogs are qualified to write for them and which are not. By doing this, Google (if they succeed, and I think they are determined and well equipped to do so) may well be left in the dust.

Sometimes, competition is good!

As to what they have just rolled out…their new site, SocialSpark, is to be a social networking site where bloggers and advertisers can come together. I think it’s cool in that I could go there looking for people who want to advertise on travel/motorcycle/RV blogs and they could go there looking for me. It’s a sort of mutually beneficial hiring fair, something to strongly support the “hire me” button that sits forlornly on my sidebar. Given that Raven’s RV will be ready to take paid posts around the same time that SocialSpark is launched, I’m rather excited at the possibilities this could bring.

IZEA messed up in their early days by not requiring disclosure, and have spent a lot of time making amends. Some forgave them, some did not. While their company presentation is, too me, rather too happy clappy and sugary/hip for my tastes, I’m reasonably content with the way they are going. I love that the new site will require in-post disclosure on all deals brokered from within SocialSpark. The only question is–since full transparency is offered and deals can potentially be brokered without giving SocialSpark their slice of the pie–whether enough people will be honest enough to not remove the middleman who enabled this and is taking a (presumably calculated) risk.

It sure will be an interesting social experiment.

I try to have fun with my paid posts. I try to at least make them interesting. It’s proven to be a fairly pleasant way to make enough income to keep the wolves at bay while giving me enough time and freedom to work on stuff like my freelance writing career. I’m therefore very pleased with the new developments, and am looking forward to seeing how this all pans out.

Just a few random posts

• Heading back into California (0)
• White Raven Award: The World according to Ollie (1)
• Oh-kay (0)
• High (0)
• I saw it, so it must be true (0)

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