UP Professor Danny Arao has taken it upon himself to discourage bloggers who intend to earn money from their blogs. Two of his recent blog posts decry the proliferation of paid blogging services and the propensity of some bloggers to take advantage of cash payouts at the risk of misinformation.
Mahirap masikmura ng isang abang peryodistang katulad ko na may mga blogger sa kasalukuyang pumapatol sa kung anu-anong iskema para kumita nang malaki (at dolyar pa) kahit na nakokompromiso na nila ang pagbibigay ng impormasyon sa mga online visitor at minsa’y lantaran pa ang panloloko.Paid blogging has been around for the past three years at least, although when it began it was not in the form that Prof. Arao shows an example of in his later post "Two Cases Against Paid Blogging". Several Filipino bloggers have gone into professional blogging as early as 2004 and now boast of refurbished houses and brand new cars as a result of their efforts. You can find them easily enough on the internet by typing the words "filipino pro blogger" (without the quotes) on Google.
Translation by me: It is difficult for a humble journalist like me to stomach the fact that there are bloggers who ride on different schemes so as to earn a large amount of money (and in dollars at that) at the risk of compromising the means by which they give information to their online visitor and in some instances outright deception.
As years went by and more Search engine optimization (SEO) techniques and tactics were discovered, the practice of paid links came into play. This is what I am into, in my blog, and I have a few contextual Google ads on my pages as well. Prof. Arao cites two examples of link requests from advertisers in his later post, both of which are the type that should be accepted only by bloggers who write in that niche. However there have been numerous instances wherein non-niche bloggers have picked out these review link requests and have forced themselves into blogging for a chance at their post being approved and therefore earning anywhere between 5 to 20 US$ per post. Bloggers based in the Philippines for example, who force themselves to write about a hotel in a Caribbean island that they've never been to, exhorting visitors to go there is obviously in it only for the money and should be dismissed as junk posts. Paid blogging services are more discernible these days, and will usually reject a blog outright if it matches the example I give above, or they have warnings at the outset such as "travel blogs only," or "do not accept this post if you are not primarily a marketing blog".
Prof. Arao apparently fears for readers who stumble upon a blog such as that I describe above, that these readers will not immediately see that the blog post they are reading is actually not by a person that specializes in the topic, but by one who is only out to make money. Here is where I maintain that Prof. Arao thinks too lowly of readers on the internet, that he believes anyone will believe anything that is written on the net.
Prof. Arao also does not cite the practice of contextual links, wherein the blogger is requested to insert a word or phrase into the blog post, making it part of the story in that post. Here there is no forced review of a service or establishment. When a blogger writes there is always a topic, whether mundane or thought-provoking, and working a requested contextual link into that post will earn the blogger a few dollars. The pay is not much, definitely no longer in the league of "I bought a car with my blog earnings," but for a working mom like me it helps to stretch the grocery budget.
To be called to task for earning money from my blog looks to me like someone who is attempting to stir up a hornet's nest. Rather than dwell on that, I would like to call attention to periodista's who accept money (and there are quite a few) to put a certain slant in their writing, as there are news reporters who brazenly insert non sequitur's in their reportage just to stir up interest and sometimes unnecessary concern among their readers and viewers. I'm not taking them to task for what they do--they too have their reasons for doing what they do, and as long as I can discern the real news from the slant, I'm good.
It is the reader/viewer who knows how to read between the lines, who knows when what he is reading or listening to is truth or trash, it is he who will decide in the end what to believe.
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