WSJ - Potential Conflicts of Interest in Paid Blogger Product Reviews
There was an interesting story in the Wall Street Journal this morning about the FTC considering some kind of regulation for bloggers who are paid to produce product reviews. I don't know how prevalent this is in the genealogy blogging community, but I can remember an instance or two where a genealogy company hosted (by invite only) marketing events for bloggers where some expenses were paid. I'm sure there were more of these types of events I'm not aware of - I suspect paid reviews by bloggers happen more often in other fields, but you never know.
The point of the article is that blog visitors might not realize they are reading a paid review by a writer who may be biased because of the compensation involved. Of course this could potentially lead to lawsuits by readers and sanctions by the FTC on the bloggers and companies involved. This is an important issue because because I don't know any genealogy blogger who has not written some kind of review of a product, service, or book at one time or another. I've never been paid to write a review, but have been paid to write a particular kind of post. A media company asked me if I were willing to write a post for advertising campaign on a particular topic. They told me I could write about anything I wanted on the topic, but restricted me to about 200 words. They paid me a whole $50 bucks for my post. I accepted the offer because I didn't have to pitch any particular product, but now have some regrets because I had to sign a "standard" non-disclosure agreement that restricted how much I could write about what I did.
I know the WSJ article is about bloggers who are paid to write reviews, but I wonder if this will impact those who write reviews because they are passionate about a topic - like genealogists...
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