<![CDATA[One place blogosphere is hypocritical: advertising]]>Remember last year when the blogosphere was up in arms about Marquis? Oh, if you weren’t around back then that company paid bloggers to write about its company. Some bloggers got paid almost $1000 to write about them. Seemed sleazy, right?

But no one complains about bloggers taking a similar deal from advertising companies like Google and Chitika.

The funny thing is that Marqui was giving 100% of its marketing dollars straight to bloggers without any intermediaries. Now they can buy the same kind of exposure by using an advertising system like Google, Chitika, Yahoo, but only a percentage of their dollar spent goes to the blogger. The rest goes to Google or Chitika or Yahoo or, soon, MSN.

One advantage to the AdSense model is that bloggers don’t need to change their editorial, although there is a subtle effect there too (if you write about topics, like Camcorders, that advertisers are more willing to pay for advertising for, you’ll make a lot more money, so if you’re in it for the money there’s a pressure to give the advertising networks what they want).

Anyway, I just noticed that the blogosphere looked very critically at the advertising Marquis was doing, but hasn’t looked critically at the other advertising that is now appearing on blogs (and will intensify over the next year — Google is even paying a referral fee for bloggers to get their blogging friends into using its advertising system).

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