Came across this blog entry this morning regarding pimping out one’s blog and decided to reply. Jason Calacanis writes:

This issue comes into play when Marc says that bloggers should get paid to blog
about things on their blog. This puts the blogger in a direct
relationship with the advertisers. It is best to shield the writer from
the advertisers and let the advertisers take ads around the content in
clearly labeled ad slots.

In the main blog entry section he writes:

If you get less then 250,000 pages guess what? You’ve
either got more work to do or you need to look at your blog like the
hobby or labor of love it is. If you really want to make it a business
simply work hard enough and wait until you hit 250,000 pages—it will
happen, trust me.

My response is as follows:

Jason, forgive me for saying this, but it sort of sounds
like you don’t want anybody to make any money with their blogs unless
they are at a certain traffic level. Is this what you are saying?

If indeed that’s the case and I didn’t misinterpret you, then I think that’s ridiculous.

Bloggers
that pay for bandwith and that’s an expense, have every right and
reason to profit from or at least recover that expense — just as you
are doing here — regardless of the size of their audience.

At
our main blog, we created separate categories for our RSS feeds called:
RSS Adfeeds - software and RSS Adfeeds - hardware. These two categories
are specifically for products and services that are primarily
advertorials and not regular blog entries. They are included within the
regular blog feeds, though.

Anything I recommend inside the
regular entries is something that I’ve either purchased myself and/or
used before/currently and these are personal and professional
endorsements. These are my opinions and they cannot be bought by
anybody. If I am signed up for an affiliate program and reference a
product or service then I’ll use those codes and you bet I’ll make a
few bucks here and there from them. Lockergnome does this with almost
everything they link to, so if you have a problem with what we’re doing
then you have a problem with them too. And that’s just two blogs out
there … there’s tons more who do this.

I don’t see any problem with any other blogger having this same code of ethics frankly.

Now
if company ABC comes along and wants to pay me specifically to blog
about their stuff then I’ll do it under these separately identified
categories *unless* I use the product/service myself and decide to have
an opinion of my own on it separate from the RSS adfeeds that I was
paid to write.

This is the line in the sand for me. It’s like
saying: here in these categories I write what I want and say what I
want, and here I write something that highlights your products and/or
services … for a fee.

It is true that some bloggers might have
trouble separating these marketing and editorial hats, but I don’t
think far reaching generalizations about how nobody should be doing
this is reasonable or reality. Somehow I doubt you meant to infer this,
so I hope you’ll follow this up with some more clarification. I’m going
to repost this comment to my blog in its entirety.

Also, I don’t see personal and/or professional endorsements that are honest are out of line for a readership of any size.
In fact, I think it’s a bit silly to suggest to a blogger who has 10
readers, 25 readers or 2,500+ that h/she cannot profit from his/her
blog until “some level of traffic” is reached.

Also that seems rather hypocritical coming from a commercial blog, but in your defense you did cover this.

But in general, wait until you get to ‘our level’ to monetize your blog sounds very wrong.

People
can do whatever they want with their websites, blogs, whatever so long
as it isn’t illegal, as far as I’m concerned. If a blogger is just a
commercial shill with no substance, then his/her readership will figure
that out quickly and they don’t have a gun to their heads to stop from
[gasp] unsubscribing.

This is one of the things that make blogs
a great place because the power is in the subscriber, not so much the
content provider.

A reality is that so far we haven’t
used the RSS Adfeeds very much, maybe a couple times. I am concerned
about keeping the signal to noise ratio low and at the same time,
bandwith costs me money and make no bones about it, I want to get at
the very least that money back for my time taken to write and share
these findings. I don’t think that’s unreasonable, unfair or unethical.

• Some bloggers worry too much about traffic
• [site news] Adding new, experimental RSS Adfeeds
• Google implements new Blogger features
• Wired goes undercover and proves Digg popularity can be bought
• ReviewMe offers $25,000 to bloggers in exchange for honest reviews
• Will second batch of blogging books be better than first?