About Bloggerista.net
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In early 2007, I had an old domain sitting around and wanted to put it to some use. I’ve been posting paid reviews on my various blogs for about a year, and recently joined several of the paid-review broker networks. I thought a site focused on this movement would be a unique voice in a sensitive debate. This site was originally born at hundreddayheadstart.com.
Oddly enough, readership and subscriptions grew steadily and I decided the site deserved a domain more descriptive and relevant to the subject matter. Since every great .com name was taken, Bloggerista.net was born.
As you read the posts and comments it will be apparent that I think paid reviews are appropriate for blogs. For years, reviews have been done through individual deal-making between advertisers and bloggers, usually without disclosure to readers, with compensation taking the form of cash, product "samples", and service "trials". With the inevitable advent of brokers and widespread adoption of this advertising platform, the discussion needs to shift from "should we or shouldn’t we" to "what can we do to make this ethical, transparent, and valuable".
It is my opinion that sponsored posts now represent a threat to traditional internet advertising models, and are thus opposed most strongly by bloggers, with few exceptions, receiving compensation through those models. The vehemence of their opposition is usually in direct proportion to the revenues generated by the ubiquitous 125 x 125 sidebar ads to which we’ve all become blinded. As advertisers see the power of user-generated advertising models, more dollars will shift away from the current model.
Feel free to disagree with me, I enjoy a good, but respectful debate.
About Tim
I’ve been blogging "officially" since 2004. Prior, I had a website of pages organized in chronological order containing stories and opinions of my own, which was slapped together in MSPublisher and uploaded to Geocities between 1995 and 1997. I stopped when I met my father-in-law, who let it be known he’d checked out the site and thought it was a bit immature. I deleted the site without saving the files, thinking I would never get back to writing so why hang onto everything?
No matter. I was receiving copies of my early work by e-mail forwards from friends who themselves had received it through a long convoluted e-mail trail that started when someone copied-and-pasted my original, copyrighted works into an e-mail.
Nice, eh?
To learn more about me, go to Everything Tim
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