Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of the Blog Herald’s editorial archives. Originally published in January 2007, it has been revised and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
In 2007, a company called PayPerPost took the blogging world by storm. The original was simple: brands paid bloggers to write articles about their products. The backlash was immediate. Critics called it deceptive. Bloggers have argued that this destroys the one thing that makes their average sound stand out – the original sound. But beneath all the furor lurked a question that was never clearly answered: if a blogger is disclosing an arrangement, what exactly is wrong with it?
This question did not go away. It has become one of the defining tensions of the creative economy.
What the PayPerPost discussion was really about
PayPerPost started in 2006 and initially did not require bloggers to disclose that their posts were paid. That was the real problem. Not the paid content itself – cheating. The company eventually added disclosure requirements, but the damage to its reputation was largely done.
The philosophical clash at the bottom of the argument was older than blogging itself. Journalism and publishing have long beenThe Great Wall of China” — the separation between editorial and advertising. Ads existed, but they carried labels. Norms were imperfect, but they existed.
Blogs violated this regulation because bloggers were not journalists. They were community builders. When a blogger wrote about a product, it read like a recommendation from a trusted friend—making undisclosed paid content feel more like a personal betrayal than a violation of media ethics.
Where the norms fell – and continued to develop
The FTC stepped in. In 2009, it updated its endorsement guidelines to require bloggers and influencers to disclose material relationships with brands, including free products, payments, and affiliate relationships. These guidelines were updated again in 2023, tightening the requirements and clarifying that disclosures must be prominent and unambiguous, not buried in hashtags or fine print.
A wider industry followed. Platform policies, influencer agreements and brand campaigns now routinely include disclosure language as a basic requirement. What was once a heated ethical debate is now largely a compliance checklist — though enforcement remains inconsistent.
The deeper lesson from the PayPerPost era is not that bloggers shouldn’t create commercial content. That’s what made the average stakes even higher. When readers trust audio, they trust it in a different way than they trust a banner ad. This trust has commercial value because it is personal. Undermining it through hidden fees destroys what made it valuable in the first place.
Norms are still being developed
New types of online advertising relationships – pay-per-post, blogger sponsorship, blogger endorsements – require the development of norms of honesty, respect for personal relationships and fair disclosure. Despite the industry’s two decades of evolution, it’s still very much a work in progress.
Influencer marketing is now a multi-billion dollar industry. A Statistical report estimated the global influencer marketing market from $1.7 billion in 2016 to more than $21 billion in 2023. The scale has changed dramatically; there are no major ethical questions.
Disclosure fatigue is real. Studies have shown that audiences often skip past or ignore disclosure labels, raising the real question of whether technical compliance serves the spirit of the rule. Some creators have responded more openly—integrating disclosures naturally into their content instead of adding a hashtag at the end.
Others move in the opposite direction, viewing sponsorships as an embarrassment to be minimized rather than a legitimate part of independent publishing’s survival. This framework is also not useful.
The Creator’s Dilemma
The PayPerPost discussion clearly raised a troubling question: Can a blogger be both a trusted voice and a commercial voice? The assumption behind much of the criticism was missing—that commercialization inherently corrupts authenticity.
This assumption has always been questionable. Print magazines advertised. Public radio presenters thank the sponsors of the middle segment. TV personalities have endorsed the products for generations. Media changes the texture of communication, but the underlying logic doesn’t change: media has always been partially funded by advertising, and audiences understand it even if they don’t like it.
It was a new kind of intimacy that blogs introduced. A reader who has followed a blogger through years of personal essays, community discussions, and genuine recommendations feels different when faced with a paid post—more like a friend recommending something for money than a magazine running a sponsorship feature. This closeness is an asset. It is also a liability if mismanaged.
The bloggers who manage this most successfully have a few things in common. They choose which brands they work with. They combine sponsorships to match the existing voice and theme. And they treat disclosure not as a legal record but as part of the readership—something their audience appreciates rather than tolerates.
What it means for publishers today
If you’re running a content transaction that includes any form of sponsored content, shared revenue, or brand partnerships, the PayPerPost era offers a clear cautionary lesson and a more useful positive model.
The caveat part is obvious: undisclosed paid content poisons trust, and trust is an asset you actually build. A more useful lesson is that commercial content and editorial integrity are fundamentally incompatible—they require thoughtful management.
The FTC’s updated 2023 approval rules it is worth reading in full, not only for relevance, but also to clarify what “material connection” means in different types of regulation. Affiliate relationships, free products, paid posts, and equity relationships all carry disclosure obligations.
Apart from compatibility, the more important question is audience trust. Your readers have an implicit model of who you are and what you stand for. Commercial content that fits this model—relevant products, honest framing, transparent relationships—will tend to be accepted. Regardless of how it’s disclosed, inappropriate content can damage relationships over time.
The question has always been about trust
In retrospect, the PayPerPost controversy was less about paid blogging and more about what kind of media blog to be. Will it maintain the long-term relationship between editorial and advertising that old media developed? Or would it destroy that difference in a way that serves no one?
The answer, it turns out, was neither. The creative economy has developed its own evolving norms – more personal than traditional media, more commercially entangled and still negotiated in real time. The bloggers who could not withstand all this were those who treated their readers as partners, not targets of a commercial organization.
This is not a revolutionary idea. But it’s something the industry has had to learn the hard way.
