I get confused easily. I think its a personal character trait - I am rather accident prone, and have the oddest bruises at any given moment to prove it.

I also have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Arrington. My initial qualm was the hype train he was on, only talking about this financing or that financing with what seemed highly tainted windows. There seemed to be almost no criticism of these companies. It really peaked when all the evite sites came out with million dollar funding - is inviting people such a huge problem online?

But my love for him has gone up recently, with good topics such as blog linking declining, analyzing deleted blog posts, Apple being bullies and so forth. A lot less hype too - thats good!

Yet he continues to puzzle me about the evil PayPerPost. If the company is so evil, and if he wishes it would die - why such obsession? So he doesn’t like paid-blog posting - that is fine. Mention who evil PayPerPost is the first time, and then move on and talk about the problem (and not the company). Even subsequent posts about companies that pay you to blog (which all have much more clarified disclosure policies) were always compared to PayPerPost. This post about ReviewMe and CreamAid only mentions PayPerPost in the title. This next post about ReviewMe launching again mentions PayPerPost in the title. When the FTC announced it will start regulating word-of-mouth marketing, the title was all about FTC regulating PayPerPost. The latest post, just one day old, was about Another PayPerPost competitor. No need to mention SponsoredReviews.com (the actual site the content was about) - naw, lets just mention PayPerPost again.

Arrington’s Techcrunch is large, making it an easy target. But the point remains - if PayPerPost is so evil, why continually mention them? Sites like ReviewMe are very clear about their disclosure policy. As long as there is disclosure and there is no editorial control - what the hell is the problem? A company gets exposure without having to go through expensive PR machinery. Blogs are a great way of getting honest feedback. From the bloggers perspective - great! You are being paid to review. You are taking the time to analyze something - why shouldn’t you be compensated? Look at Graywolf’s review of TLA. He immediately announces it is a paid review, he does a decent review of the site, and he closes with again reminding the user that the post was paid.

PayPerPost let the advertiser force a positive review. It required no disclosure. ReviewMe (amongst others) did not let the advertiser demand anything. And there had to be disclosure. So why even compare the two?