Mesh Conference - My chat with Ted Murphy of PayPerPost.com
As is always the case at conferences, the lunchtime and hallway conferences at Mesh have been as interesting as what’s on stage.
I haven’t followed the Payperpost controversy very closely over the last while, but I found myself sitting at lunch in conversation with Ted Murphy, the founder of Payperpost.com.
PayPerPost.com, for those who don’t know, is a company that pays bloggers to write positive (or at least not negative) reviews about their products.
Yesterday at the conference, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch referred to Ted as “the most evil person in the room.”
There are a lot of people who agree with Mike, with bucketloads of venom having been spat at Ted by A-list bloggers and journalists over the last year or so.
I tried to keep an open mind, and not jump to the Dr. Evil perspective, but it wasn’t easy.
Ted’s a strong debater, and his arguments are tricky to counter. Fundamentally, I understood his position to be:
- Our bloggers disclose, so that makes us better citizens than most marketers/journalists/bloggers
- Bloggers’ authority is everything, so if they betray their audience’s trust they will suffer. Therefore, they are self-policed and will behave themselves.
- We are just facilitating transactions that are already going on, and, hey, we are actually making it possible for bloggers to make money.
- Either (a) readers are smart and they know what is advertising and what isn’t; or (b) the distinction between advertising and regular content is a false one.
The issue with PayPerPost, in my mind, is that it sends us back to the philosophical underpinnings of journalism. The Church and State separation of advertising and content is one of the key principles of journalism, and the muddying of those waters is very troubling for many people.
As we worked our way through the debate, I was trying to understand why I react so viscerally and negatively to Ted’s pitch, and the PayPerPost model.
Finally, it dawned on me why I seriously dislike what they are doing: The company is built on a model that creates a Tragedy of the Commons situation, in which the activities of each individual participant, while containing benefit for each participant, actually harm everyone in the aggregate.
The term Tragedy of the Commons was coined by Garrett Hardin almost 30 years ago when he wrote, that “Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. “
So, what Commons are we ruining?
It is the marketplace of ideas, the arena of public discourse.
Let’s spin this out in an example…
There is an emerging public debate about the economic, environmental and health benefits of using bottled water.
Let’s consider an organization that promotes the use of bottled water. Let’s suppose they offer opportunities on PayPerPost for bloggers to advocate in support of bottled water.
While individual users do disclose that they are paid for what they write, every new post, thread or discussion pollutes the marketplace of ideas with insincere, inauthentic content in which the incentives of the writer are skewed in favour of the bottled water organization.
Every new post reduces the value of discourse, and fundamentally results in a buying-off of the realm of public discussion. Every new post closes off a part of the space of authentic ideas, in which competing interests are fought out in a realm that is (at least occasionally) rooted in something other than crass financial interests, or at least moderated and interpreted by actors by groups that can articulate the interests that are involved.
Yes, I agree with Ted that there may be worse offenders. And, yes, journalists and marketers are not always angels.
But, to bring this back to the original Tragedy of the Commons discussion — in which the addition of every new cow brought some immediate value to the farmer but reduced the long-term well-being of everyone — in my mind PayPerPost is the company camped out at the edge of the field selling cows.
Postscript: I thought I was being all creative, unique, and insightful by linking this PayPerPost to the Tragedy of the Commons. Alas, nothing is ever really new on the Internet. When I got back to Google I realized that I’m not the first to do so. Pete Brackshaw of ConsumerGeneratedMedia.com got there a year ago, and BusinessWeek took a similar angle with a piece called “Polluting the Blogosphere”
