Last Blogger

While PayPerPost has long been causing a stir throughout the blogosphere and with many observers, they’ve caused a very interesting dilemma within their own community. With there new update have come a slew of new features. One of them is segmenting. Segmenting is simply a way to allow advertiser to be pickier about who they will allow to take their ops. That means you can pay more to entice bigger bloggers without worrying about wasting money on a small time blog snatching up the ops.

That’s great, but there are two major problems. One of the metrics is “tack score”. That’s a measure of the advertisers happiness with your work. Once you finish an op, the advertisers can give feedback from 1-5 or a ban, preventing that blogger from ever taking one of their ops again. While there’s nothing wrong with the idea, it’s a blind system. As a blogger you can only see how many people have voted and not what score was given. I suspect that there are some that would be challenged due to unfair expectations given the requirements of the op if bloggers could see where a low rating came from. Seems only fair to me, but when you’re understaffed and suffering from other problems, fair gets expensive. The other problem is that your Alexa score is also a metric. While we all know that Alexa can easily be gamed, it’s not that bad a metric to use in conjunction with others. Only once again, due to programming problems, none of the Alexa score are correct and they’re already allowing people to filter on those. Nothing has affected me personally yet, but I feel bad for anyone who’s getting locked out of an op because of programming problems.

They’ve also introduced a “Bubble Ad” which works like the disclosure badge you see in the previous post. But unlike the benign image that’s there, the Bubble Ad would allow advertisers to show a pop-up from it. Well needless to say there’s been some outcry over that.

The interesting thing out of all of this is that PPP is very smartly softening their community up with posts that pay well and require you to start using their new developments in baby steps. It’s such a great idea. I admire the business sense these guys have, I’m just appalled at the software development sense. I think that PPP will succeed in getting over their recent debacles due to their understanding that money talks and people are best persuaded in small bits. Final analysis; A tip of the hat to the business team and wag of the finger to the dev team.