In this day and age, blogging and content generation is not an easy task. You have to be regular, you have to constantly add value and you have to be patient because it doesn’t start paying the bills until you get healthy traffic.
Pakistan is host to some amazing bloggers in every field. Unfortunately, however, in their quest to break even or make it their primary earning method, they sometimes resort to less than ethical means, without thinking for a while about the morals, values and credibility in the long run.
This state of bloggers is coupled with such brands that use the short-way of getting promotion through paid content. Instead of bringing value into their products and building relations, they rely on money to get their content published.
Paid content is bad for publishers, and even worse for brands. But the fact remains that both publishers and brands are equally responsible for paid content as both parties agree to shake hands. Who is bigger culprit in this is something we can argue about.
But the fact remains that publishing paid content is against journalistic values unless clearly notifying your readers about the origins and type of the content (which is against Google TOS anyway, meaning that doing so will get yourself banned from Google SERP and adsense).
This issue was recently brought to the spotlight after a blogger received an email (and shared it on his Facebook), which we’ve shown below, that asked for a series of articles posted on a blog for PKR 2,500.
We won’t even talk about how insulting that amount is, rather, we would like to state that brands in Pakistan — especially those who want to get short-term benefits — don’t hesitate to get involved in dirty business of paying bloggers and journalists for getting biased content published.
When we called Lamudi and asked them about the email, they said that getting free PR is next to impossible these days and bloggers themselves demand compensation for any content that would promote a company, regardless of merit.
Clearly this is not the case when we see the above screen-grab, in which Lamudi is explicitly luring a blogger to do some posts against a fixed money in return.
Brands getting involved in shady practices is not new, but bloggers asking for money against publishing a content is purely a shock for us.
In fact we know about bloggers in Pakistan who have specially crafted “Rate Lists” for accommodating PRs, interviews, reviews and etc. on their blogs.
That’s not all actually, two smartphone companies (we won’t name actually) give bloggers the very smartphones they are supposed to review. This encourages more favourable reviews in exchange for monetary gain. Even if you are impartial, the company would rather give the devices to people who post reviews that give a higher score. In short, even unwillingly, you end up misleading readers.
According to PR gurus, such PR people who offer money against publication of content should commit suicide as they contradict the very definition of their profession.
We think that getting paid for publishing content compromises journalistic integrity and takes away any authority from your content.
We know it’s hard work to build something from the ground up out of your own pockets but we as a nation have to decide if we want to engage in the same things we curse our leaders for? The answer should be a big NO.
By the way, if you are wondering that how exactly bloggers should make money out of their blogging then its banners ads, affiliate marketing but no agreed money or an agreed incentive against the content.
