Hello New (Killer) Pricing, Goodbye PayPerPost

Okay, we all know there is a financial crisis, and everybody suffers, but I didn’t think PayPerPost’s “posties” would feel the crisis on their own (blogs’) skin. I remember only 1-2 years ago when the highest opportunities available were over $250 (for PageRank 6+ blogs) and blog posts of $15 for 1oo words buzz on a low-level rank were a norm. It’s undoubtedly a deep history now.

I have not logged in to my account for several months, but a few days ago, I decided to check what’s new, and maybe there are a dozen easy dollars I can make while chewing my lunch. To my surprise, I saw a dramatic reform that took place in the early days of February. The marketplace is flooded with opportunities requiring over 100 words of buzz and will pay you… 0,50$ for this task. You will get fifty cents (not THAT Fifty Cents, though). You will need to write about 200 or even more words for a whole big dollar, but some generous souls are still ready to pay you one hundred cents for a 100-word positive revi100-word. I took a screenshot of my dashboard so you can better visualize the disaster’s proportion.

Why so many people are angry now?

Not really; because prices collapsed, we all can stand up and leave payperpost, which I am sure most will do. But if you remember, over a year ago, Google rolled out a wave of penalties to ALL websites listed in PPP’s marketplace because they sold links based on Page Rank. All blogs I had, including this blog you are reading now, got penalized, thrown away from their SERP, and lost or devalued their Page Rank. Toptut.com has over 100,000 backlinks, yet it went down from PR5 to PR3, only thanks to the few bucks earned through PayPerPost.

Back then, all the bloggers who worked for PPP were frustrated, mainly because working for them paid out, and with the loss of PageRank, many of us were left out, unable to take the $20+ or $30+ paying opportunities anymore. The guys behind PayPerPost, the IZEA network,  quickly devised a solution, inventing their “IZEA RANK,” which could have been a success, but… it was not.

IZEA was worthless if you ask me; moreover, it was buggy, and advertisers, naturally, didn’t want to rely on it. Being in the top 10% of most successful, high-traffic blogs was prestigious. It was suggested that advertisers should pay more for a blog post in the top 10% online since they get a review on such an ultra-popular webpage. Now, that sounded tempting. Independent tool that measures weblog’s traffic and tells you who is worth paying for and who is not. The only problem was that this rank could only measure blogs within the IZEA network; only blogs who signed up for IZEA rank and installed it on their blog, regardless of reloading the page every time you click on your mouse anywhere on the page. I assume that all the dead blogs did sign up because even my least popular back then, NOWG.net, made it to the top 10% of most visited blogs on the web, with hardly 1000 units a month. SiteDevices.com, also unpromoted then, was and is STILL in the top 10%. Perhaps I was not the only one to notice that adding all the dodgy code snippets of IZEA RealRank was a waste of time.

The bottom line is that plenty of quality bloggers lost their PR for nothing, and now PPP, desperate to stay drifting on the surface during the crisis, opened their gates to the low-paying (or even ‘non-paying‘ if you ask me). These spammy advertisers want to get a backlink for $0,50 per pop.

PayPerPost’s Profit

As always, PPP themselves are not at a loss. First of all, all the blogs across the globe are now complaining, whining, and b*tching about the new low prices, so there we go — a whole lot of free promotion. Since their profit comes from advertisers and there is a minimum fee to create a listing in the marketplace, they now have a new wave of advertisers, and even the poorest amongst us can now afford to buy reviews.

Advertiser’s Loss

As I previously mentioned, my experience with PPP as an advertiser failed. After having paid $10 per review on web design-related blogs, I ended up with 5 poorly written posts on totally nonrelated blogs that, for some reason, tagged themselves as web design. My reviews were squeezed between short cooking receipts, loan reviews, acne solutions, and random crap. But even that didn’t last long, as after 30 days, the payment proceeded, and all the bloggers deleted my reviews one by one. Unlike other networks, PPP does not ask the bloggers to keep the reviews permanently, so remember that most WILL delete them once they get paid. I doubt my sponsored posts even had the chance to get indexed since other sponsored reviews pushed them off the front page quickly, and after being buried deep in the archive, they dissolved.

So, what now?

No one wants to associate with IZEA and with Payperpost in particular. They made another desperate attempt to revive sponsored reviews by creating the “Social Spark,” but that idea unsurprisingly didn’t hit the sky.

If you are an advertiser looking to spend your hard-earned money on promotion, you’d better buy yourself bubble gum with that few bucks, as a few reviews on dead blogs will not give you more promotion than that. And, if you are a blogger looking to make money online, think twice before you open your blog, staff the footer with IZEA codes, read up on advertiser’s service, and spend your time writing about them, all this to get the best 1 dollar and no guarantee that your review will be approved…