FTC’s crackdown on paid bloggers was also a crackdown on paid celebrities
David Spark here, reporting for ad:tech at ad:tech NY 2009.
I chatted with Ted Murphy, CEO of Izea, the company that makes the paid blogging service, Social Spark. Wonder why I was so interested in them? I had met Murphy before and followed up with him, not just because he’s got two new services, Sponsored Tweets, and sponsored guest blog posts, Sponzai. The idea for Sponzai is your company can write a blog post and another blogger can put the entire blog on their site as a sponsored guest post.
I was more interested in talking with Murphy about his experience working with the FTC on their blogging guidelines. While they’ve always required disclosure for Social Spark, Murphy said what he was most surprised about regarding the FTC’s ruling was that they were really going after celebrities who for years had been hiding their affiliations as to who was sponsoring them.
