Paint Tomorrow Blue

Even though I joined the party rather late, I remain a great lover of PayPer­Post. There’s a mer­ce­nary and annoy­ing way to go about it, and there’s a more humane and fun way to go about it. I was never very aggres­sive about want­ing to earn money from my blog, but I did take some very silly oppor­tu­ni­ties that I might not have inflicted on my blog read­ers had I not been unemployed.

When it was opened to the pub­lic, I joined the site that’s sort of the next gen­er­a­tion of PayPer­Post, SocialSpark. I’ve expe­ri­enced a lot of bugs and other trou­ble, as one would expect from such a new site, but over­all I’m excited to see how the site devel­ops and what hap­pens.  Either way, I love work­ing with Izea, since it’s hard not to like a com­pany that puts up error mes­sages like this one:

The for­mats are indeed dif­fer­ent. Payper­post [PPP] heav­ily favors peo­ple who are able to sit in front of their com­put­ers all day, reload­ing the paid post oppor­tu­ni­ties page. There isn’t nec­es­sar­ily any­thing wrong with this, and it worked in my favor when I wasn’t work­ing or didn’t work every day and was able to check the site fre­quently. Most heavy users of PPP don’t work or don’t have 9–5 jobs, so this works out well for them. Now I spend the day­time at work, and don’t get to use the Inter­net for per­sonal things. Which is prob­a­bly bet­ter for me in the long run…

The big flaw with PPP, how­ever, is that for many oppor­tu­ni­ties, blog­gers weren’t sell­ing a link and a review as much as sell­ing our Google PageR­ank. This got Google’s atten­tion, and they took the PageR­ank of almost all PPP blog­gers down to zero, myself included. Adver­tis­ers wanted some­times very spe­cific anchor words, and much of the time didn’t want blog­gers to dis­close that the post was a paid one. I found this morally prob­lem­atic, and I found myself with fewer and fewer adver­tis­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties that I was able to take. If that’s what adver­tis­ers want and they’re able to find a blog­ger to give them that space, that’s fine–but it doesn’t work for me or what I want to do with my blog.

The main dif­fer­ence with Socialspark, I’m find­ing, is that who gets which post, and when, doesn’t depend on who is sit­ting in front of their key­board at that par­tic­u­lar moment. This has its advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages, but works out well for some­one like me, with a day job where I can’t blog. Socialspark posts also require that they be marked as spon­sored, which makes me and my pesky ethics happy.

There are some bugs to work out yet, but I like play­ing around with Socialspark. Apart from the adver­tise­ments, I also like tak­ing writ­ing prompts, or “sparks,” from other mem­bers, and read­ing the pro­files of adver­tis­ers and other bloggers.