Not only has Google punished all those people judasing their opinion on the web for some silver, but now the EU is saying that companies who pay people to write fake reviews of products will get fined and be liable for criminal prosecution. Well according to the Register anyway.
and the upshot is that companies (including sole traders) will no longer be able to pay individual bloggers or professional agencies to post false or misleading blogs or reviews online. Nor will they be able to do it themselves.
A little step in the right direction for the malevolent marketers and their deceptive disciples who would rather make a quick buck then have a moral backbone or an ounce of creativity. In actual fact this is law in many EU countries already, this is what the EU wants:
Certain commercial practices across Europe are banned outright under the Directive. To ensure that traders, marketing professionals and customers are clear about what is prohibited, a Black List of unfair practices has been drawn up. Which types of commercial practices does it cover? The commercial practices on the Black List are unfair in all circumstances and no case-by-case assessment against other provisions of the Directive is required. The list may only be modified at EU level, by revision of the Directive with the involvement of the European Parliament and the Council (representatives from Member States).
And the one for this blog article:
Professional trader disguised as consumer “Falsely claiming or creating the impression that the trader is not acting for purposes relating to his trade, business, craft or profession, or falsely representing oneself as a consumer.â€
Is paying someone to blog about your product covered under this?
Is it Law in Ireland? Under the Consumer Protection Act 2007, in section 55 it outright bans:
(x) making a representation or creating an impression that the trader—
(i) is not acting for purposes related to the trader’s trade, business or profession, when the trader is so acting,
or
(ii) is acting as a consumer, when the trader is not;
And the fines:
56.—A trader who contravenes section 55(1) or (3) commits an offence and is liable on conviction on indictment or on summary conviction, as the case may be, to the fines and penalties provided in Chapter 4 of Part 5.
But would the below section mean that once someone delcares Pay Per Post, they’re ok?
(q) using editorial content in the media to promote a product (if a trader has paid for that promotion) if it is not made clear that the promotion is a paid promotion, whether in the content itself or in any oral, written, visual or descriptive representation in the promotion;
I’m not sure myself but I’m not a legal scholar so I’ll leave it up to one to clarify it when they read this. However part x is quite clear and useful. You can now make a complaint to the national consumer agency if a marketing or PR company leaves fake comments as “consumers” and have them done for breaking the law. Not that the NCA will give a damn or make an effort to do anything about this. I should think Boards.ie can make massive use of this given how so many marketing companies and all sorts of companies come on to the site, register as new users and talk up new products pretending not to be linked to them. I remember a certain Satellite Internet company used to do that on the IrelandOffline forum on boards, come on talking up their product and denying they were from the company.
Update: Daithà was 9 months ahead of me!
Yup, that’s a fair reading of the law. I posted about this when the Bill appeared at the start of the year (http://www.lexferenda.com/11022007/check-out-this-new-product-is-really-cool/) and I look forward to making complaints 😉
Are there actually any Irish PayPerPost bloggers, though?
Yes but I’m not linking to them, no follow or not, none of em will get any traffic from me.
I wonder if payperpost.ie has been taken yet?
ah now, you can’t slam bloggers/websites for showing paid links/reviews provided of course, the majority of their content isn’t of a paid nature.
like it or not, money makes the blogosphere and the internet in general go around. if you don’t like the ads, ignore them.
provided content > ads on a site, i don’t see what the problem is.
What a moronic statement. “makes the world go round” McDonalds Economics 101.
I can slam whoever I want and handily enough now I can report those people that graffiti the web with their paid lies.
smemon: PayPerPost reviews are not ads. They are attempts to exploit the trust that people have in the blogs that they read. Ads do not influence editorial content, PayPerPost does.
It might be useful to compare them to schemes like Amway, where people are influenced by the possibility of making money to overhype a product to their friends.
Basically, if I’m reading a blog I trust, and I see a review there, I am inclined to expect the review to be truthful, not paid for.
PayPerPost, in practice, is also often used to buy PageRank-passing links; that is, it is a mechanism to degrade search results for the general public, so that someone can make money.
In fairness, PayPerPost has made some improvements lately; they (kinda) require disclosure that the reviews aren’t real reviews, but I don’t think they’ve gone far enough.
smemon: By the way, there are plenty of non-deceptive methods of making money with a blog; ordinary adverts are one. Ads don’t imply editorial approval of the advertised products.
damien: according to Matt Cutts, you can report this sort of thing by going to Google spam report, and using the ‘word’ ‘paidlink’ in your description. (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/)
And the National Consumer Agency is another way
PayPerPost will NOT accept a review without clear indication the post is a review. Passing on PR/manipulating SERPS happened long before PPP. You could argue link exchanges are in fact designed to manipulate SERPS, some comments on blogs etc… where does it all end… ??
Do we ban the index:follow altogether on all links and re-jig the SERPS??
Blogs are a very powerful, rapid way of getting at consumers for advertisers. Most sites aren’t blessed with instant traffic or publicity and from an advertisers point of view, blogs are a good place to start. On the flip side, bloggers get to earn cash doing something they love.
You can of course argue the toss that readers must come in to it and of course come before all business…. But as a reader of blogs myself, i much prefer sponsored reviews over pop ups/ebooks/landing pages or flash graphic ads. Perhaps i’m in the minority, i don’t know.
I do agree the review tone should be left up to the reviewer… but i have to say most ads are labelled as buzz or neutral in tone; in other words they don’t *have* to be positive, advertisers just want to raise awareness and get traffic.
“PayPerPost will NOT accept a review without clear indication the post is a review.” – You say that, but just about every PayPerPost review I’ve ever seen has at best a silly little image or vague reference to it being a ‘sponsored review’. Also, there are lots of reviews lying around from when they didn’t have that requirement.
“Passing on PR/manipulating SERPS happened long before PPP.” – Not denying that; my big issue with PPP and similar is the whole deception factor. Google is beginning to deal rather effectively with link sale, anyway; searching for ‘text link ads’ no longer gets you their site. 🙂
“You could arguep link exchanges are in fact designed to manipulate SERPS” – They are, and Google frowns upon them.
“Do we ban the index:follow altogether on all links and re-jig the SERPS??” – What? No. Just link to things for sensible reasons, not because you’re being bribed.
“Blogs are a very powerful, rapid way of getting at consumers for advertisers.” – How nice for them. I honestly couldn’t care less about the ‘needs’ of advertisers. Bribing journalists to mention them positively on the front page of national newspapers would be very powerful, as well, but it is _frowned upon_.
“Most sites aren’t blessed with instant traffic or publicity…” – Anything good will become popular pretty quickly. Have you noticed that it’s generally horrible crap which uses underhanded advertising of this sort?
“On the flip side, bloggers get to earn cash doing something they love.” – Where ‘something they love’ is deceiving their readers, eh?
“You can of course argue the toss that readers must come in to it and of course come before all business…” – Indeed. When did blogging become a get-rich-quick scheme? I blame ProBlogger and other such tripe.
“But as a reader of blogs myself, i much prefer sponsored reviews over pop ups/ebooks/landing pages or flash graphic ads.” – I’d never trust any blog which had any of these things, except POSSIBLY graphical ads. In particular, real blogs never have ebooks; ebooks are the domain of get-rich-quick gits. I’d also never trust a service advertised through PPP. I can sort of excuse people who fell for TLA when it turned up; I flirted with it myself, though got cautious at the last minute. I don’t think people were really aware it was a Google-manipulation racket.
I mean, blogging doesn’t cost you anything, really, these days. There are adequate free services. It’s about writing about things you’re interested in, not making a fortune out of pedalling pointless crap.
“I do agree the review tone should be left up to the reviewer… but i have to say most ads are labelled as buzz or neutral in tone; in other words they don’t *have* to be positive, advertisers just want to raise awareness and get traffic.” – It’s called astroturfing, and it’s generally frowned upon in decent circles.
valid points, i can’t say much more as i’m blue in the face with this subject 🙂
but if you take out every single blog with a paid link or sponsored review on it, you’re killing business, that’s my point.
the internet is the ultimate free information source but the reason we have so much information on it is because it is paid for at some stage or is created with the hope of being paid for it.
i fear if you start picking off ad networks left right and centre, you’re ultimately stunting growth, but i guess that’s my opinion.. we’re all different 🙂
“but if you take out every single blog with a paid link or sponsored review on it, you’re killing business, that’s my point.” – Not worthwhile businesses, IMO. If they’re normal people, well, they don’t need to be paid. If they’re professional content writers, then they can sink or swim based on legitimate advertising (AdSense, etc.)
“the internet is the ultimate free information source but the reason we have so much information on it is because it is paid for at some stage or is created with the hope of being paid for it.” – Certainly, some of it is. The impression that I get, though, is that anyone producing WORTHWHILE content is either doing it because they like doing it, or can make decent money on legit. ads, or both.
“i fear if you start picking off ad networks left right and centre, you’re ultimately stunting growth, but i guess that’s my opinion.. we’re all different” – Only the dodgy ones need to be picked off. Google is doing a rather nice job, IMO, but sensible laws on deceptive advertising can only help.
[…] practice I’m familiar with, although I had never heard the term before – I think it might be illegal, but it is definitely “evil” (in the Web 2.0 sense). This spamming campaign is plain […]
I’m not sure I can even understand how anyone could make an argument that falsely representing yourself as an unbiased, unpaid member of the public so as to recommend a product or service is ok. There is a massive difference between that, and giving a review while openly identifying your association to the thing you are reviewing.
There’s a reason that paid reviews or advertorials are labelled as such – so as to not mislead the reader. Remove the labelling and all you’re left with is a lie. Plain and simple.
Law or no law, legislation or no legislation, directive or no directive – if you’re going to conduct yourself in such a way as to purposely mislead others, then I think you at least deserve to be publicly exposed and shamed. Happy days if you can be fined/prosecuted, but lets be honest, what are the actual chances of that happening? In Ireland – slim, in my opinion.
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