As suspected, PayPerPost have launched their publisher marketplace to give bloggers the opportunity to promote their blog to potential paying advertisers. This is obviously a challenge to the ReviewMe marketplace and I was quite interested to see how it compared and whether it was worth listing my site on.

One of the basic requirements to get listed in the marketplace is to have the PPP Direct widget installed on your site. I’ve made my feelings clear about how PPP Direct can make you less money but I’d probably be willing to consider taking the payment cut it if it meant I’d able to enter a marketplace that provided my site with a valuable way to promote it to advertisers.

The PayPerPost publisher marketplace doesn’t give me that.

You want how much money??

While the design of the marketplace is nice and web2.0, they’ve fallen into the eternal marketplace weakpoint of providing a crappy ranking system for blogs. Just as ReviewMe had to change their system when bloggers were charging inflated prices to make the front page, the PayPerPost bloggers are doing the same and charging a ridiculous MILLION DOLLARS:

I have to assume that PayPerPost will get on top of this right away and make changes to the system, but I would have thought they’d learned from the same thing happening on ReviewMe.

This just makes the marketplace look completely spammy and unprofessional.

What’s a high rank?

Blogs can be ranked by price and also “tack rating” which is a measure of how previous advertisers have felt about the sponsored postings. The idea behind this is pretty solid - instead of relying on manipulated rankings like Technorati or the “hard to measure” RSS readership, you’re able to sort through which blogs actually write quality reviews. I think many advertisers would like this feature. But….

The tack rating seems to be pretty much all the blog is ranked on. Viewing the number 1 blog when I sorted by rankings gave me this:

Obviously the author has written some quality reviews (and looking at the blog, I agree!), but the 3million+ Alexa ranking pretty much tells me that the advertisers are pretty much the only people who have read these great reviews. Sure it’s only $5, but I don’t think a site like this really deserved to be the number one ranked blog in the marketplace.

In fact, all of the top ranked blogs on the first page all charged under $20. That tells me right away there aren’t high traffic sites being listed there.

Anybody can enter the marketplace

I think the problem stems from the fact that anyone can enter the publisher marketplace. The requirements are actually less than entering the existing advertiser marketplace as your site doesn’t have to be 90 days old.

This is a pretty big difference when compared to ReviewMe’s strict requirements and waiting periods and is perhaps the reason that PayPerPost doesn’t have the higher reputation that ReviewMe enjoys.

Can you get featured?

The marketplace also has a “featured bloggers” list that seems to rotate through some of the more higher quality and higher value blogs in the marketplace. Looking at them briefly, I recognized quite a few of them as having been previously mentioned on the PPP blog and homepage. I have to wonder if this list hasn’t been made up of PPP’s main supporters. Not necessarily a bad thing, but these blogs are more likely to have reviews purchased so it would be better if they listed the judgement criteria for being a ‘featured site’

No thanks

When I wrote about PPP Direct making you less money, it was under the premise that there wasn’t a publisher marketplace. With a publisher marketplace, I was interested to see if my opinion would change and if the money sacrificed through PPP Direct would be compensated for by an inclusion in the marketplace.

At this stage, the PayPerPost publisher marketplace just looks a little spammy and I’m going to avoid it for this site. If they can use their new funding to get a better ranking system and make it a bit more than a listing of every blog who uses PPP Direct, I’ll consider it again, but for now I’m going to say a big “No thank you!”

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