SponsoredReviews Answers FTC Compliance Questions
Posted by: dragonblogger // Category: bloggingThe weasel abides.
SponsoredReviews posted a detailed and very informative response on how to handle Disclosure of paid assignments. In summary, SponsoredReviews themselves do not require non-disclosure they leave it up to the advertiser and the blogger has a right to reject assignments requiring non-disclosure. SponsoredReviews encourages a SiteWide disclosure but not using a common generated one and hiding your Disclose image as a file so Google doesn’t penalize your blog for having it.
Based on SponsoredReviews response bloggers should push back on advertisers who still request non-disclosure for their assignments after December 1st 2009, Google does need to update its policies to stop penalizing bloggers for using paid and sponsored posts, especially now that the FTC requires the disclosure.
Here was full support response from SponsoredReviews:
“Hi Justin, BTW, We tried to respond to the post you did on your blog two times, but our comments never showed up. You may want to check your spam filter. To be clear, SponsoredReviews has never had a policy stating that bloggers must not disclose their paid relationships. Our policy has always been to leave it to the advertiser and the blogger to decide how they want to disclose. It is true that some advertisers request non-disclosure due to their concerns about Google seeing that they are “buying links” but it has always been the bloggers right to decline those jobs. The blogger also has the right to add a sitewide disclosure even if they are accepting jobs from advertisers requiring non in-post disclosure. Most advertisers are only concerned with in-post disclosures since they raise red flags with Google. In fact we had a case recently where an advertiser disputed a review that a blogger wrote because they had asked for non-disclosure yet the blogger had a site wide disclosure. We sided with the blogger in that case and the advertiser was made aware that we do not support a requirement of “no site-wide disclosures”. The issue of disclosure is an interesting one, most advertisers have no desire to be deceitful, their only motivation for asking for non-disclosure is that Google has made it clear that paid reviews are considered to be “paid links” and are against Google”s Webmaster Guidelines. Most advertisers are fully willing to comply with the updated FTC guidelines. Many advertisers have already begun to remove their requirements for non disclosure in order to meet the December 01 deadline. So what changes is SponsoredReviews going to make to its system in order to insure FTC compliance. For starters we are going to implement functionality that allows advertisers to require in-post disclosure. Our disclosure system will validate the existence of a disclosure badge on each post that a blogger submits. In addition, due to the concerns that advertisers have about Google our disclosure system will not create a signature that can be used to automatically track down and devalue their reviews. We will be making further announcements in the near future. For now we encourage all bloggers to add a site wide disclosure statement to their blogs. We suggest creating a custom statement versus copying one from a site like disclosurepolicy.org. It is easy for Google to track down bloggers who are using copied statements. If you are going to do in-post disclosures we suggest using a small image with the words “Sponsored Post” or “Paid Review” or “Sponsored Review” or “This Post is Sponsored”. We also suggest that you name the image something random such as 56234.jpg.”
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Tags: Blog articles, blog news, blogger ftc compliance, blogging articles, blogging information, blogging news, FTC Compliance, ftc guidelines, FTC Guidelings, paid blogging, sponsored posts, sponsoredreviews, SponsoredReviews Answers FTC Compliance, SponsoredReviews FTC Compliance
October 21st, 2009 at 8:09 am
Thanks for the information! They should get with the times and do what needs to be done, like ripping off a bandaid.
Heather Kephart´s last blog ..Fuzzmail sheds light on what is hidden
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