I have my own thoughts on the topic of course that I have mainly left in comments.

There was me thinking the whole point was to form a syndicate

• Better deal flow
• Stronger negotiating position
• More value add with varied skills and contacts
• Dispersed risk
• A players working with A players

Who wants to invest their money (or that of their LPs) with someone who isn’t maximising the chance of success.
Success is the balance – if the deals don’t maximise the chance of success of the startup then the investment strategy fails.

This also has parallels with the disturbing trends in Internet Marketing that are also being likened to collusion.

I also understand that the more (legitimate) money someone makes selling training or services to online marketers, in theory the better they can serve their customers.

You could also look on any form of press embargo as collusion – those with access to news in advanced have commercial advantage.
Would access to news in advance influence the tone of news coverage? Who wants to shoot the goose that lays the golden eggs after all?

Does it affect reviews in some industries? If someone has written a negative review of one of your products in the past, are you more or less likely to get access to review a product in the future.

Is being given beta access as a member of the press or a blogger with the future intention of writing about it in some way collusion? In some ways I think it is.

Confidential Letter – Redacted

In the latest episode of Angelgate Michael Arrington has posted a confidential letter from Chris Sacca to some of his fellow “Super Angels” – it is 3000+ very passionate words and a very interesting read.

But one section of a highly personal nature has been redacted.

Chris Sacca email

My days have been driven by a passion that makes it impossible for me to avoid the opportunity to help. Right now, 94% of my net worth is tied up in startups and I [REMOVED BY TECHCRUNCH]. I have every shred of my money alongside my founders, often buying their same common stock. No one but an obsessive idiot would ever allocate their money that way. But, I love what I do. And I know that goes for everyone on this list.

[REMOVED BY TECHCRUNCH] hmm?

I have already seen on Quora one person ask what could possibly have been removed from that 3000 word email that could possibly be more personal, and a few comments on techcrunch have jokingly added some suggestions.

So Lets Have Some Fun With It

Complete this sentence in the comments

Right now, 94% of my net worth is tied up in startups and I [REMOVED BY TECHCRUNCH]

Thus: Right now, 94% of my net worth is tied up in startups and I wish I hadn’t invested in Crunchpad.

Here is a template if you want to do your own.

Image Source: Crunchbase

Rules

• Keep it family friendly
• Stretch the truth as much as possible
• We want dead ringers to be redacted (for whatever fictional reason)
• This is just for fun/humor

Angelgate Recap

For anyone who hasn’t been following this story for the last week here is a quick recap, but there have been 100s of posts.

• A Blogger Walks Into A Bar
• Dave McClure Gets Mad
• Dave McClure Gets Really Mad
• Ron Conway Goes Nuclear
• Ron Conway Clarifies

p.s. I have no idea if Chris has any connection with Crunchpad in the slightest, but if he did, a reference like that in the email would be a dead ringer to be redacted.

Via Techmeme

Update

For another view of the troubles in Internet marketing Dan Thies (with a new blog) is well worth a read.
p.s. Dan seems to be testing duplicate meta tags (my tests show Google take the most restrictive)

I must admit I am not a huge fan of linking to articles from Associated Press, simply because it is extremely difficult to determine the original source when these stories “go over the wire”.

A great example of the reasons why is when I reported about the appropriated story last year from the Museum of Hoaxes – that was Agence France-Presse to blame, a different organization.

Readers might also remember my run-in with The Guardian where I was a major source for an article, but didn’t receive a link. The author and editor of The Guardian explained their viewpoint in the comments, but it still wrankles a little.

That being said, there is a huge amount of PROFIT being made online in the form of online membership sites which is a paid content business model.

Highly successful examples include:-

• Strategic Profits – $10m+ business
• Stompernet – $25m+ business
• Success Chef (prelaunch)
• Double Your Dating – $20m+ business

I could the continue the list with the likes of Armand Morin, Mike Filsaime, Jeff Walker, Yanik Silver, John Reese, Ray Edwards, Jim Edwards, Frank Kern, Jason Postash and many many more. Among bloggers Brain Clark with Teaching Sells and Yaro Starak with Blog Mastermind immediately come to mind.

Then of course there are the mega information marketers such as Agora Publishing with multiple content channels such as Early to Rise

I should include affiliate links to all of them, but that isn’t the point – most of these guys are pulling in million dollar earnings on a yearly basis, and whilst they have diversified into physical products, exclusive coaching and seminars.

Agora might even be pulling in $1m a day by now, I don’t have recent figures.

Agora might be making more money than Facebook

Paid content certainly isn’t a dying business model

Plausible deniability is the term given to the creation of loose and informal chains of command in governments and other large organizations. In the case that assassinations, false flag or black ops or any other illegal or otherwise disreputable and unpopular activities become public, high-ranking officials may deny any connection to or awareness of such act, or the agents used to carry out such act.

In politics and espionage, deniability refers to the ability of a “powerful player” or actor to avoid “blowback” by secretly arranging for an action to be taken on their behalf by a third party—ostensibly unconnected with the major player.

More generally, “plausible deniability” can also apply to any act that leaves little or no evidence of wrongdoing or abuse. Examples of this are the use of electricity or pain-compliance holds as a means of torture or punishment, leaving little or no tangible signs that the abuse ever took place.

I can understand Om Malik’s reason for not attending, a bad back – nice, clear, understandable, totally excusable.

There is some doubt over Michael Arrington’s claims, for instance Wendy says she posted after confirmation with the organisers.

Michael Arrington’s specific words

I never agreed to attend the conference.

I would really appreciate it if the organizers of Blogworld would post something clearing this up.

Jim Kukral wrote

You forgot to come? At least lie to us, lol.

Digging Into The Facts

There was a little bit of a storm in a teacup just a month ago over a bit of clumsy email marketing, which also involved Techcrunch writer Duncan Riley.

Within that there was some telling evidence to this situation, at least in my mind.

This is what Duncan Riley wrote in an email to Rick Calvert that appears in a blog post on the Blogworld Expo blog (Emphasis is mine)

Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2007 1:01 AM

Subject: Re: Come Join Us at the World’s Largest Blogging Conference

Brian
I know Michael is speaking, I write for TechCrunch. I’m not sure whether to take this as spam or not, particularly given that I’ve already discussed with the organizers the rumor that I wasn’t invited due to a sponsor. In fact the face that you’ve pulled out a random post on my personal blog makes this sound a lot like spam.

Best of luck with it.

So Duncan acknowledges that Michael Arrington is attending, and qualifies that statement by implying he know that because he is a staff writer for Techcrunch, not because of any misleading advertising material.

There is contrary evidence, Michael declining in the Facebook group but I must admit I do that almost as an automatic thing myself, often after the event. People can always change their mind.

My reading of the facts is there might have been some communication mistakes, these things happen, but with people inside Michael’s own Techcrunch organisation thinking he was attending less than a month before the event, the communication problems are certainly on both sides.

What Really Matters

I said at the start the facts don’t matter at all, but if I was attending, and even as an observer halfway around the world, I can’t believe even a comedy of errors could be maintained for so long without Michael Arrington stepping up and saying he was not attending before the event.

Even Andy Beal, who has his finger on the pulse all the time didn’t know Michael wasn’t going to be at the keynote until he didn’t appear on stage.

Michael Chose His Words Very Carefully

In the run up to Blogworld Expo, Techcrunch were gaining a lot of links and exposure, it would be impossible for anyone with any hint of reputation management and online knowledge to not notice appearing in blog posts for months before the event on an almost daily basis.

But the “I didn’t confirm” was allowed to continue, because it benefited Techcrunch, even up to the time Michael was due to appear on stage for the first time.

Now the truth is out, even more links, links are valuable, and in public relations, there is no such thing as bad press.

The Rumour Industry

Techcrunch is head of the tech industry rumour mill, and as such prints a lot of stories that may or may not be true, and sometimes they get told the information is incorrect, and sometimes misleading information is allowed to persist, because it is good for stock prices.
A good example of that in recent times is the Google Phone, which turned out to be an open operating system for mobile phone manufacturers.

I can understand the need to be the first with the big scoop, the speculation, the increased readership that drives advertising dollars.

But should those reporting use plausible deniability and let it run across the blogosphere knowing that it is totally untrue, but it is good for marketing?

If you are a product manufacturer or service provider, there is a strategic benefit to keep users or competitors in doubt… sometimes. It is not just a marketing thing to leak rumours, and the press and bloggers eat up the morsels anyway.

For a blogger or press outlet to allow news to continue to be written about them knowing it is misleading or false leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

For me, this is a thing of trust. I have lost trust in much of what Techcrunch writes, in just the same way people would lose trust of bloggers writing paid posts without some form of disclosure.

I mention paid posts for a reason, I would have loved as a blog reader to see people’s thoughts of the New Media Fundraising presentation.
That was to include David Cohen, Brad Feld, Dan Rua, and…. Michael Arrington. Dan is an investor in Izea/PayPerPost and has had multiple exchanges with Michael Arrington over PayPerPost, not just ethically, but also the financial stability of the company gaining B round investment from the same group of investors.
David Cohen, just the day before the presentation still thought Michael was attending.

I haven’t seen any reports from the session, so it is possible it didn’t even happen, or the “clash of the investors” was made less attractive.

Plausible deniability just doesn’t cut it Mr Arrington

Michael Arrington Updates

Michael Arrington has updated his post to reflect on additional attacks, and also he has managed to have a chat with Rick the organizer.

It is well worth reading, though I can now see how this happens.

From what I can see

Michael gets far too much email – only reads 10% of it. He should create a more private email for friends, and then get a PA handle the rest.
Michael doesn’t do any reputation management and states that he doesn’t read all the negative commentary – again that could be outsourced

Michael did however state in his update that:-

My response to them was “I’m attending an event this week?”

Thus he was aware before the event that he was expected to be speaking, and knew he wasn’t.

This whole issue could have been cleared up before the event and should have been.

Final Update

Rick has posted the BlogWorld Expo side of the story on their blog.

It seems to me there was a lot more communication than was suggested in the initial Crunchnotes post by Michael Arrington, and to be honest it seems that there was more than even currently included on Crunchnotes after a number of updates.

In Mike’s final update he suggests he should have claimed he had the flu, or similar.

Not everyone agreed with my review and there were 4 major arguments against using the service from various corners of the blogosphere.

• PayPerPost don’t provide a marketplace for their bloggers using PayPerPost direct, and that without a marketplace it would be hard for a blogger and an advertiser to connect.
• Bloggers should sell direct – supporter of this argument suggested that the 10% additional fee that PayPerPost added ontop of what a blogger receives was excessive, and it would be better to have an advertising sales page, and handle any transaction directly
• The icons provided by PayPerPost were ugly
• No High Paying Advertisers – it was believed that all PayPerPost advertisers were “low budget” and that the service wouldn’t attract major brands with deeper pockets.

$7 Million in New Funding

Companies don’t receive a second round of funding unless investors have taken a very close look at the future of a company, and their ability to meet goals and deliver based upon their business plan.

Tomorrow PayPerPost will officially announce $7M USD Series B funding led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson whose Managing Director Josh Stein joins the board, and additional participants Inflexion Partners, Village Ventures and new investor DFJ Gotham.

With Series A funding last year of $3M plus initial seed funding by the founders, that brings total investment of over $10M USD.

PayPerPost mean business and are in this for the long haul, and with that much money in the kitty, they can afford to be generous to their marketplace of bloggers.

I notice Michael Arrington has already posted his views on the new round of funding. He seems to think the fact that the same investors are involved this second time to be a sign that other investors want to keep their hands clean.
That is possible, because Michael has been giving them constant bad press, and who knows, maybe the numbers don’t add up for other investors.

An alternative could be equally well said that the current investors don’t feel the need for a lot of fresh blood on the board of directors, are happy with the ability of PayPerPost to deliver based upon their development schedule, and they don’t seem to be having problems finding bloggers or advertisers.

Michael has also got a podcast available with Ted Murphey, CEO of PayPerPost and Josh Stein, the new board member.
Update:- I should have checked out the link first – it is actually the old podcast from back in November, worth listening to if you haven’t heard it, though a lot of it is now out-of-date.

New PayPerPost Marketplace

Time for some pictures:-

The initial PayPerPost Marketplace view is unfiltered. It allows you to sort through PayPerPost’s 28000 bloggers either by price in ascending or decending order, or by “tack” which is based on the rating a blogger has received from advertisers.

It should be noted that posties (the bloggers) who have been very active in the PayPerPost system prior to the launch of PayPerPost direct are more likely to have higher quality ratings at this stage. New bloggers who have been attracted to PayPerPost because of the new direct service may have been writing reviews for competing services. I would think it will be a while before this situation becomes balanced out, but it is great for those that have been supporting PayPerPost as bloggers for almost a year.

So lets apply a filter and see what we find, in this case we will go for primary categories Business and Technology, and set the filter between $50 and $200.

The result for that filter is 30 bloggers sorted in alphabetical order (though you can still sort by price or quality), who match the category and price choices.

The display only shows a snippet of information about each blogger, but it is possible to click through to a profile for more information.

Power User Tip For Posties – You will notice in this next screenshot that I did some experimentation, and that you can use some HTML in your description. Hopefully that will remain because it helps you improve your presentation.
Also note in the preceding screenshot that my snippet displayed isn’t very inviting. It will be important to optimize you first paragraph to encourage people to click through to a full description.

Statistics such as Pagerank and Alexa Traffic are available on the profile page – Technorati Authority is not used, because PayPerPost made the decision recently not to use Technorati ratings, because they can be fairly inaccurate. As an example a theme designer could have a much higher authority with Technorati than major blogs such as Techcrunch, Engadget and BoingBoing.

You will also note that tags are displayed, but there currently isn’t a way to sort blogs based upon tagging – hopefully this is something that will be added in the future. I also hope they move away from having bloggers enter space separated tags, and them being displayed comma separated.
It would be much more accurate to have comma separated tags being entered, and then displayed without adjustment. This would allow tags to be multiple words, such as used by Technorati.

Lets look at the other shortcomings raised 2 weeks ago by other bloggers

Bloggers Should Sell Direct

I thought in my review of PayPerPost Direct 2 weeks ago that orders that will be coming from a new direct marketplace would have a higher charge for processing payable by advertisers. It looks like that is currently not going to be the case.
A 10% fee for order processing, technology, and providing a marketplace and escrow service really isn’t a major concern, especially with the way PayPerPost promote their bloggers to advertisers.

I imagine the level of blogger promotion is set to increase, and that bloggers will be rotated through the system.

The Icons Are Ugly

You could always include them on an advertising sales page rather than in your blog sidebar, and that might be an option I will consider in the future.
The system also allows you to use your own custom icons, or just a text link.

I think a more valid argument, which I don’t think I have heard anyone raise is the ability to customise the popup when someone clicks on a link.

If I only want to allow neutral tone orders, I don’t want any other option available to an advertiser, and I would also prefer to give links in an editorial context, and not have advertisers specify link text – I have a fair amount of SEO experience, and I am not going to give people junk links, but I want to have the choice.

No High Paying Advertisers

In the press release going out tomorrow, PayPerPost confirm they currently have over 6500 advertisers, and those advertisers have ordered, and PayPerPost have delivered 125,000 blog posts – that is probably a turnover of over $1,500,000 in the last year. Not huge by any means, but that number is increasing. I am sure more than $1m of that is in the last 6 months.

Zookoda

PayPerPost purchased Zookoda not too long ago and that business has a lot of potential if they expand into a similar territory as that previously occupied by Feedburner.

Feedburner were recently acquired by Google

Ted, Dan & The PayPerPost Team

Investors invest in people, not just ideas. Dan is one of the investors in PPP, but in many ways is also one of the marketing team, and highly dedicated.

Ted is charismatic and smart, and doesn’t seem phased by anything. Whilst many startups are founded by geeks and don’t have a business plan, PayPerPost was founded by a marketer who saw a need for a certain product in the marketplace.

My blogging friend Jim Kukral frequently calls Ted a Marketing Genius and PayPerPost have certainly capitalised on the controversy that they have caused since they were launched.

The PayPerPost team seem to be very dedicated, and you can tell if you watch any of the videos on RockStartup that they are a well oiled machine, and having fun and delivering development milestones like clockwork.

Calling Microsoft & Yahoo

PayPerPost is a disruptive business model, not just to the blogosphere, but also to advertising. It could be argued that it is also disruptive for search results, but generally it is successful companies who offer good products who can afford to advertise on a large scale, and bloggers who work for Microsoft or Yahoo, and even Google effectively promote their own company products all over the blogosphere whenever something is launched.

Surprise surprise, there are some major companies who offer great product who don’t already have 1000+ bloggers on their payroll, and they would like bloggers talking about them as well.

If Microsoft or Yahoo buy PayPerPost, it would be extremely disruptive to their major competitor, Google, both by offering an advertising model Google can’t touch because of prior criticism (though not official), and one that affects Google’s search quality (supposedly, though there is very little proof)

6 months or less to a major acquisition?

Expect more information on the PayPerPost blog tomorrow and here is a direct link through to the new PayPerPost marketplace.

Update:

Think I covered everything? Think again…

Kat for instance pointed out how well PayPerPost are promoting their bloggers, with the rotating spotlight on bloggers at the top of the bloggers page in the new design. She also highlights some very interesting demographic information that is currently available.
To give you some idea of the misconceptions among the tech sector that “mommy bloggers” are not a worthy audience for advertising, I know Kat gets more traffic than I do every month.

I think the Forbes reporter has been reading Techcrunch too much, and should maybe vary his reading habits more. Whilst the coverage is reasonably accurate on the facts, there is a definite negative slant without looking at what really happens in the blogosphere by employees of INC500 companies who happen to be bloggers.
Colleen again was being misquoted by the press, but in what must be a fairly unique situation, actually gained 2 links from Forbes.

It looks like Jules has found the press section on the new PPP site and is taking advantage of the photos provided.

Update2:

Compensated reviews can be of high quality, all you have to do is take pride in what you write. This article by SapphireKnight in a sponsored post for PayPerPost about the latest funding goes into detail about the difference between the original PayPerPost Marketplace and the new Direct Marketplace.