My Experience with PayPerPost as an Advertiser

After I decided to join PayPerPost from the other side, and become an advertiser, just to see how will it help my other blog’s promotion, I must say it turned to be not quite what I was anticipating.

First of all, once you have created an opportunity, you can’t edit it. The approval is very fast (which is maybe a plus), however, once the opportunity you posted has been approved, you can’t do anything about it anymore. My opp was rather low paying (slightly below 7$, as you can see above) and despite being rated 5 tacks (highest) by 16 bloggers, I got criticized in their support forum for giving high rating to bloggers who reviewed my site on a PR4+ blog. Actually, every advertiser who makes a low paying adverts request gets unofficially “condemned” by the bloggers and I must say - I have no idea why. I am a blogger myself and I know that no-one obliges you to take a certain opp from any advertiser. If you feel you don’t like to blog about a particular site, and feel that the payout does not worth it, no one forces you to write about it, and if you really need the few dollars one’s opportunity offers, then why to take it and then cry out loud about how cheap it was? Thankfully, none of the bloggers who reviewed my site so far complained, but a few friends of mine who joined together with me and opened an advertising campaign, got slammed for not paying higher.

What bloggers maybe do not realize, is that PayPerPost takes quite a good cut. For example, if I want to pay 7$ to the blogger, and willing to take only ONE blog post at this occasion, this is how much it would cost me (without adding images, extra exposure or bubble ad):

The sum you are willing to pay to the blogger + 5$ service fee + 35% off the opportunity’s cost. Their fees won’t hurt the pocket only if you order many 5$ reviews at once, but if you are willing to created several high paying opportunities, the service fees can come down to a lot of money.

Okay, advertiser pays service fees, so what do they guarantee? — That you can automatically bench bloggers with certain PageRank and Alexa, and that is good, isn’t it? Not really.

One of the reviews I got, was on a site with Alexa Rank bellow 199,999. I could assume it’s a high traffic site and if I was to go with PPP’s suggest pricing, for this criteria alone I had to pay $45.00 extra. However, I know the trick behind Alexa ranking, and just as a proof to my post 2 weeks ago, I got a review exactly on such site. The main domain hosts over 5 blogs, each of them is individually promoted, and therefore, the Alexa traffic shows aggregate rank for the domain’ traffic. The blog itself, on which I got the review (say, site.com/blog3) in fact has very little visitors, and despite the review been flawlessly written and very good — it is unlikely to deliver me any traffic. So, filtering the Alexa rank, let alone paying for it - is mindless.

Next. The categories section is not very detailed, and even though I took one of my good friend’s advices and unchecked all the general categories, I still had to compromise on a rather general classification of “Computers and Internet”.

Amongst other downsides is the inability to fuel your account using PayPal, only credit card, as well as no control over your opportunity once you have submitted the details. Even if I see the blog post and don’t think it met the criteria, yet PPP team approved it, I pay anyway and can only but learn my lesson and be more specific next time.

Bottom line is, I liked the reviews I got and am grateful to the bloggers who talked about my website so far, however, it was definitely not what I was expecting. If you consider generating buzz about your site by paying bloggers who will spread the word, I’d strongly recommend to use PPP direct, where you can see the blog itself before ordering, the amount of posts made daily, the ratio between sponsored and non-sponsored posts, Alexa, readers count, PR and whatever else has weight for you. This way, you will know exactly what value you get for your money, prior to payment.