Performancing and PayPerPost!?!

OK, a bit late it may be, but it’s the holiday season – we shouldn’t even be posting at all! (Just kidding of course, we’re always here, and always hard at work). But anyway, why!? Why did Perfomancing, one of the very best online services for bloggers, have to be bought up by the nasty, cheating, and totally immoral PayPerPost!?

For those of you not in the know, PayPerPost accquired Performancing on December 25, 2006 (Welcome to 2007 everyone, btw!), and are making sure everyone knows about it. Performancing is a great, friendly, and honest company; PayPerPost made their money through dishonest, bribery, and deception. Whereas Performancing was an honest service that most bloggers were proud to be a part of, PayPerPost’s very essence involved shame and denial – what a match!

PayPerPost is a relatively new start-up that allows “bloggers to make money,” except it’s not as innocent as it sounds. It was basically a mass-PR deception. Bloggers would be “hired” by companies to “review” their products and “write only positive aspects” of the product. Even worse, companies could require that the blogger not disclose the fact that this was blatant paid advertising, pretending that it was “just another review!” The FTC caught on pretty quick however, and made it mandatory to include some form of (really tiny and illegible) disclaimer informing readers that this was in fact a paid advertisement. But the ruling doesn’t make PayPerPost any less of a dishonest corporate entity trying to profit off of the blogging bandwagon in the most dishonest ways imaginable.

Performancing on the other hand, is a free service that helps bloggers get statistics about activity on their site and, more recently, place ads (in image format) on their website. It’s an honest start-up with a respectable name in the business, that has helped thousands of bloggers get to know their site and traffic better, and even make a couple of bucks along the way.

Why would Performancing sell out, especially to the likes of PayPerPost? The answer is easy: money. Performancing was a free service, and their new advertising network was pretty much a failure: with too many already successful alternatives out there and a tiny (relatively speaking) userbase, their ad network didn’t flourish. To the contrary, it went belly-up. PayPerPost on the other-hand is a highly successful enterprise (nevermind the means and morals at the moment), and has the money to buy what they couldn’t earn: respect.