Blogola

Payola for blogs: freebies offered to bloggers in return for favorable coverage.

Reporting recently for NPR, David Schaper wrote:

The growing rift in the blogosphere over what some are calling “blogola” was among the issues discussed at the fifth annual Blog-Her conference in Chicago.

“Blogola” is the free goodies, products, trips and other perks many marketers are giving to bloggers in hopes of getting favorable publicity or positive reviews. It’s a hot topic among “mommy-bloggers” in particular, who are proving to be quite influential with their readers.

According to a May 2009 report in Business Week, the days of blogola may be numbered:

back-scratching endorsements could become tougher under a coming set of Federal Trade Commission guidelines designed to clarify how companies can court bloggers to write about their products. This summer, the government agency is expected to issue new advertising guidelines that will require bloggers to disclose when they’re writing about a sponsor’s product and voicing opinions that aren’t their own. The new FTC guidelines say that blog authors should disclose when they’re being compensated by an advertiser to discuss a product.

(The term blogola seems to have been in use since 2006. Update | An eagle-eyed co-vocabularist directs our attention to this 2004 post on the Althouseblog: “An emailer writes that there should be a spiffy little word for blogger payola, like “blogola.” Maybe we could also do with a word for blog product placement, like maybe “product blogment.”)