PayPerPost Raises $3 Million

Posted on October 2, 2006

TechCrunch reports that PayPerPost, a controversial third party advertising service that pays bloggers for blogging about products and services, has raised $3 million in a round of financing.

The service is a marketplace for advertisers to pay bloggers to write about products for a fee. Commenters to our original post were polarized into those violently for and those againt the product. The key area of controversy is the fact that advertisers can mandate that posts be positive on the product, and disclosure of payment is optional for the blogger (screen shot at end of post shows sample available writing opportunities).

The controversy didn't stop venture capitalists from quickly jumping on board, though. On Tuesday PayPerPost will announce a $3 million round of financing led by Inflexion Partners and with participation from Villiage Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Dan Rua from Inflexion and Michael Barach from Villiage Ventures will take board seats. Josh Stein from Draper Fisher Jurvetson will become a board observer.

TechCrunch is correct that there were some polarized bloggers when the service was announced several months ago but there was some indifference as well. You can see our roundup of blog coverage from PayPerPost's launch which generated many opinions.

A list of the current ad opportunities for bloggers can be found on PayPerPost's site. It looks like PayPerPost currently pays in a range of about $2.5 to $12 for a post depending on what the individual advertiser is paying. That could amount to some decent revenues for an individual blogger who doesn't mind blogging about a variety of different products and services -- and who isn't afraid their readers won't mind. However, PayPerPost alone isn't likely to generate enough revenues for a blogger to be able to quit his or her day job.

For far more impressive revenues take a look at this story today from MarketWatch. Frank Barnako is reporting that Rocketboom is now charging $80,000 for a week of ads in their video blogs. Now that is some serious revenues. Of course, most blogs don't have anywhere near Rocketboom's traffic so they typically settle for a third party ad service or a combination of third party ad services.