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Ethics

The Sanity Discount: Ethics for Small Businesses and Bloggers

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Well. Bloggers who run ads are small businesses, of course. A couple of ripples in the daily flow of things have, over the past couple of days, led me to ruminate about integrity and ethics, and about how they should direct the course of our little side businesses, including our blogs.

First, a very nice new client recently wandered in through the door. Says he wants someone to edit website copy for a successful small business in the trades. I send my rate sheet, which frames my rates on a per-page basis. He wants to know what I’ll charge by the hour. I say sixty bucks, not an unreasonable amount in the large scheme of things (twenty years ago a friend here was getting $120 an hour for similar work). He, doing business in a large city far, far away where employees’ and independent contractors’ pay is not throttled by right-to-work laws, doesn’t even blink.

So I dive into the project, which is kind of fun. Well, “kind of fun” because it doesn’t entail a lot of technical language or esoteric theory, unlike most of the stuff I do. Mathematical biosciences this is not, nor is it abstruse postmodernist blather. But there’s a fair amount of it, and it needs substantial reorganization, rewriting, and new research & writing. I enjoy this little endeavor over the course of about 22 hours. Eventually I wrap the job and add up my bill, and…

Holy mackerel! At $60 an hour, the tab came to enough for me to buy a condo in the guy’s expensive city. It really did seem out of line, given the relative ease and mild entertainment value of the work.

Okay, it’s true that if I based my fees on how much fun the job is, I’d have to edit Poisoned Pen Press copy for free. But still…there’s a limit.

Seeking a fairer arrangement, I calculated what it would cost the client if I charged my highest page rate—justifiable, I figured, because of the amount of actual writing I did—and came up with an amount that was enough for The Copyeditor’s Desk to buy itself a couple of printer cartridges. Fairly respectable, actually, but not enough to break the bank.

So that was what I ended up billing: about four or five hundred bucks less than the hourly rate would have commanded. But at $60 an hour, the bottom line added up to a figure utterly beyond reason. In an abstract way, it didn’t seem right to charge that much for that kind of work.

Call it the Sanity Discount.

Hard on the heels of that exchange, an ongoing conundrum resurfaced. Some of you probably noticed the recent “sp0ns0r3d post” that went up recently. You may or may not have observed that it also went down.

Funny about Money is getting large enough to attract the attention of various individuals and groups who bill themselves as advertisers. Almost all of them—a good 99.9 percent of them—want me to run paid text links. And they’re willing to pay pretty well for the privilege. I could easily double or triple Funny’s revenues by selling paid text links.

These people and their brokers approach the blogger by saying either that they want to buy ad space on the site or that they are generously offering a guest post, “absolutely free to you.”

Trouble is, doing so eventually puts one afoul of Google’s arcane rules, designed to protect its search engine algorithm. To simplify a complicated story, if Google catches you publishing paid text links (which sooner or later it will), your page rank magically drops to zero.

So, after you’ve worked for months or years to build a respectable page rank, these folks come along and take advantage of it; then when their practices kill your page rank, they of course will abandon you.

That particular aspect is not at issue here, though. What we have at issue is the so-called advertiser’s strategy to evade discovery, which is to produce copy for a post that fits the blogger’s site theme. The paid link is then embedded in the post, in such a way that the link appears to point to something relevant to the post’s subject.

It’s important to understand that paid links are not advertising. They’re a device to suck link juice from a site with a relatively decent page rank into the buyer’s own site, by way of making the other site appear at or near the top of a Google search.

In other words, what looks like a real post is a deceptive device to mount self-serving links whose purpose has nothing to do with the host site’s content. Often it contains a link pointing to some outfit selling a service or product that runs counter to the host site’s very raison d’être. Why, for example, would a personal finance blogger who urges readers to get out of debt, manage money wisely, and avoid loan sharks recommend taking out a payday loan?

Why? To collect a hundred bucks for publishing two words attached to a live do-follow link, that’s why.

Such a post is, in short, advertorial. Actually, it doesn’t even rise to that level, because the articles are not really intended to be read; they exist to carry the links, which exist to use the host’s page rank to jack up the search engine page rank on the link seller’s site. While they’re billed as advertising, they’re actually a form of black-hat SEO.

Well, I started in journalism back in 1979, and over the years I’ve worked for some of the most prominent regional periodicals in my part of the country. Believe it or not, there is such a thing as journalistic ethics, and over the course of 32 years they tend to inhabit your thinking. When I came up, there was a sharp divide between advertising and editorial—in fact, the ad and circulation departments were housed on the other side of the building from where the editors and artists worked.

Magazines did publish crass little “articles” written by highly paid writers—earning far more than any of us did!—whose purpose was to plug paying advertisers. This was to be expected: magazines survive on ad revenue; subscription income does not suffice to support a print publication. However, ethical publishers mark advertorials as such: with a running header or footer saying something like “Advertisement.” Often advertorials are set off typographically and even printed on slightly different paper from the rest of the rag.

To publish advertising or SEO masquerading as an article without cluing the reader to the fact that the stuff is paid advertising is dishonest.

It is to lie.

That is why many publications do not print advertorial at all, and why those who do, if they have any decency at all, label them prominently as advertising.

Times have changed, of course, with the advent of the brave new world that is the Internet. And blogging is and is not journalism, though it has readers who presumably expect some standard of honesty from their writers. Here’s what journalistic webmaster Robert Niles says about the issue, writing at the Online Journalism Review:

The old rule: There must be a wall between advertising and editorial.

The new rule: Sell ads into ad space and report news in editorial space. And make sure to show the reader the difference.

Accordingly, I marked the paid-link peddler’s copy as a Sp0nsor3d Post!

This elicited a squawk of dismay. When I refused to remove the notice saying the post was a paid article containing links to the author’s clients’ sites, the deal fell through. Cheerfully, I removed the post from my site, and good riddance to it.

To cope with the practice of secreting paid links in fake stories, Google is now demanding that all links to commercial sites be coded as no-follow links. The would-be advertisers hate this, of course—because the link juice is what they’re paying for—and usually they will decline to place a paid link unless it’s do-follow. Many bloggers simply take a chance that Google will never catch them, and they justify the potential loss of page rank by arguing that PR doesn’t matter anyway.

Maybe it doesn’t, maybe it does. The technicalities of page rank are way above my pretty little head, and so I don’t trouble myself with them.

But one could argue, with some justice, that Google’s policy on paid do-follow links is hugely unfair, since Google Adsense places plenty of paid links on your site. And since Google pays nothing like what these often rather sleazy “advertisers” will pay, Google itself takes on a whiff of the exploitive.

About that, I say it is what it is.

Ironically, while Google’s policy is self-serving (their motive has nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with the way the company’s business model works), it in fact feeds into that fundamental journalistic ethic: the effect of the rule is to discourage deceptive content and to encourage separation of advertising and editorial.

Old-fashioned…but then so is “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

😉

Truth, the highest thing that man may keep

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If you’re here to read “Truth” for FMF’s “March Madness” competition, please remember to vote at Free Money Finance’s site, not in the comments here. 🙂

Why, when we’re confronted, do we tend to blurt out the truth, even when it works to our disadvantage to do so? Chaucer had it right when he said “truth is the highest thing that Man may keep.” Sometimes we should keep it to ourselves.

Asked in the right way, we’ll often reveal private, sensitive information that’s strictly none of anyone’s business, that’s valuable to people trying to manipulate us into buying products and services, and that can be used to pester or even harass us, in some cases handing over Medicare and other personal information to convicted felons. Warranty cards with long lists of personal questions are especially egregious: what about your favorite sporting event and the magazines you read is needed to guarantee a flashlight’s performance? And how often do you give your phone number to companies that have no need to know it?

When my mother was young, back in the Early Pleistocene, she worked for the telephone company. Long-distance phone tolls were a pricey, money-making item, and people would try all sorts of scams to rip off a free call, ranging from disallowing calls they actually made to charging calls to someone else’s phone number. My mother’s job was to investigate claims of fraudulent charges. To get started, she would telephone the number that a customer said didn’t belong on a bill. When someone picked up the receiver, she would say she was calling from Pacific Bell and then quickly ask who called that number on thus-and-such a day at thus-and-such a time.

Incredibly, she said, about 90 percent of people would blurt out the truth. When you’re asked a question you don’t expect, point-blank, you’re likely to answer accurately even if the answer works against you.

In a general way, ethical people tell the truth. On the other hand, those who commit petty larcenies like stealing from the phone company are not ethical…and so why should they, by impulse, speak truthfully? It’s a deep-seated instinct, one that in the marketplace is too often used against us. Information we share for no other reason than that some stranger asks us is routinely sold to other merchandisers.

Yesterday when I went to get a flu shot at a grocery-store clinic, I was asked (among other things) for my e-mail address and telephone number. I left the e-mail address blank, figuring that if they pressed me I’d say I don’t have a computer or give them my junk gmail address. But under the mild stress of having to get another shot (I really do dislike injections of all kinds), I completely spaced the fake phone number I normally use in some circumstances. Well…actually, it occurred to me that if something was wrong with the vaccine they might need to call, so I gave my office number.

I immediately regretted it. The exception to the national Do-Not-Call Law allows companies that you do business with and all their subsidiaries to pester you with phone solicitation. So now I can expect nuisance phone calls not only from Dr. Mollen’s health-care enterprise, but from any other company even vaguely related to it.

Okay, I’m not advocating that we should routinely lie. However, I think when marketers try to extract private information for which they have no use other than to sell it or to sell something to you, you’re well within your rights to refuse to share it. And when pressed, to respond with disinformation. For example, I have a phony telephone number printed on my checks. No law says you have to tell a merchandiser the truth, nor is there any need for a retailer to have your phone number for no other reason than that you paid for a product with a check. If the check bounces, the bank will come after you.

Similarly, my Safeway club card bears my dog’s name and the telephone number of Safeway’s corporate offices.

Some retailers will themselves lie when you ask not to have a phone number used for solicitation. The first time I bought an appliance at Sears, the salesman asked for my number so the installer could call to make an appointment. I specifically stated that I did not wish to receive sales calls, and he specifically stated that my number would not be used for phone solicitation. He said he was entering a do-not-call note in the database. Within days, I was getting nuisance sales pitches from Sears. Requests that they take me off their list were ignored. It took weeks to get them to quit badgering me, and they only quit after I complained to a state consumer protection agency and the Better Business Bureau.

Big Brother is watching you, but unlike Orwell’s nightmare vision, he ain’t the government. Big Brother is the corporate shadow government, the one that follows your every step on video cameras and keeps tabs on every magazine you subscribe to, every prescription you buy, how much you earn and where you earn it, and every deep breath you take. You’re well within your rights to protect your privacy. Remember, with the exception of some financial institutions, the courts, and the IRS, no law requires you to answer a nosy question.

Image: Truth (1896). Olin Warner (completed by Herbert Adams). Left bronze door at main entrance of the Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building. Photo by Carol Highsmith. Public Domain.