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How to Live in a Grey World of Objective Yet Commercial Content

Posted by Jenny on May 11, 2010 in Best Practices, Opinion

by Alicia Navarro

Online journalism has become a vast grey area created by the blend of black and white extremes of objective content and commercially-driven content.  We all want to be confident that what we read online is in fact as authentic and objective as possible, but we also know that everyone needs to pay the bills, which means that online content is likely to somehow have a degree of commercial influence.  While users may at first be sceptical that monetised content can be trusted, it is in fact possible to be ethical in this grey area.  Monetised content can be authentic, and with honesty and disclosure, publishers can retain the trust of their users and still make money.

Online journalists are increasingly pressured to bend to commercial pressures as it’s these advertisers that pay their salaries. The newspaper business has been in sharp decline both in print and online, and with ad revenues severely down all-around, newspapers and editorial web sites need a new way to make money.  As a result, online journalists are increasingly encouraged to write sensational content that drives page impressions to their banner and text ads, or commercial content that encourages readers to purchase from advertisers’ sites.

The nature of editorial content has also evolved over the past few years, with professional journalism suffering in the face of citizen journalism and blogging, as well as a seismic shift towards social media and crowd-sourcing for obtaining news and information. In the United States, Facebook has become more popular than Google.  Additionally, a recent study by PRWeek/PR Newswire revealed that 52% of bloggers consider themselves journalists, but only 20% of them receive the majority of their income from it.

With decreased readerships, lowered perceived value of professional journalism, and a plethora of competing options, the ability to rely on just banner advertising is nearly impossible for most editorial sites. This leads to temptations to accept pay-per-post and other paid sponsorship deals, and putting pressure on them to find ways to monetise their content ethically.

Can these competing demands be balanced? Some would say no; that the second you are paid by someone you can no longer be objective about what you write about them. However, most journalists and editors I have met care deeply about their content, and how it is perceived by their readers. They work hard to write content that is true to their audience, but where appropriate, focus on retailers and advertisers that they do objectively like and with whom they have commercial relationships.

Affiliate marketing is a particularly effective way to approach this balance. Editors write about products and retailers they like, and as most prominent retailers have affiliate programs, sites can earn affiliate commissions without having to approach the process in the same explicit commercial way as pay-per-post can be. Also, affiliate marketing is publisher-led, rather than advertiser-led in the way that pay-per-post can be, so editors are still in complete control of whom they write about and what they write about them, making it significantly more possible that they can write objectively on the subject.

If editors ever do get too tempted to wax lyrical about an advertiser who is paying them, the most powerful policing technique will be applied to them: reader loyalty. Readers are the best judge of the authenticity of an editor’s voice and won’t return to a site if they feel the content is overly commercial in its nature. It’s better to be honest about a product and not earn an affiliate commission but keep the loyalty of the reader, than get a sale but never get the reader back again; and editors can take one more step to take to ensure complete transparency with readers, and this is to disclose how they monetize their site.

Disclosure is key to building a loyal readership. Besides being part of the FTC guidelines for blogs and editorial content, it is also good practise to be honest to your readers about where your income comes from and how this might influence your objectivity. There are some great examples of how disclosure can be done in a way that is honest but won’t scare your reader base– check out Scott Jangro’s disclosure statement and Shawn Collins’ on his affiliate marketing blog AffiliateTip.

What this boils down to is that editors and bloggers have to take responsibility for the integrity of their content and for finding a balance between writing objectively and writing commercially. It is possible to navigate this grey area between objectivity and subjectivity; and moreover, it is necessary if we want quality content written by professional journalists or talented bloggers, and we don’t want to pay cash to read it.

Alicia is Skimlinks’ CEO and Co-Founder and you can find her on Twitter: @alicianavarro