On the one hand. I hate advertising. It seems like the biggest impediment to an efficient market which maximizes utility by distorting perceived value and therefore choice. Why spend $100 million on making your product better when you can just spend $99 million making people think it's better.
On the other hand, advertising is how we pay for a lot of free content. TV shoes, news, blogs. All of it takes resources, and basically, we tax the gullible with the increased price of Pepsi and other products relative to generics. I'm not that gullible (but I'm probably a bit gullible), so overall I benefit from this arrangement.
Also, advertising is self-correcting. If everyone stops being gullible, advertising will stop being effective, and the money will dry up, and so all that free content will have to start getting it's income for a new source.
So, what do I think about the PepsiCo blog on SB? Well, if you take what they are serving without any thought, your a fool, but at least an egalitarian and useful fool in that you pay for everyone else's free stuff. In that sense, I don't really have any problem with it existing.
From SB's standpoint, this makes perfect sense. Content + Advertising = Profit. This is just another source of Advertising as outlined at the end of the this letter from Seed editor Adam Bly. They just need to make sure they make the content creators happy and creating interesting content.
From their point of view, it's pretty clear. They don't want to be lumped along with blogs like PepsiCo, because their goal is probably not to become rich directly, but to increase their reputation. And the reputation of advertising is mighty low.
So, to make both groups happy, SB needs to do something to prevent the bloggers from feeling like the actions of PepsiBlog effect their reputation, while still making Pepsi think that they are being connected to those very same bloggers. Rough job. Adam outlines some ideas:
"Should we host these blogs under a modified SB logo?"
Worth a shot. If I was an sponsor I wouldn't like it.
"Allow our readers to exclude them from RSS feeds?"
Pesonally, this would be awesome. I pretty much use RSS feeds and google reader for everything. I'd love the option to control. However, this is going to either in ineffective or unworkable. No sponsor is going to pay for a blog that no-one sees. If they aren't getting page hits, they will cancel the project. So, either they page hits are coming from regular browsing traffic, in which case this does nothing to prevent SB bloggers being separated from SB sponsors, or the traffic is coming from RSS feeds, in which case the sponsor quits sponsoring.
"Establish a blogger council that signs off on the scientists who are blogging?"
can of worms. I wouldn't touch this with a ten foot poll. Would the council only police sponsored blogs and not the rest? Who would be on the council. Sponsors would probably want some input on the makeup of the council.
"Make the sponsor's logo clearer on the banner?"
This is an easy yes. A win-win. Independent bloggers like that there's a clearer line between them and the sponsored blogs. Sponsors love the branding.
To this list I'd also add a mandatory tag (category in SB-speak) for all blog posts by sponsors. This would function similarly to the 'advertising' headers that are already in the content-like advertisements in things like Scientific American, etc.
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