There is one big problem with paid posting as far as I am concerned – and that is the approval process.

There are 2 ways to approve completed posts. You either pass it back to the advertiser to review or you have a team employed by the system review the posts. Neither is perfect and a combination of the 2 seems impossible.

With advertisers reviewing the posts, it is open to their interpretation. Take PayPerPost and their dreadful ‘link only’ opportunity. This means that the advertiser is paying just for a link, but there are often stories (and I have been on the receiving end of them) of advertisers rejecting outright these posts because the content is not satisfactory. That’s not the idea of a “link only”.

Likewise, I’ve had advertisers reject multiple posts because they were ‘plagiarised’, when each was written from scratch. And the problem is that there is no appeal. Why would the system in the middle want to upset advertisers by going against their wishes?

The other way is for the staff to approve posts, but this involves a lot of manpower to read and approve every post and this needs to be paid for, from the cut out of the payment for the post. However, at least this type of review is consistent and usually it is the more high quality end of the systems that use this technique. I know that with BlogDistributor any single spelling mistake is picked up on and has to be changed.

As I said, you can’t mix and match as that would go against the advertiser’s wants. What’s better then? Well, I suppose the long winded staff approval. It might cost more but it is fairer and even helps the advertiser. But it is probably something that needs a high degree of quality in all posts and the extreme bulk expert market places probably can’t enforce that degree of control because of the range of ability with the English language between bloggers.