In the midst of the whole FTC blogger disclosure debacle, Matt Cutts came out pro-FTC, as we noted Tuesday in our FTC blogger roundup. Cutts proudly put forth his disclosure up on his website:
I was glad to see that the FTC unanimously approved new guidelines regarding endorsements and testimonials. The updated guidelines affirm the principle that material connections behind endorsements should be disclosed. This seems like a great time to offer my own disclosure information.
I happen to fall into the Anti-FTC camp on this one mainly for three reasons:
1) their ability to regulate around an area that is very ‘grey and fuzzy’,
2) it’s not business friendly – a kinda Sarbanes-Oxley for blogging (with the ability to create a very real chilling effect),
and 3) the belief that it will stifle innovation to create an new ad solution for quality vertical publishers.
It is without question, almost a matter of fact, that the primary form of compensation display ads (CPM) and AdSense (CPC) fall short of providing compensation to any micro-publisher. In fact it promotes bad behavior in driving sensational or what I tend to call “train wreck journalism” pageviews.
Can you imagine if the fed regulated CPC in the early days with disclose statements? It would more than likely that Google’s ad prosperity never would have existed.
I believe that Cutts is on the wrong side of this one.
Disclosure: We don’t put AdSense on our site at siliconANGLE.com because it would provide revenue that would fall way short of managing operations that is unless we eliminated the notion of proprietary quality content and replaced it with spam bots and screen scrapers to run page aggregators and SEM arbitrage.
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