- Swedish and Norwegian press have been fascinated by a Swedish teenager who reportedly “makes millions” off her blog.
- Kenza.se is the second most popular blog in Sweden. It’s written by another seventeen year old girl. This one’s a model, and told Dagens Media that she makes 30,000-40,000 SEK a month on income from her blog.
- Isabella Lˆwengrip says her advertisers buy “package deals”, where she’s paid a fixed sum for writing about the product or company a certain number of times on her blog and making sure she mentions it if she’s interviewed on television or by a newspaper. (N‰r ett fˆretag hˆr av sig till mig s brukar vi skriva ett avtal, om att den h‰r mÂnaden ska jag skriva s h‰r mÂnga gÂnger om det fˆretaget, jag n‰mner deras fˆretag om jag ‰r med i tv, eller blir intervjuad av tidningar.) The newspaper article mentions a company that she says paid her such a lump sum.
- Anna Bodin from the media bureau PHD says they like to use blogs to influence a target group without them knowing they’re being influenced (-Vi vill pÂverka mÂlgruppen utan att den ska k‰nna att de blir pÂverkade. D kan en blogg vara bra, s‰ger Anna Bodin p PHD.).
- WOMMA – the Word of Mouth Marketing Association – explicitly requires complete honesty in word of mouth marketing campaigns: “We stand against shill and undercover marketing, whereby people are paid to make recommendations without disclosing their relationship with the marketer.”
- Even PayPerPost now requires full disclosure that the blogger is being paid to write.
- It’s illegal by Swedish law to pay for editorial content without such content being marked as an advertisment. I think the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) guidelines in the US also ban this, though I don’t know what the legal status of this is. I presume it’s also illegal in Norway?
- There are lots of examples of dishonest blog marketing practices gone wrong – I link to a few in the summary of a talk I gave a while back (in Norwegian), and I discuss the issue pretty thoroughly in the “Blogging Brands” chapter of my book on Blogging.
- Apart from this one article, I haven’t found anything in the many enthusiastic articles about Swedish teens making money off blogging that even questions the deception involved – or its legality.
- So are Swedes – and Swedish and Norwegian journalists – simply accepting of covert advertising in blogs? Or are they all fooled by the sweet and authentic girls?
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Tama Leaver dot Net » Blog Archive » Links for July 2nd 2008
[…] swedish teenager making millions off her blog? [jill/txt] – Jill Walker Rettberg looks at the fascinating case of a Swedish teenager who appears to be making a very healthy sum blogging by inserting paid ads and editorial comment without disclosure. [More links here.] addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tamaleaver.net%2F2008%2F07%2F02%2Flinks-for-july-2nd-2008%2F’; addthis_title = ‘Links+for+July+2nd+2008’; addthis_pub = ‘tamaleaver’; Tags:boingboinged, celebrity, censorship, cyberbullying, digitalculture, digitalhistory, economics, ethics, fred, ip, law, legal, longtail, marketing, myspace, powerpoint, presentation, slideshare, socialnetworking, socialsoftware, spore, sporn, stats, sweden, wired […]