I'm going to flag it for you now, Octobers earnings will not be anywhere near as high as the previous two months. Why? The number of PayPerPost opportunities that I'm comfortable with taking is decreasing by the minute. Recently I have had one post repeatedly rejected because the opportunity I'd taken specified that there be "no in post disclosure". Apparently the fact that I included "This post sponsored by:" at the very end of the post meant that the post could not be accepted.

Advertisers are becoming increasingly demanding. For example, there are currently a range of $5 (50 word minimum) post opportunities available. As well as the one mandatory link, these the advertisers have specified that for these opportunities, three additional links are also required. To top things off the opportunity concludes with:

"DO NOT INCLUDE ANY IN TEXT DISCLOSURE SUCH AS "sponsored by" "Paid for by" -- Disclosure, if any, must be in the form of a picture."

Likewise there are other opportunities that specify things such as "Please no in text disclosure!!!".

I have no problems with the whole paid posting thing, so long as the person posting is free to disclose that they received payment for it. I know PayPerPost like to point to the "Disclosure Policy" and the little disclosure badges as a way to disclose paid posting, but in my opinion, whacking a little badge in the bottom of your blog is not satisfactory. The sitewide method does not allow for readers to differentiate what posts a blogger was paid to post compared to those posted freely. This is particularly a problem for a blog like this one that takes paid opportunities relatively infrequently.

The minimum Google Page Rank required for a blog to take up the opportunity these requirements were taken from is 3. Besides all the other issues with this, $5 is not a lot of money to be paying for 4 links on a PR3+ blog. For all the hoops a poster is required to jump through before this could be approved, $5 hardly seems worth it. Another thing is that If the post stuck to 50 word mark, around 25% of the post would be made up of anchor text.

If advertisers specify that there be no in text disclosure then PayPerPost should make the "Disclosure Badge BubbleAd" a mandatory requirement.

I've been a long time PayPerPost user, and have generally been quite happy with their service, but this recent drop in both quality of posts, and the apparent endorsement of "restricted disclosure" is starting to become a problem. Hopefully it is a problem that they address far sooner than later. So, how do you feel about PayPerPost at the moment?

Edit: I've also just joined LinkWorth to see how they go as well. Looks like I'm doing some ad program spring cleaning.