Travel & Humanitarian Photos
I think the term is “crowdsourcing”. Taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor and outsourcing it to an undefined group of people, to paraphrase Wikipedia.
In this case, it’s advertising in the shape of ebuzzing. Rather than outsource the marketing and promotion of a product to an advertising agency, companies will pay approved bloggers a fee to talk about a product on their blog. I suppose the principle is that if you get enough bloggers to write about a new product then the resulting “buzz” will prove to be equally as effective as a major marketing campaign. It seems to make sense on one level. If you add up all of the reader numbers for several thousand blogs then you’d see an impressive total. And Bloggers are real people, like you and me, so we’re more likely to trust what they say than what an ad agency tells us. Probably.
The crowdsourcing phenomena is not new of course and stock photographers have seen the introduction of crowdsourcing at “microsites” like istockphoto. It’s a similar principle, rather than employ a few professional stock photographers, microsites offer to sell stock photos for any number of amateurs. If the market for stock photographs remains the same then the revenue available to photographers obviously diminishes when there are more photographers wanting a slice of the pie. That’s a pretty simplistic analysis and there’s evidence that the arrival of very cheap stock photographs has seen the market increase although not necessarily in line with the increase in the numbers of potential stock suppliers.
All of which is a diversion from the purpose of this post which was to introduce the fact that I may be posting items in the future that are sponsored through ebuzzing. The inclusion of the little icon at the bottom of the post will identify sponsored articles and the editorial nature of my musings will remain unbiased and uninfluenced by the promise of a little filthy lucre. Some may ask whether the integrity of a blog can be upheld when posts are sponsored and my answer to that would be (a) What integrity? and (b) I have a wife, Canon, Epson and Lowepro to support (except not the wife) so if someone’s prepared to chuck me a tenner for my unbiased scribbles about their product then they’re more than welcome.
This post is sponsored by ebuzzing ;o)