Will The New FTC Blogging Guidelines Affect You?

The Fed­eral Trade Com­mis­sion issued new guide­lines on Oct 05, 2009, requir­ing blog­gers to dis­close free gifts or pay­ments they receive for post­ing a review on their blogs. This has stirred a tremen­dous reac­tion across the internet.

These are guide­lines at the time of this writ­ing and are not rules or laws. But, a fine of $11,000 could be levied against a blog­ger who did not com­ply, and was caught or turned in by a com­pet­i­tive blog­ging site, or individual.

The gist of the new guide­lines is that if a blog­ger receives a book or prod­uct to review, they have to post a dis­clo­sure along with the arti­cle, or post, which reveals the nature of the gift or receipt of pay­ment for pub­lish­ing the review.

It is not com­pletely clear yet how far reach­ing this will be. Affil­i­ate links, while not a direct endorse­ment of a prod­uct could be con­strued as such. Cou­pled with a men­tions of a prod­uct and it’s attrib­utes, an affil­i­ate link could fall within these new guidelines.

The FTC states through Richard Cle­land, assis­tant direc­tor of the FTC’s Bureau of Con­sumer Pro­tec­tion, that they are more con­cerned with how adver­tis­ers pay for endorse­ments and reviews rather than the actions of indi­vid­ual bloggers.

How this affects the adver­tis­ers, whom the FTC claims are the ones that they are really after, we shall have to wait and see. It seems that the indi­vid­ual Blog­ger may be the vic­tim and be the loser in this new attempt at reg­u­la­tion by the FTC.

The new guide­lines will only affect blog­gers within the USA and its ter­ri­to­ries. For­eign blog­gers will not be affected. Some blog­gers have already voiced that they may change their host­ing servers so that they no longer are hosted within the USA, to avoid hav­ing to obey the new guidelines.

This was bound to hap­pen due to the large amount of com­plaints that are being logged daily with the FTC about the fake review sites and blogs sites that have been on the rise for the last two years.

The FTC is try­ing to quell the rise of these fake sites and the adver­tis­ers that are uti­liz­ing them. How this will accom­plish this I do not under­stand, because these fake blog sites (flogs) already claim that they have received the prod­ucts that they are review­ing, and claim that they have made ridicu­lous amounts of money from the prod­ucts in question.

I read that the FTC received 220,000 com­plaints about Google Money Tree alone, and this is their solu­tion to try and quell the rise in this type of inter­net fraud and scam crimes. I do not really think that this is the answer to the prob­lem and I think that they have worded their new guide­lines with such a broad brush that there will be unfore­seen lit­i­ga­tion prob­lems await­ing them.

The indi­vid­ual blog­gers that are giv­ing hon­est reviews, and usu­ally receiv­ing very lit­tle if any com­pen­sa­tion, could be the newest vic­tims when all is said and done. If a blog­ger fails to post a dis­clo­sure cor­rectly they could be bank­rupted and lose every­thing that they have worked hard to build up over time, includ­ing their credibility.

The FTC would do much more good going after the cre­ators of the scam prod­ucts, the affil­i­ate pub­lish­ing sites, and the affil­i­ate man­agers, that know­ingly pro­mote scams to their mem­bers, rather than penal­iz­ing indi­vid­ual blog­gers that may or may not give a good review of cer­tain products.

At the end of the day I do not see how these new guide­lines are going to help any­one. I will keep an open mind and a watch­ful eye on how this all turns out.

See ftc.gov

Read these for more information:

What Are The New FTC Blog­ger Guidelines?

Things to do if you have been scammed

Newest devel­op­ments in flog scams

If you are search­ing for our cur­rent rec­om­men­da­tions and reviews you can read about some of them here:

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