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

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