Because whether we’ve meant to or not, we’ve turned the social media landscape in to this:
Every day as I scroll twitter, looking for the interesting/thought provoking/funny things my friends say, on every screen I will inevitably be hit - blam! - with another tweet that’s nothing more than an ad.
“Our <insert brand name> Adventure!”
“We tried a new <insert brand> recipe!”
“Join my <insert brand hashtag> twitter party!”
More and more, I follow a friend to see what they have to say, and then get barraged with links about their brand sponsored post.
You know what it’s called when you’re consuming something and a message from a brand pops up in the middle of it, right?
It’s called a commercial.
Except you’re not getting paid anywhere NEAR what a network would be paid.
And there’s the problem.
We’re flogging brands for nothing.
We’re taking time away from our families for pennies.
We are television channels filled with commercials and no shows.
I used to write a product blog. I loved it. I never made a penny on it, and I didn’t care. It was a labour of my own heart. I found products I loved and wrote about them all by myself. Soon I started getting pitches, offers of product, offers of traffic and links. And that was kind of fun, for a while, but it wasn’t why I was writing it. I was writing it because I believed in it.
Then I got disillusioned. For a lot of reasons. And one big one was that I found myself doing work for big brands with big marketing budgets - for nothing. They wanted me to talk about them, for the sake of a free water filter or eco mop.
It wasn’t cool. It wasn’t cool at all.
And when I got busy, and when I got disillusioned, it was easy to let the blog go in to hibernation, because I wasn’t doing it for anyone else. I was doing it for me. And I wanted to walk away for a while. And I could, because it was mine. I didn’t have to force myself to phone it in because I had brand commitments. When I needed a break, I took it. Because I could.
I realized that working with a big brand wasn’t the way to “make it” in the blogosphere. The people that I have the most respect for, the people that I always want to talk to, the people that I want to Be Like aren’t the ones who do the most work with brands. They are the people who were good writers. Sure, they work with brands sometimes too, but they are always true to themselves in their writing and in the way they present their work with the brand. There is never a “Here Is My Review For This Free Thing I Got” post; rather, there was a reason that product appeared in conjunction with that blogger. Because it fit. It made sense. The presence of the blogger as an enhancement, not a shill.
A couple of years ago, I took every single ad off this blog. Why? Because I didn’t want to have any contractual obligations to anyone else about what I do in my own space. I don’t want to be required to phone in a post to satisfy a clause in a contract when I have nothing to say. I don’t want to be prevented from talking about a something I believe in because it conflicts with a brand that’s appearing in an ad. I want to be ME in this space. And with those ads, I was giving all of that away. I was compromising ME.
Enough.
Stop compromising you. Stop shilling everyone who offers you a product or a little bit of dough. Start telling me about YOU. I don’t want to know what you think about your Super New Floor Cleaning Product unless I am specifically in the market for a super new floor cleaning product. I want to know about YOU.
When you write your blog, what are you telling me? Are you telling me about you, or about someone else’s product?
Are you a commercial, or are you a show?

{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m a show, with the occasional commercial … over on my review blog.
Love this, Shannon. And you. xo
Angella recently posted..Road Trip Self-Portraits
Thanks for this Shannon.
I am always reading for content and have recently cleaned out the commercials from my reader. I do not want to hear the same ten bloggers write about the same American=made family car they got to test drive for a weekend, the same free trip they took with their family, the same mass market store that they got all got a free outfit from, or the plastic toys they are promoting.
I am not saying I don’t read commercial blogs; I read Dooce and SkinnyRunner, but they both have a ton of content with substance, point of view and opinion.
My blog is advertisement-free because I don’t have enough readers to make it the effort worthwhile at this point; I use it to get thoughts out to friends, family and a few like=minded virtual strangers. I do have an idea for eventual monetization… but it certainly won’t be shilling for big multinationals for pennies in goods and services.
Uughh - that turned into a rant… sorry
Liisa at Fit for a Kid recently posted..Day 100: It Rained
jumped the gun on “submit” - I meant “from which they all got a free outfit”
Liisa at Fit for a Kid recently posted..Day 100: It Rained
I’ve been debating this for a whole now. Most of my posts are about the show, with a few commercials in there. Like Liisa I don’t have enough readers or the other numbers that big companies want so I’m ad free on my two main blogs but I do some product reviews because *I* like something and have asked a company to review it for them or I’ve purchased the product myself and am either very impressed by it or want to warn people about it.
I love that your blog is about YOU the Zchamu Show
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