FTC Rules for Bloggers: Your Thoughts?
October 15, 2009 by Allison Boyer
Filed under Jobs
By now, most bloggers have read about the new FTC rules that apply to reviewing products. In case you aren’t a blogger or haven’t been following the story, here’s the basic idea:
If you’re given a free items (or service) to review, or if you are paid by a company to write a review, you have to disclose this to readers.
Bloggers are dealing with this in a number of ways. Some are ignoring the new rule outright, saying that it is unfair or that the FTC has no way of policing all the blogs on the web. Some are adding a line to their “About Me” page that says all items reviewed are received for free unless otherwise noted. Some are adding a note at the end of the review saying that they got something for free. Some are adding it right into the review’s content.
Now, before you make a purchase based on a review, you can take into consideration whether or not the blogger was biased. Image: sxc.hu
I’m curious; how do you guys feel about this new rule?
Here are some of my thoughts:
- Bloggers should have already been disclosing this information, or at least not hiding it. Personally, when I see a review, I assume the reviewer got the item or service for free.
- I don’t think that it’s fair that this rule only applies to bloggers. Newspapers, magazines, online sources, and other review sources should have to disclose information as well.
- There should be a uniform way to do this. I support the “line at the end of the review” approach, because I think that most readers won’t actually notice a note on another page. At the same time, adding it into the review could interrupt the flow of the review.
- How will the FTC enforce these new rules? Plagiarism (words and photos) runs rampant on the web, and that’s a much more serious problem in my mind.
Overall, this is a good thing, in my opinion. I like the idea of full disclosure about what you get for free to review a product, even though I don’t do reviews myself more than once or twice a month across all of my sites. What do you think about this rule?
I have always disclosed that I received items or services for free on my blog — within each blog post and with a general disclosure statement — so the new rules don’t bother me at all. I’m interested to see how testimonial advertising changes after these new rules — a line stating “Results not typical” was all they needed, but now they need that line PLUS a line detailing what typical results are.
Actually I DIDN’T know about these new rules so thanks for bringing them to my attention. I checked out your site Melanie to see how you worded your statement at the end of your posts. I think that’s probably the easiest for me. If anyone else has other example, I’d love to take a gander.
I think the government should spend billions of dollars to monitor all blogs. Why not? They’re throwing away our money by the trillions anyway!
(soapbox on)Seriously, I think this is just another step towards more government control by the current regime and his czars. They will soon control what the press has to say if they continue they will control everything on the public internet, radio, tv, etc.(soapbox off).
I’m with you, I always assume something has been given freely to be reviewed. Why not just note that it wasn’t free?
Good info. Thanks!
Bill