Even before the PR devastation that Google brought on the hapless Pay Per Post bloggers, the idea of the very existence of sponsored posts has been put into question. While some bloggers view it as a very good opportunity for cashing on their blogs, there are others still who believe that the advent of sponsored posts brought about the end of the blogosphere’s age of innocence.

When before, blogging was purely a tool for self-expression, an online diary if you will, now it has become a platform where advertisers, for a minimal fee, can ask bloggers to write favorably about their products and services. For some, this transaction is tantamount to selling the bloggers soul. While this observation may appear extreme, it has nonetheless some grain of truth.

Some quarters view the sponsored post phenomenon as nothing short of the plague. Their contention is that sponsored posts pollute the blogosphere. They say that while there are bloggers who care about the products that they review, there are more of them who are only too willing to put out a post just so they can earn money, regardless of the product they are promoting.

Because of the prevalence of these sponsored posts, they also claim that now, when you search for something, you have to go through a lot of garbage sponsored posts before you’re able to reach whatever it is you are looking for.

To summarize, these quarters bewail the emergence of the sponsored post because:

>>Some bloggers are only more concerned about making money so they put out good reviews for stuff that they do not even believe in or care about and this eventually leads to

>>Cluttering of the blogosphere resulting from the proliferation of pseudo-product reviews and posts

While I sympathize with these concerns (I for one believe that one should only review things that he/she is sincere about in recommending), however, I also think that sponsored posts go beyond ethics or morals. Blogging has evolved from being a purely personal experience to a revenue enabling tool and thus it should not be seen as it once was.

How can you fault advertisers for example, from exploiting an opportunity such as the blogosphere where millions of potential customers congregate? With 15million active blogs today, how can they not salivate over the prospect of tapping this huge market? Advertising is fundamentally a numbers game, and advertisers are always on the lookout for alternative markets to ply their wares.

Online advertising marketplaces such as Pay Per Post on the other hand, only act as a bridge between advertisers who want to tap new markets, and the bloggers who are essentially THE market. Alright so they get their cut in the process, but how can they be faulted for filling that gap?

In the same way, how can you fault bloggers from trying to earn a decent living by offering themselves as media for advertising? Is it so bad to earn money from their blogs?

If we talk about ethics, we need to consider all the underlying ramifications of the subject at hand. Making money via sponsored posts goes beyond internet clutter or SERPs. In fact it strikes to the core of a person’s right to make an honest living. When you deprive a person of this right, then, isn’t that unethical as well?

We all have our own idea of what’s lofty and what’s beautiful in this world. However, we need to check where our rights end and where another’s right begins. If no man can tell another man how to lead his life, then what gives a person the right to dictate what a blogger can or cannot do with his blog?