Many home business owners maintain a blog as part of their overall business efforts, and for many affiliate marketers it is the lifeblood of their business. A number of successful bloggers are also now being sent dozens of products to review on their sights or are paid for their opinions.
New rules (not laws yet) that the Fair Trade Commission intend to implement on December 1st 2009 may change the face of the blogging business for good. According to the new rules a blogger must state clearly in their posts if they are being paid for their opinions or if they have received goods or services for free for review purposes. The penalty for non compliance with these rules could be a fine of up $11,000 per infraction.

This lands a lot of bloggers in a difficult situation, especially those who use affiliate links in their blogs. Affiliate marketers on the whole are not receiving free goods or services but they are in many cases using their blog to advertise product, but they generally only receive a payment if a reader makes a purchase on the destination site. Which makes their legal position rather murky.

Here is an actual example of a situation that the FTC considers a violation of their new policies, which is taken directly from their “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising”:
“A college student who has earned a reputation as a video game expert maintains a personal weblog or “blog” where he posts entries about his gaming experiences. Readers of his blog frequently seek his opinions about video game hardware and software. As it has done in the past, the manufacturer of a newly released video game system send the student a free copy of the system and asks him to write about it on his blog. He tests the new gaming system and writes a favorable review. Because his review is disseminated via a form of consumer-generated media in which his relationship to the advertiser is not inherently obvious, readers are unlikely to know that he has received the video game system free of charge in exchange for his review of the product, and given the value of the video game system, this fact likely would materially affect the credibility they attach to his endorsement. Accordingly, the blogger should clearly and conspicuously disclose that he received the gaming system free of charge. The manufacturer should advise him at the time it provides the gaming system that this connection should be disclosed, that it should have procedures in place to try to monitor his postings for compliance.”

You can download the whole rather long and confusing document here.  As many rights groups are protesting the regulation of the internet’s contents as a freedom of speech violation, it will certainly be in any bloggers best interests to watch how the story plays out over the next few months.