What the FTC plans on doing to Bloggers

[TheMakeupSnob]

I posted the article from the new york times in my blog. It seems people have alot of mixed opinions on this subject.

I have a beauty blog, and in my corner of the blogging world it is a big deal. Makeup is given away for free and beauty bloggers use it rave about it and readers buy it.

Its good to know if products were purchased or given for free so the knoweldge can be taken into review when making the decesion as a consumer to buy or not to buy. But then again. You need to trust your resource. I have a handful of blogs I would trust no matter what they said. I would not need to have a disclosure.

From a bloggers perspective. I wouldnt want someone to discount my review, thinking a product wasnt as good becase I didnt pay for it. So its a hard case. You tube seems to be the biggest problem (rather than blogs) from what I have been hearing...

[ChickenFreak]

There's been much discussion about this on the perfume blogs and forums as well. I think that all of the trusted blogs have policies that comply anyway (disclosing what's free, and so on, and in fact most of them give anything valuable away again), so it doesn't seem to be a practical issue, more a worrying precedent if online publications have to comply with stricter rules than paper publications.

I really have trouble imagining that a private blogger who happens to receive a few free items and forgets to disclose this would end up being prosecuted. Yes, the policies do seem to allow for the possibility, and yes it's probably safest to be careful to disclose, but I'd bet that they're after bigger fish than that.

ChickenFreak