It bears repeating what Lucas says, but don't trust me….

<![CDATA[the weblog of Lucas Gonze:
I’ve been pondering how to apply the Marqui paid-blogging model to the music industry. Ethical chicken aside, the business value of mentions on alpha MP3 blogs is huge, and bloggers deserve money for their hard work. Blogging suffers from very serious ethical problems in the first place, putting cash up front makes the ethical issues more transparent rather than less. However, the paid-blogging model has to grow up, and there are a lot of details to be taken care of.
For one, future paid bloggers won’t be able to write about paid blogging; that topic is pretty well owned by Marqui. They’ll have to write about the product itself, which is not easy.
Types of blog entries should be broken out. For example the contract might call for two 10-word mentions, one 100-word entry, and one 800-word entry.
Paid bloggers need to write on a topic already associated with their sponsor. For example, mentions on this blog would be a lot more valuable to an internet music product than to a content management system.
Paid blog stints have to account for the natural lifetime of a topic. There just isn’t that much to say. Marqui blog contracts were for three months; this should be halved to six weeks.
Marqui’s rates were perfect. $200 a week is what it costs to get a blogger to take the project seriously.]]>