When I first starting blogging, there was a whole brouhaha about disclosure and whether or not accepting payment for blogging was an "in" thing to do or not. In this economy I think that snobbishness has died down a bit. In my opinion, the whole fuss was kind of silly anyway. Those who had wanted more and didn't want any competition and those who didn't wanted something. I just wanted to learn how the whole thing worked. PayPerPost, which has been good to me, and which I consider a great way to monetize a blog (and this, by the way, is NOT a paid post), used to give us little disclosure bubbles to put at the end of every post, unless the advertiser specified that they did not want disclosure in the paid post. I've only seen that happen once, by the way.
I don't take a paid post opportunity unless I think it is interesting and on the up and up. One of my favorites was Arizona Game and Fish. They honored this blog by allowing me to help them spread the word about boating safety by promoting their cute little video on the topic Don't Swim with the Fish a while back. I did about 5 ads for them; 4 were unpaid. People remembering not to drink when they drive is important to me whether they are in boats or on the highways.
Even though most of my posts are recreational and/or public service, I do pay a little for my blogging platform and tools and see nothing wrong with getting something back. So somewhere on here there is a site-wide disclosure notice.
By the way, the word brouhaha is French, dating back to the 19th century, but some dictionaries footnote that derivation as "imitative" and I rather wondered what it was imitative of. Turns out some diabolical characters in drama used to mispronounce a popular phrase then quoted from the Book of Psalms, much like the apparently related Italian word barruccaba so that is one possible explanation. Yes, it is meant to have a slightly derogatory connotation.
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