I received an awkwardly-worded email from Stephanie Wong yesterday afternoon soliciting myself to participate in StyleHive at a rate of $1 per post.

Hi Julie,

 

I’m Stephanie, the Editor from Stylehive. How are you?

 

We are interested in advertising on your Almost Girl blog.

 

Here is the deal. We’ll pay you $1 for every original bookmark you add to the Stylehive and you will also need to put our Stylehive badge on a prominent spot on your blog. The bookmarks must be original, that means no ‘quick copies’ and no ‘copy and edit’. At the end of each month we’ll total the number of original bookmarks you’ve added and send you $ via Paypal. The number of bookmarks you add is up to you!

This struck a number of worrying chords over here, and I feel that it’s necessary to voice some of the concerns we have about this program. Through Coutorture we represent 152 bloggers, several of whom are “featured people” and active contributors to StyleHive.

I understand and respect the motivation behind this program – rewarding active contributors to the site for their work. However, the way these deals are structured undermines the basis for their contributions. By paying bloggers to post anything they have the incentive to post everything. There’s no quality check and none of the self-editing or accountability that happens on their own blogs. Ultimately, we think that this will and will pollute StyleHive with halfhearted recommendations born of convenience and not the passion for products and platform that their community relies on.

More importantly, though, there is no requirement that the payment for posting be disclosed. This is a tremendous liability for both StyleHive and its bloggers. One public row about unscrupulous fashion bloggers would do enormous damage to our community and “social” online fashion sites as a whole, and we simply can’t go about this in the same manner as the magazines – taking money for editorial (justified or not) until our credibility has completely eroded.

We have emailed a select few of our bloggers who participate in the site about this program. Few had been invited, but the reactions ranged from dismissal (“I wouldn’t do something like that”) to outright hostility (“now you can’t tell who is posting or why!”).

Phil and I have strongly suggested, both over the phone and via email that StyleHive discontinue this offer until they can find a way to incorporate a mechanism for transparency, align the incentives such that they don’t undermine the value of your site, and don’t alienate the very communities they rely on and hope to enrich.

We are also recommending that they they tell us how they have, or will, address these concerns. Until we hear back from them, though, we discourage any and all of our bloggers from participating in any way with StyleHive lest they eventually by we feel will be an