Tom Michiels’s Weblog

I recently conducted an elaborate study on the Belgian blogosphere’s position on paid blogging. This research was part of the Master Thesis I wrote during my eMBA at the Flanders Business School in cooperation with the Kellogg School of Management. The subject is “uMarket.it: Consumer Generated Marketing”: a venture business plan, research project and financial plan to launch a self-serve online marketplace that allows advertisers to reach out to a European network of bloggers.

The empirical research on the feasibility of the uMarket.it concept was split up in two successive parts. First, I launched an online survey among a sample of Belgian bloggers in which we investigated their position on getting paid for writing a blog post. Secondly, I launched an experiment among a sample of the survey respondents to act as a proof-of-concept and test if the survey results were realistic. A set of bloggers was asked to write a paid blog post on a commercial subject and another set was asked to blog on a non-commercial topic. The data was then analyzed with SPSS and linked to the survey data. To conclude, I complemented my own research with desk research on the online advertising expenditure and the way surfers interact with online advertisements such as display advertising. I also dove deeper into research on a phenomenon called ‘banner blindness’. The methodology, results and findings, and conclusions are described in detail in the document that is available for download below.

Some key findings of the survey:

- 62 percent of the respondents have some form of advertisements on their blog
- Google AdSense (35 percent) and banner advertising (41 percent) are the most popular forms of advertising
- more than 50 percent of the bloggers earn less than 50 EUR per month
- According to the survey, Business/ICT is the most lucrative blog category
- We can conclude with a confidence of 95 percent that between 59 and 75 percent of the blogging community is willing to blog about a product, service or event in return for compensation.
- Most of the bloggers who rejected the idea of getting paid to write blog posts indicate that the main reason is a conflict with the purpose of their blog.
- Next to the conflict with the purpose of their blog, some bloggers are also concerned that participating in sponsored blogging will affect their image as a neutral source.

Download the Research Paper : Tom Michiels - Research, Survey and Experiment on Paid Blogging (PDF, 4,5 MB)

Visit the uMarket.it Experiment Site