SocialSpark 2.NO!
July 14, 2010 
3 Comments
SocialSpark has been a quality Get Paid to Blog platform for some time now. It has features that other services do not and advertisers seem to enjoy the service. While SocialSpark has not been used on this blog, I have used it before on other blogs. The service was good, but obviously needed to be revamped. Well, everyone welcome SocialSpark 2.0!
I got the email about this change on July 12th, so I figured I would check it out. After I read their blog about the changes, I can honestly say that I was NOT impressed. Most features and changes were great until I stumbled upon their Direct Publishing requirement. This is exactly what it sounds like, where SocialSpark will use your username and password to your blog to automatically upload your post to your blog. You actually write your post in SocialSpark and then the advertiser gets to look at it and ask for changes. This does reduce the amount of times that you have to deal with non payments after you run your post, which was a pain for everyone.
While you do get guaranteed payments, you also give up your login credentials to SocialSpark so they can automatically post to your blog. I am not sure about everyone, but that does not happen on my blogs without careful consideration. We don’t even allow guest authors to have access via different logins. It is to make sure that we have full control over the quality of the content. I think SocialSpark made a huge mistake with this crazy requirement and with other people commenting on this, they agree with me. This is a no-no for most bloggers.
SocialSpark…..Change this crazy requirement and make it optional for bloggers. Do the right thing!
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I am not happy with their changes. I will not allow any company to auto publish on my blog, no matter who they are. They need to make this optional or they will most likely lose a lot of bloggers.
I too was dismayed about the direct publishing clause. IZEA claims that it will speed up approvals of blog posts. My answer to that is to only have blogs in the system that are reliable and well written to begin with. Of course many premium bloggers (the cream of the crop so to speak) will leave but unfortunately there are many others waiting to sign up. Have you ever looked at those other blogs in the system? Most of them are junk, ad filled personal blogs with no direction. Only the very top 300 ever get those $100 – $500 blog posts. The rest of them get the $15 ones if they are lucky. I haven’t done a blog post for them in over a month now. It is not because my blogs were not qualified but none of the products or services offered to me were anything I wanted to promote. I removed the IZEA tracking code off of my blogs a long time ago.
Thank you for visiting. There are many that feel your same thoughts with Social Spark. While there are a lot of other blogs there, I hope the advertisers will start fighting back because the quality blogs are gone. This is the only way that IZEA will change their mind on direct publishing.