Effective December 1st 2009, bloggers cannot advertise a product or service without disclosing payments. I could see this one coming because some bloggers where like this guy below:

FTC fine blog

Of course not all bloggers can afford FTC's $11k fine…

The thing is that most people will probably not notice that a product is actually being advertised and think that praise for a product or service is genuinely made by someone like them who happens to have a popular blog.It is only a trained eye, i.e. someone that has knowledge of sales and marketing, that could see if something is being sold or if something is being reviewed.

Well, according to the FTC, this is not acceptable business practice anymore. As a social media and Web 2.0 enthusiast, I welcome this decision, because it will remove a lot of noise from the blogosphere to a certain degree. Of course, the FTC will not be able to monitor everybody, but ads disguised in reviews will be diminished. Or, will it reinforce the influencing power of the ones that will go unnoticed?

Without being a legal expert, I believe there will be some semantic as well as logistics issues in identifying and correctly labeling sponsored reviews. After all, I can hardly imagine that Starbucks would admit they hired the blogger above…or did they?

Update (Jan 17 2010): The FTC finally admits that it’s not so easy to enforce its rules.