Hamey

Australian blog-to-email service Zookoda has been acquired by PayPerPost for an undisclosed amount.

Zookoda was started in May 2006 and went up for sale in September 2006. With 10,000 bloggers sending emails to 2.3 million people, the numbers speak for themselves.

PayPerPost has the controversial business model of paying bloggers to write about specific things. There has been a lot of talk about whether this will corrupt the blogosphere into a tangle of paid marketing and honest opinion. Realistically though, this was always going to happen and any broadcast media has the same problem. Good writing requires a great deal of belief in the subject anyway, so if an article is well written and paid for, then who cares? Anything that is average will just get ignored.

Although most blog revenue has been from ads, there are few other startups like PayU2blog that have a business model similar to PayPerPost. It will be interesting to see how viable the paid-blogger concept is and how the blogosphere reacts, especially in light of recent discussion about a Blogger’s Code of Conduct by Tim O’Reilly.

Well done Zookoda!