Our friends at PRNewser passed along some recent statistics from eMarketer.com that underscore the significance of the new Federal Trade Commission guidelines controlling how blogs must handle “endorsements” of consumer goods: This year alone, the FTC’s determination that newspapers and magazines do journalism but blogs do product endorsement will affect, in the abstract, 27,900,000 people, or 14 percent of the U.S. Internet’s “population.” (In practical terms, the number affected is significantly less, because many bloggers don’t even review consumer goods, let alone receive them for the purposes of review.)
Let’s imagine for a moment that the FTC created a set of guidelines that would bracket out 14 percent of American print media and hold it to a different standard than other publications, or bracket out 14 percent of America’s radio and television stations and hold them to a different standard than other broadcasters. How long do you think it would take for some serious protests, including but not limited to calls for congressional intervention, to begin?
When you look at the other chart eMarketer.com sent us, though, it’s easy to understand why the FTC thinks it needs to do something (even if you happen to believe it’s doing the wrong thing).
By the end of next year, more than 100,000,000 Americans will be reading at least one blog at least once a month—that will be more than half of the U.S. Internet “population,” and (according to Census Bureau projections) 33.8 percent of the entire U.S. population. We get that the FTC wants to protect that substantial demographic from consumer fraud, and it’s perfectly reasonable to insist content funded by commercial interests for the express purpose of promoting those specific commercial interests be identified as such, the same for blogs as it is infomercials and “special inserts.” The problem lies in the FTC’s determination that a not-insignificant class of bloggers has been, is, and will be engaged in commercial speech when just about nobody else involved in the actual “transactions” involved believed that to be the case, nor do they believe it now just because the FTC says so, nor will they believe it once they are compelled by federal regulation to behave as if they do.