Bloggers Must Comply With FTC Disclosure Guidelines // Community // BlogCatalog
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As of December 1, 2009, new FTC guidelines went into effect requiring bloggers to disclose any time they are compensated for endorsing or reviewing products or services. Bloggers should now be disclosing any time they receive payment, free products or services, or perks in return for a post on their blogs. Also any relationship with a company or organization that can be viewed as creating a conflict of interest should be disclosed. It is also a good idea to add disclosures to any past posts that still receive a decent amount of traffic.
The main focus for the blogger should be transparency. Tom Chernaik, one of the developers of http://CMP.ly (Comply), has had several discussions directly with the FTC. In a phone conversation yesterday, Tom told me that "what the FTC has said is that they're not looking to go after bloggers. What they want is for people to comply and be transparent and to be open about what they're doing." He stated that most of the burden will fall on advertisers. They will be responsible for "lead[ing] the discussion about disclosure...and having a monitoring plan in place to monitor those disclosures as they occur."
