Valleywag
Buried news in a long post by Amadeo Plaza at Gamer 2.0: CNET allegedly sells placement of articles, not ads, on the front door of its GameSpot site for about $3,500 per week. He's not saying advertisers can buy an article — rather, they can pay to have an article placed prominently on the front door. Imagine the makers of Cloverfield paying The New York Times to move its review of the movie to page A1 and you get the idea. I'm supposed to opine here about the evil advent of adverjournalism and its corrupting influence on my so-called career. But at $500 a day to override CNET's editorial judgement, my overwhelming reaction is that GameSpot is selling itself too cheap.
CNET sells editorial placement, needs to raise rates
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5:05 PM on Mon Jan 21 2008
By Paul Boutin
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5 comments
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Let's just get it all out there, end the Potemkin presumption of objectivity or truth and everybody just print what they think people want to read. And how do we figure out what they want to read? Why they PAY FOR IT. Duh.
Also shut up about steroids, pay college athletes, put the money back into politics, and I don't give a shit about your carbon footprint.
it's not underselling when you paid $3500 for front page placement of a bad review...
As an employee of CNET and within the Entertainment division (which includes GameSpot) I can attest that this claim is 100% false. We never have nor will sell editorial or advertorial type content on GameSpot.
@GameSpotter: But what about _placement_, which was the point of the post?
@GameSpotter: Your own management, two years ago, admitted to the practice of paying for editorial placement.
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