FTC to Fine Bloggers up to $11,000 for Not Disclosing Payments

via spiers:

soupsoup:

Adam Ostrow at Mashable

The FTC has updated its Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising for the first time since 1980, and among the changes, a requirement that “bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.” Fines for violating the new rule will run up to $11,000 per post.

A heads up to those who have been NonCompliant.

If this were enforced with actual journalists, I know a lot of people who’d be out of a job and/or deeply in debt to the FTC.  At lifestyle magazines in particular, freebies are often the norm, not the exception.  (I don’t think that’s the way it should be, but that’s the way it is.)  But you’ll never see a little asterisk next to a ringing endorsement of this season’s Galliano show that the company happens to outfit the editor-in-chief at zero cost.

It’s cute that the FTC thinks I apparently have a money bin upstate where I go do butterfly strokes in a sea of my millions and sometimes talk in a Scottish accent.

Does this also mean that Julia Allison is in trouble?