There is quite a bit of injustice floating in the blogosphere. some affiliate programs do not count affiliate incomes, some of them do not count clicks, impressions, etc. For instance, for the same placement of ads for adsense on my blog, I would get for each thousand impression an average of 20 clicks. But when I used bidvertiser, they gave me only one click for those impressions. clearly they didn’t count 19 clicks. And clicks are badly paid.

What I think about is starting a network for all bloggers, and asking each blogger to post about any problem faced by any member of the group. And digg up the stories to get more public attention. This way, nobody will try to scam or malpractice with anyone in the union. And as the union grows further, the number of bloggers will increase, and that will cause any scammer to fear touching bloggers. If you think this is good, then we can work on starting a bloggers union. I currently don have a website or anything, so I am thinking about starting it as a free social network or community and then having a dedicated website to it. What do you think Daniel?

Now that you’ve put forward this idea, I’m joining this with all my heart.

keep me informed about its take off date

It would make more sense if we had a “code” which would be more like a bloggers best practices, something that would keep things fair without seeming very dumb. It would almost be an etiquette that we would all follow.

Cases of bloggers getting into trouble are on the rise and such a union would be great to help defend bloggers’ rights. I’m in!

Union organization in the United States requires a majority vote of eligible workers/members. Union leadership is generally determined by a vote of the cumulative dues contributing membership. While each union differs on how the collect dues, most opt for a contract clause that has the Company pay the union directly either a flat rate or a percentage of salary. Would a professional blogger want to be in mixed company with personal bloggers who’s income does not rely on their blogs when it comes to deciding the leadership?

I think an association would be much more successful. Similar to the success enjoyed by those who formed BlogHer.

Union or Association, this could turn out to be great, if the members really look out for each other.

Being someone who only blogs for fun, the fees to join the association might be something that would hold me back.

Personally, I’d love to join this association, if I could afford. 🙂

Rick

If you compare bloggers to writers (and there is much overlap), the journalism industry already has such groups as the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the South Asian Journalists Association, the Society of Professional Journalists, etc.

In that vein, sure, why not create another blogger association to provide supplemental/supportive content to every other blogger association.

The biggest question in my mind, echoed elsewhere online, is that of elitism. Why should someone join this association idea of yours, and what does the association say to the free enterprise of the Web and to those bloggers who choose not to join? Are they looked down on? Are they not provided information otherwise provided by other groups?

A union would help if comment ownership became a problem for bloggers.

I think another post going into more detail about what a blogger union would mean would be helpful. All in all I think the idea would work. Bloggers need help with protecting there content, identity, domain (Ex: David Airey), as well as other things.

@Jeremy, could be. I am sure really sure about the differences between a union and an association, but I will research it out.

@Carey, I am not sure, even if you are not a pro blogger you can get in some pretty bad trouble online, so I see virtually any blogger being able to benefit from such an organization.

@DevJargon, perhaps the “union” word was not a good choice them. There will be no fees or stuff like you see on the union of the dentists 🙂 .

How much dues be? There’s a lot of bloggers that make little to no income from blogging and don’t have other means to make themselves part of something they have to pay for. Dues, rather than niche, may be exactly what pushes people out and yet won’t allow some of the best in just because of financial status.

Who would manage the money? Few people are going to want to hand over dues to a person or company they know nothing about in the “hopes” that something right is done with it.

To say we’ll all band together to go after a company sounds like a bit much to me. Frankly, there’d really have to be something going on that would warrant a “warning” of some time for me to blog about another blogger’s problems. While banning together and creating a true community out of blogging and supporting each other sounds great, there are aspects that you’ve mentioned that are a turn-off for me and I image it’d be the same for other people.

Just one guy’s opinion

For people that are blogging as a job, a union makes a lot of sense since it protects their investment and their paycheques. For the bloggers that are doing this because they love it (and may make a little change along the way), I don’t see much benefit of joining a union. It’ll just cost them in dues and they probably won’t see much benefit.

For probloggers an union of the sort suggests by Daniel is inevitable, I think, as their blogs become their business and in some cases their only income source and as such they ought to protect their interest, ie their blogs, contents, earnings from third party advertisers and networks etc.

As for non-probloggers, they are just happy to blog and read blogs!

when you start going route of union it loses that purpose imho

so go for it if thats your passion

but universal acceptance of one blogging union is going to be hard

i can bet you they will be 1000’s of copycat union popping up after yours

it will be like many boxing federation which imho help ruining good boxing

btw if you cant get big blogs to partake i dont see much success for it

my honest opinion

But yes I agree some pre-qualification is needed. One of them could be the age of the blog. We could limit the entrance to people with blogs that are 6-months or older.

The issues i have with the union are the enormous amount of backing an idea like this may need to have in order for it to be taken seriously. I believe members should have to pay a yearly fund for being a member of such union, like for example a work union (teachers union) they have to pay a fee to be in the union this helps with funding and staff, admin e.t.c

I do not think it would be enough to just depend on donations, to take the idea further i think we would have to look at some sort of sponsors of financial backing off some of the more professional blogging companies, and individual professional bloggers for example your article on the “top 25 blogs” them people, yourself.

All in all i think its a great idea, a long way of being refined in to a perfect finished plan but on its way.

I think we should aim to make the union as broad as possible, else it would be difficult to gain enough mass to make it efficient.

Grouping 50 tech bloggers together could work sometimes, but having 1000 of them, even if they come from different topics, would be much more effective.

@Matt, perhaps, though I think it would not be easy given the widespread of the members.

But it would be really cool to finally join one.

Maybe a qualification of “tech blog union” or “Online news publisher union” or “online publisher union” would make more sense then calling it a “blog union”. I don’t think that all bloggers consider themselves publishers, as much as journals, or “logs”…

By narrowing the term a bit, you can then attach standards to that qualification, and people who are bloggers can choose to sign up to be included.

I didn’t had many links yesterday so I skipped it 🙂 .

@Kevin, Indeed, there are many situations with the law is gray, and a union could help to solve problems without the need of entering into those roads.

What if a new network starts refusing to pay one of our members? There is very little to no regulation on the web so a union like this could really pressure bad companies to do the right thing.

Finally I missed yesterday’s post. Hope you are fine.

I understand well the example with the “Russian company” and I am very curious to hear some opinions from Russian bloggers.

Regards from Bulgaria! 🙂

@Melvin, why you say so? An email list could work pretty good initially.

btw, I think this concept is hard to implement and would worth a lot of work…