nilcypher said:
The new guidelines would mean that sites would have to disclose any connections between the games they review and the ad revenue they receive, and have also been expanded to include bloggers in that net.
Unfortunately the rules are a lot more complicated and subjective than this. The general gist of the guidelines are that any compensation for an endorsement that would not be reasonably assumed must be disclosed. Of course, the definition of "compensation", "endorsement", and "reasonably" make a huge difference in that statement.
For example, a review of a product by itself isn't an endorsement. If the product for review is provided for free as a review sample ("compensation"), then whether or not it counts as endorsement depends on who is reviewing it and how much the product is worth. A personal blog that gets a free review copy of a movie would need to disclose it - but a site based on doing movie reviews may not, since most people can reasonable assume that review sites get review copies. But a big-ticket item like a car would need to be disclosed if the reviewer got to keep it no matter what, since it's not reasonable for someone to be giving away free cars. It's very subjective.
Also unclear in this case is how it relates to normal advertising. For example, none of our editors know what ad campaigns we're running on the site on any given day, even though people in the same company sell the ads, so the requirement for disclosure here is unclear. Most large organizations work similarly (though not always). But there are definitely also documented cases where advertisers have forced editorial changes (or at least tried to), either by threat of pulled campaigns or just information cut-off, which aren't directly monetary compensation. We had someone try doing that to us once, and a long long time ago one of the ancient ancestors of this site was blacklisted by Sony PR/advertising for giving EverQuest a bad review.
In short, the implications of the new rules on "professional" sites is pretty unclear. I'm sure they'll be defined better over time, but I don't think the assumptions as translated through GamePolitics are as clear as they're made out as.
What this
does make a clear difference on is guerilla marketers though. The new rules specifically mention messageboard posting, for example. If you're trying to advertise something and you don't disclose it, even on a forum, you can be hit with a FTC beatdown. Likewise for setting up corporate-controlled blogs without making it obvious that the content on them is for advertising, or posting fake 'reviews' on Amazon/Newegg/etc. This could have a huge impact on some of the more shady astroturfing campaigns - or at least give the FTC a stick to use to beat them with.
