Why I Won’t Be Using Open Sky
As a blogger who now relies on the income I make from blogging and related activities (at least until I find work here in kiwi land!), I’m always on the lookout for new money making opportunities. After all, I spend a lot of time on my blogs and would like to benefit from all that work.
One thing I haven’t been able to get excited about is OpenSky. In the health and fitness blogging community bloggers are opening up shops left and right and they are all extremely! excited! about! it!! It seems like every day a new shop opens up from a blogger I’ve got tucked away in my Google reader. While I’m not against other bloggers making money (I try my best to help other people make money!) I wonder if Open Sky is the right way to do it.
I like the general idea behind Open Sky. You recommend items to your friends and readers and they buy based on your recommendations. At it’s core it taps into the strength of females and how they communicate. I love to recommend products I like and do it all the time. If I find something that makes my life better I want to tell people about it whether I make a commission or not.
But in it’s application Open Sky doesn’t work in the happy friend recommending a product to another friend way. It tends to be an endless promotion of products from the blogger so they can make a small commission on an overpriced product. While I love some of the products people recommend, they can almost always be found somewhere else for a cheaper price. As a budget conscious person I find it hard to purchase from Open Sky even if I do want to help out another blogger.
On many blogs it is nothing but an endless stream of ads for products in the store. Many blogs I used to love have much more “blogomercial” content promoting their store and I’m not the only one that thinks this (see the comments here). Additionally, Open Sky violates the “friend recommending to friends” philosophy by giving bloggers free products that then end up in their shop. If they hadn’t relieved them for free they would never have been in the shop. When a blogger gets all these products for free and then recommends to readers to buy that overpriced version of the product it feels a bit… weird and forced.
I guess for me I only want to promote products I have bought or plan to buy (or sometime things I would buy if I could afford it). Would I ever buy a jar of nut butter that cost more than ten dollars? Not if I could help it. So for me I can’t in good conscious recommend people buy things I would NEVER buy. Since I never plan to shop from Open Sky I will never offer an Open Sky shop. My basic rule of thumb to keep my integrity is if I wouldn’t ever buy it then I won’t recommend it. I might love expensive free items someone sends me, but if I wouldn’t buy it I’m not going to recommend it. I will continue to make recommendations of products I enjoy using the old school trusted methods: Amazon and “Google it”. Maybe I won’t make as much money, but I’ll feel better about it.
What do you think of Open Sky?
Well, now, you took the words out of my mouth. You probably saw my series of comments on the post you linked to but I think we feel the same way about it.
This is the exact argument that I struggled with before opening my OpenSky store.. On one hand, I really like the concept of recommending products that you love based on the trust between you and your friends and readers. On the other, some products are needlessly expensive and the advertising annoying. In the end, I decided to open a store, but not to sell any products that I don’t already own and love. I haven’t gotten anything for free, and am probably not big enough of a blog to get free things anyway. I don’t know.. the sea of making money in order to spend more time on your blog is difficult to navigate, but as long as you are honest and do the things that you say that you are going to do – those are the things that I find the most important. I also am annoyed by the constant stream of BUY THIS on so many blogs, and don’t really intend on doing that [which is probably what keeps me from having sold anything. haha ;) ]
I can’t stand the OpenSky appearances on some of my fave blogs.
It just reeks of advertising, the same way we all know when
product placement appears in the middle of a movie.
It really stopped my enjoyment of reading a few blogs.Drives me batty and feels fake and like an infomercial.If I see on more
shake of “Garlic Gold” or some ridiculously expensive nut butter or granola.And it makes the blog seem artificial a bit since they have to make an effort to include it nonchalantly in a recipe or whatever.
(I also couldn’t stand the Athenos Feta thing when many bloggers ate so many feta meals I felt a little queasy in more ways than one!
To each their own, I am just keeping it real by sharing my uncensored
honest feelings!
Ciao!!