• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, December 29, 2006

Blog word-of-mouth marketing company PayPerPost plans to acquire key assets from Performancing LLC and its network of some 28,000 bloggers. PayPerPost, which connects bloggers with marketers seeking paid product placement, is hoping to bolster its campaign measurement capabilities with Performancing's proprietary blog analytics tools.

Performancing Metrics, one of the assets purchased by PayPerPost, is a free service tailored for bloggers to track visitor stats--including AdSense auditing--for their blogs. The platform, now in beta, reports blog visitors, blog comments, ad click-throughs and much more.

"Performancing has created several very innovative services that help bloggers become more successful in their work," said Ted Murphy, chief executive officer of PayPerPost.

Performancing Exchange is a free online marketplace for companies, blog sites and others wishing to employ professional bloggers. The classifieds have brought a number of bloggers and employers together for both short-term and long-term relationships.

Earlier this month, PayPerPost began requiring its bloggers to disclose their paid relationships with marketers amid pressure from industry watchdogs. Now, the company, which only launched in June, expects its bloggers to post a general--and some say vague--disclosure on their sites.

The change followed comments made in early December by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission specifying that individuals who receive compensation for pushing products must adhere to laws requiring disclosure in advertising.

Before recent changes to PayPerPost's terms of service were made, the company encouraged bloggers to disclose their paid relationships with marketers, but did not require it. Along with the change in terms of service, PayPerPost is raising the minimum price per post to $5 from $1, "to cover the increased blogger and marketplace costs of the new policy," according to a company statement.