How popular is sponsored content today? A three-week campaign with BuzzFeed, including a handful of sponsored posts written by its advertorial staff, will cost you a minimum of $50,000. Most BuzzFeed advertisers pay much more than that.

BuzzFeed is the headliner of a media zeitgeist that is all the rage these days for both media companies and marketers; more than $1.5 billion in content sponsorships is expected to be sold this year. This month, the Washington Post jumped on board with its BrandConnect offering, joining Forbes, The Huffington Post, and The Atlantic. Thousands of media outlets also collect revenues from organizations like Outbrain, a “PPC for content” vendor that sells links from media sites to corporate blogs.

But while sponsored content appears to be a much-needed boon for publishers and advertisers weary of the limitations of banner ads, sponsored content also is sending many traditional journalists into an ethical tizzy…

Read the full post on sponsored content ethics at MarketingProfs Daily Fix blog.

So just as I was posting a history lesson about the perils of sharecropping — both IRL and online — I came across two announcements by Twitter of relevance to this topic:

1. Twitter said Friday it is shutting down Posterous, the once-popular hosted blogging platform that has been badly neglected since it was acquired by Twitter early last year. That means all the bloggers who have built their web presences on the site will have to grab all their content before it gets deleted.
2. Twitter also announced late last week that it will begin assigning “value ratings” to users’ tweets that will impact their visibility to their followers. This sounds a lot like Facebook’s algorithm changes that have limited the ability of brands to organically reach fans who liked their pages — forcing brands to spend more and more in advertising to reach their fan bases.

Posterous bloggers shouldn’t be surprised by being booted off their “land” online. As Kim Phillips wrote last month:

Posterous, since it was bought by Twitter, has been notorious for inaccessibility, missing content, and unresponsiveness to it’s blog users.* Notice I didn’t say “owners,” because when someone else controls your digital assets – blog posts, photos, website content – you’re sharecropping. You can slave over brilliant prose and gorgeous images, only to have them disappear on you.

As for Twitter’s planned visibility changes to tweets? As Sam Laird at Mashable puts it:

It’s definitely a positive for Twitter, which will have the power to designate “high” value tweets (in some cases, perhaps, for a price).

Just “some cases”? We’ll see.

As a good Southern boy whose ancestors hailed from Mississippi and who spent much of my four years at the University of Virginia studying 19th-century Southern history, I know a thing or two about sharecropping.

Sharecropping in the United States originated in Mississippi and became popular across the South after the Civil War, replacing the vanquished plantation economy. Because freed slaves never received their 40 acres and a mule, they found themselves uprooted in an agrarian economy lacking the basic asset needed to have a chance at success: land.

So the Freedmen were forced to be tenants of the white landowners — planting the cotton seed, tending the crop, being responsible for everything produced by their small patch of land. But after all the work was done, they had to hand over the proceeds of their labor to the landowners and receive just a “share” of the “crop” — usually no more than half.

The blacks, as well as poor whites, forced to work as sharecroppers were little more than feudal serfs for nearly three generations after the Civil War.
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