I’m always looking for new ways to bring traffic to our network of sites, but the new “Pay With A Like” plugin from WPMU feels socially dishonest to me.
The Pay with a Like plugin lets you leverage the power of social currency in order to give access to content or a download. You know your content is share-worthy, but how do you get those lazy visitors to take a minute to share with their friends? Make them pay with a Like on Facebook!
Content becomes visible after a user pays by sharing your post. And it’s not just for Facebook Likes – users can also pay with a Tweet, a Google +1, or a share on LinkedIn.
The plugin is also very easy to use. It comes with a built-in button to protect specific content within a post through use of shortcodes:
Don’t get me wrong, we’re never above asking people to like us when we run a competition or something, but asking people to share your site or post before they’ve even seen the content, before they even know if it’s share-worthy, well that just flies in the face of what social sharing is about in my opinion.
Also, I wonder if this wouldn’t have the potential to backfire?
When we rolled out changes to our sites recently that had 12 excerpts on the front page instead of 3 full posts, the backlash from readers had us scrambling to change the format because a lot of users just won’t make that extra click see the content. Call it laziness or whatever you want, some folks just won’t do it.
Thoughts?
