Stop Selling Yourself for a Lip Gloss
Every other day in the blogger groups I’m part of, someone posts a giveaway. Two lipsticks from Maybelline. A €10 H&M voucher. Once, memorably, something from KiK—a discount chain so bottom-tier it functions as a punchline. The blogger is thrilled, posting with the energy of someone who just landed their first real brand deal. And I sit there thinking: you got played. Again.
My name is Marcel Winatschek. I make money on the internet—writing, editing, wrangling feeds and PR agencies and trolls into something resembling content. I’ve been doing it long enough to watch the same mistake repeat itself so many times it’s become ritual. An agency contacts a blogger, usually someone young running a fashion or lifestyle site, and offers product or a small voucher in exchange for coverage. The blogger, starved for any acknowledgment that their work has monetary value, says yes. Posts go up. Shares happen. The brand gets its reach. The blogger gets a lip gloss.
Here’s what that lip gloss actually cost. The agency billed their client for a campaign. That budget exists. It just didn’t go to you. You absorbed the cost entirely—your time, your audience’s attention, your credibility—and converted it into free advertising for a company that doesn’t respect you enough to pay real money. The agency knows you’ll do it again. You always do.
I’m not saying the people running these campaigns are villains. It’s just business. If someone offers to deliver genuine value for free, you take it. That’s rational. The stupidity is entirely on our side—the side that keeps accepting these terms because we’re flattered to be asked. No offense. But also: offense.
The part that actually bothers me isn’t even the self-harm. It’s what it does to everyone else. Brands compare notes. If they can get equivalent reach from six unpaid posts, why would they ever pay for one? Every blogger who works for a voucher is setting a market rate, and that rate is embarrassing. It doesn’t just affect you—it pulls the floor out from under anyone who’s tried to hold a real price.
The answer is a rate card. Reply to every cooperation request with a real number—a few hundred euros at minimum, adjusted for reach, covering the post and social shares. Some brands will claim they have no budget and vanish. Good. The ones who come back are the only ones worth the conversation.
Firms and agencies aren’t the enemy here. They’re doing exactly what you’d do in their position: keeping costs as low as possible for as wide a reach as possible. That’s business. It’s time to be a part of it instead of the raw material it runs on.