“ReviewMe is eating their own dog food by giving away $25,000 today to pay bloggers to write about the service.”

So how big of a slice of that $25,000 did you get? (Just / Kidding)

I think that if bloggers are going to be paid instead of allowing them to decide how they are going to disclose that fact - there should be a preset wording, such as Google does with the paid adverts.

It will be a very grey area, of how a blogger decides to disclose that they have been paid to write the post, which will make this a very murky area still.

I see it as another form of advertisment - which is fine - we all need ads, but I dont want to be tricked or confused about what is an ad and what is a ‘real’ opinion.

Well, if services like this are going to exist, at least it’s a little bit of a better model for all parties involved. I guess it’s a step in the right direction. It’s an interesting climate online right now that you’re seeing this concept spreading as it is. Lots of money in the air, people unsure of where to spend it. It’s going to be an interesting year.

Definitely looks better…except for the fact that the blog I just set up this week, solely with the intention of making money and writing filler, wasn’t accepted. I don’t get it…derpa derpa dee derp…

Why would an advertiser pay for a post that may be negative and will be marked as an advertisement? Why not just, oh, I don’t know, buy a traditional advertisement? One where you control the copy.

This seems like a great deal for bloggers, but not a very good one for advertisers.

Michael,

I personally dont think Review Me is not such a bad idea . . . but what made you change your mind? Or atleast moderate your opinion? I guess you are just being “stating the facts” this time rather than offering your opinion?

(I actually agree with your current post more than the previous one)

Just last month you said:

The PayPerPost Virus Spreads

Our position on these pay-to-shill services is clear: they are a natural result of the growth in size and influence of the blogosphere, but they undermine the credibility of the entire ecosystem and mislead readers.

While we applaud the fact that ReviewMe requires disclosure and prohibits advertisers from requiring a positive post, we still think the very act of paying bloggers to write about a product is a very bad idea. Frankly, we’re not happy that one of our sponsors has launched this type of service, and we’ve notified them that we will not allow promotion of ReviewMe through TechCrunch.

I assume the service has some of rating system where an advertiser will be able to see the “better” bloggers or review their blogs. So even though they allow negative posts, I doubt bloggers making negative posts will get many return advertisers.

Also, bloggers taking money are less likely to write bad reviews (or at least will try hard to find something they like) or at least that is what advertisers would hope.

As some one who is on the other side of this, having just launched an early beta version of our site (Koonji), it is an interesting dilemma. You don’t want to be perceived as a site that pays for its reviews but at the same time you need to build early traffic through these reviews. The sooner this becomes an accepted form of “advertisement”, the better for us.

I signed up for my blog, and I do not see it as an issue as long as it is stated in the post that it is a paid ad. In addition to that statement, allowing the blogger to write a negative or positive review makes the system non-biased.

These types of low-life PR businesses were done ‘last time around’ (aka ‘web beta’, ‘Web 1.0′, ‘the great bubble’, before the dark crystal cracked, etc.) They are all gone and/or have been sublimated into the big-time private net reporting infrastructure (Yahoo invested companies, The CNET cluster adverticle, Zdnet whores for Microsoft, etc.) This is just a naive ploy for the new blogger franchise fanboy generation.

Smacks more of a bubble everyday when scabbie little online businesses not only have competition, but they talk smack about deep-sixing some other weezle’s endeavors. Where’s the Web 2.0 in this? Where the cooperation, the social networking, real peeps & homies cross-cutting API’s? This is like those pimps during the ‘last time around’ knocking each other out selling domain names and screwing people like you and I in the process. No real business, not giving any value to the community, just whoring for a thin vein of dollars.

One way to realize how cheezy some of this stuff operates is to imagine the same business in the *ahemm* real world, or shall we say operating as a BAM business. The comparison I came up with is tainted media… like CNBC going-on about how great new NBC show is, or FOX shilling for the Whitehouse, or Joe Blow who owns the chemical death plant at the end of your local industrial lane, rubbing elbows with Pete who runs the paper across town at the local watering hole and the subsequent plastering of articles/editorials in the town’s main news source like: “DeathPlant’s Wonderful Service To The Community” and “All The Kid’s Cancers Are Entirely Unrelated To The DeathPlant”. If you are still reading this far, thanks for your time and buy my product since we have 80,00 pageviews from India and 9 carefully crafted comments agreeing with me on just how great it is.

ReviewMe sounds like a great idea, though to be fair, PayPerPost is implementing ranked payouts for their bloggers as well. I remember reading this in a Townhouse meeting chat log on their site.
PayPerPost leaves a lot of the power in the hands of the blogger. I always put up disclaimers that I was making a paid post. I also didn’t choose products unless I liked them or I had the freedom to be negative.

CreamAid has been doing this for a while,
and you are mentioning it as if this is the first time
this kind of thing ever happened. strange.
Is it because Reviewme is from your sponsor?

if you want to get into Reviewme, I think your site should at least be PR 4 with decent traffic according to Alexa. The problem with Alexa is that its not too accurate and the stats are a bit outdated.

Looks much better than Payperpost, these guys have made an impact with Textlinkads & know how to run a company & do business properly.

Best of luck to them

Stuart
http://www.earnersblog.com

Yeah, personally I think creamaid is doing a great job
as far as ethical issues are concerned.
I don’t understand why they aren’t getting some attention.

Very smart marketing medium indeed.

In the UK we have several companies that list reviews of products & places
Reevoo, CrowdStorm, TrustedPlaces etc. Each does a great job in their particular sphere but I recently argued with one of them that building a business model purely based on goodwill from visitors might prove very difficult to sustain in the long run once people have got over them being the new new thing before the next new thing comes along.

The basis for my argument is that time and attention (T&A) are not elastic and therefore where I choose to spend my T&A will become ever more important to me.

Yes YouTube got $1.65bn and never paid users but many of the comments after the sale related to “where is our cut of this deal. Our UGC helped make you valuable and we get nothing for our time, attention and/or creativity”.

Users are getting smarter and will want compensation or a share of the advertising revenue they help create. The generation of prosumers is upon us and ReviewMe is the first example of sites waking up to the need to pay people for their time.

If a service like this opened in the UK how long would it take before people said I don’t want to give a review to you for free when I can get paid to do so eslewhere?

Is ReviewMe the best or only model -I don’t know but doubt it. Amazon with its Mechanical Turk has an interesting compensation model. Yahoo Answers have reward points already and Xbox Live has a points reward system.

Someone somewhere in the future will crack this problem on a global scale with a micropayment reward system that does not require cash. In Web 1.0 Beenz nearly pulled this off.

As a newbie reading Techcruch I am a bit perplexed.

Why would I bookmark a blog where the decisions about what to write about will be influenced by -

“hmmm .. if I write about such-and-such I can have a nice dinner out”

It really does not help even if there is a supposed ethical aspect where the ‘advertisement’ aspect is clearly marked and you are ‘allowed’ to speak negatively and still roll in the dough. I don’t look at a blog in order to skip over a section like I do with those Saudi Arabian and other ‘advertisement” sections in the New York Times. It is hard enough to separate blog wheat from blog dross without dealing with mercantile-influenced articles, blogs where the decision about what to write about are influenced by the $ that will result from the article.

If Techcruch is going to be involved in these deals I don’t think I will be coming back often, if at all. Maybe I am missing something, feel free to try to tell me what. I will stick around to listen but that is my gut reaction.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
Queens, NY

Oh, on the other hand, let me just say that I have found your series of articles about Start Page companies very interesting and well done. That is how I got here. Now if I can just find out what is Ajax (Flash I know).

Consumers (better known as customers), the likes of you and I, want to know what is an advert and what isn’t. This looks like it just blurs the boundary and creates confusion. Who does it really benefit?

Reviews need to be impartial and independent – “real-world reviews”.

Some interesting questions:

Is a business going to pay good money for a poor review of their product? They might once, but will they do it again?

I love how Mike says he is not going to let them promote ReviewME on his blog, but he headlines their launch which is 100 times greater than any banner/button for any period of time.

TechCrunch might not be registered as a paid blogger at ReviewMe, but he is certainly on the TLA payroll, one way or another.

Michael - I think you are missing one important item - and I posted this on CenterNetworks. You state:
Finally, advertisers can purchase posts, but they cannot require that a post is positive. The blogger can choose to write their honest opinion without fear of not being paid. The only requirement is that the review must be a minimum of 200 words.

And my reply is simple:
If I look at your blog xyz.com and there are 2 or so negative paid reviews, do you really think I would pay for another review knowing it could very well be negative? This is my biggest concern with this service.

BTW - let me make it even easier on the pos/neg review issue: When was the last time you saw a paid advertisement on tv or newspaper that was negative… let me see… NEVER.

Interesting: if you have a blogspot or wordpress.com blog, you’re ReviewMe rate is inflated, since your Alexa ranking is sky high (Alexa doesn’t rank subdomains, so all blogspot.com blogs have an Alexa ranking for ALL of blogspot).

This would seem to be a flaw in how they are calculating rates.

So - it is an “advertorial”. Basically trying to trick a customer into thinking it is a review even though you state “paid for advertising” in very very small letters where most people won’t read it. If you weren’t trying to trick them then why the hell would they read the post.

I can see a lot of bloggers jumping onto this bandwagon and taking payments (which we be very small when the pie is split) to write about these things, and have a very low readership who actually care about reading the “adverts”.

Is there really any difference between this and paying a marketing agency to write positive reviews about your product on Amazon?

Just think - out of the people who have commented (about 23 of you so far) - how many are in some way related to “review me” or would benefit from it doing well (as a blogger)?

Don’t get caught in a bubble again guys - think about it!

Once the prices drop it will be interesting for advertisement. I hope that the quality of some blogs will not drop because they take too many paid posts.

Well… I must agree with Josh:

Good for bloggers? Maybe.
Good for advertisers? Certainly not.

PayPerPost will give more value to the customers than ReviewMe.

I understand the people who do not like the PPP concept claiming “they will bury PPP” is just pure marketing BS. In fact, it’s almost pathetic for a company that sell link ads for the sole purpose of improving PR.

JT

I’m not sure where I stand on this.

On the site, it suggests that companies use the paid post as market research as much as a source of buzz. Market research costs quite a lot to conduct. People won’t do very much for free and participants might be given equal amounts for participation in focus groups as ReviewMe is paying. If it is used in that way, then all well and good.

Will people still be able to be honest if a product sucks? I don’t think so…

This sort of shill service just clogs up the internet and makes it harder to find quality information. In the long term it will make many (me at least) even more loyal to the bigger quality review services as people seek reliable impartiality.

Its a crappy trend and just one more thing to avoid online.

(already have a trackback, but…)

In my review of reviewme.com I suggest several improvements to the site, and things bloggers should know before using it.

http://engtech.wordpress.com/2.....t-of-view/

wow, I think you got everyone’s attention, but can you see the balance, will it be positive or negative. Anyway, negative or positive publicity is always a publicity.

Vurbs.com pays people to post videos that they have hosted at Google or Youtube.

Very good idea.

I think this is a great idea by ReviewMe…and waving the $25,000 carrot in front of bloggers is a unique idea for sure–it convinced me to write about them.

What I don’t get is the all or nothing / black and white approach to this new idea. For example, one big complaint is that if most of your reviews are negative, then advertisers will no longer be interested in your site. This could be true but is assuming too much.

First of all, are advertisers going to read through your entire archives to figure out what is positive and what is negative? And it’s as if everyone who signs up with ReviewMe will stop what they were previously doing and only write reviews for ReviewMe. For my part, I post something nearly every day, sometimes multiple times a day. If a paid review with full disclosure is here or there, how would an advertiser know where to look without reading half my blog?

I don’t know if the business plan will work out, but I don’t think it’s fundamentally flawed. I think blogger and advertiser behavior is hard to define. The results will tell us how it works, not our over-simplified hypotheticals.

I’ve reviewed ReviewMe here and think it’s worth a shot:

http://www.computers.net/2006/.....ing_r.html

Michael, there are 4 significant and critical reasons why ReviewMe will not succeed which I detailed in depth on my post:

ReviewMe.com, a Business Model With Nowhere to Go:

1. What advertiser is willing to pay for a product whose quality they cannot review ahead of time?
2. Forcing bloggers to disclose they are being compensated automatically creates perception of bias, even on the most credible of bloggers offering unbiased perspective.
3. Pressure to produce positive reviews will continue since bloggers will not want to jeapardize future earnings from potential advertisers who will have an opportunity to see the blogger’s review history and shy away from bloggers with a significant negative review history.
4. By eliminating smaller blogs ReviewMe effectively sacrifices the entire “tail” play of smaller blogs who in aggregate have an opportunity to produce significant earnings for the company.

Gene Kavner

Yeah, well, signing up is easy, but this is for the mega bloggers, not some little nobody webduck like me. Hey, I have opinions. Most of the time I can type and write in English coherently. I am reliable. Guess I will go back to making my few cents a day at MTurk. ;(

Thanks for the tip. earned my $50

With regards to Gene’s remark:

1. You’d be surprised at what advertisers are willing to pay for… Dealing directly with advertisers has taught me a lot of them not using professionals web marketeers don’t know what this web advertising is about, and they have all kinds of wrong assumptions about it.

2. Compare it to ‘advertorials’ in the world of paper-magazines.

3. I don’t believe any blogger will get rich from ReviewMe income. It’s all very relative. Why would you feel under pressure if your monthly income won’t run in the thousands?

4. That’s a point worth mentioning, but IMMHO, it’s the same as saying that small directories and SEs should be spared by Google… Perhaps they should.

-Erik

I tried ReviewMe.com and didn’t get paid.

Sedentary Lifestyle: Lack of exercise may lead to ED. erectile dysfunction and alcohol

But i don’t know why - mine wasn’t even accepted at REviewme. Can you please tell me if there are any minimum requirements to get accepted at Reiewme ?