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Review Me Review: Sponsored Posts on all topics

Do you have a website/product that you wish to submit to the critique of others in order to create name recognition/traction/buzz?

Use Review Me to find people willing to review and critique your resource.

Do you often blog about products or services and critique their value and benefit?

Use Review Me to find websites willing to pay you for a review.

With ReviewMe, sponsored posts come front and center to the blogging world.

Now, I know what your thinking. Paid reviews?? Seems like someone is going to heavily weigh the tables in favor of deep pocket advertisers.

Heres the thing: Bloggers are paid for a review, they are not paid to say good things. They are not paid to say bad things. Review Me has set things up in such a way that two key elements must happen:

1. Advertisers must be willing to submit their site/product to the scrutiny and critique of others. They are buying critique and exposure not necessarily goodwill.
2. Bloggers MUST disclose the paid nature of the review. They can be honest. They can be direct. They can tear something apart if they want. They are being paid for their opinion. Its that simple.

When I first read about Review Me, I was excited about the possibilities. My site is all about reviews and recommendations. It seemed like a natural fit for me. Of course I had concerns. Would I lose credibility? Would people not listen to a paid review?

Here are my thoughts:

• credibility is maintained by disclosure
• credibility is maintained by being fair, honest and direct. That means my reviews should be like they have in the past. I gear my reviews towards beginners. I generally lean to the positive edge anyway. I tend not to review items which I simply don’t like or won’t serve my readers. I don’t waste my time on items that aren’t worth a mention.
• credibility is maintained by writing quality reviews.
• people will listen if all the above are in place

Questions advertisers should ask themselves before using Review Me:

• Do you feel your website/resource/product will meet the quality standards of the Review Me blogging audience?
• Are you willing to accept ALL kinds of buzz, good and bad?
• Are you willing to pay for that buzz, whether good or bad?

Remember, advertisers are not even buying a link. A reviewer may decide the product isn’t worthy of a link. A reviewer may even decide to link to something with the anchor text “dont buy this crappy item”. This means advertisers must be willing to submit their products to the purifying fire of opinion and review. Why pay for something when there is no control over the PR? Quality products should have nothing to fear. Whereas products that straddle the fence of usefulness should think twice about promoting themselves with Review Me. Quality products will get quality links.

Questions bloggers should ask themselves before using Review Me:

• Will you be willing to disclose the paid nature of the review? Disclosure is a big issue and I am currently writing a more complete disclosure statement that discusses not only paid reviews, but other advertising and affiliate relationships that exist on my site.
• Are you willing to write and have an opinion? Are you willing to write, have an opinion AND get paid for it?
• Are you willing to write review posts of value? Personally, I think Review Me should increase the word limit from the current 200 words to 500 words. This would enforce better quality reviews.

The key for Review Me will be attracting advertisers. Over the next weeks and months it will be interesting to see if companies are willing to pay for this kind of exposure. I am writing this review a few hours after Review Me has gone live. It is way too early to tell if even bloggers are signing up. I will try to post as those kinds of numbers can be ascertained.

Other concerns:

Review Me has a 48 hr time limit once a blogger accepts a review. It is not clear whether this time limit will be the standard for all reviews. This time limit might not work in a lot of cases. I recently reviewed a web statistics program. It took about six weeks (if not more) from the time I signed up for their free trial to the point where the review was written. Maybe it is just me, but I don’t feel comfortable writing about something I haven’t had time to use/play with/try to break.

I do wonder whether advertisers will take the risk of review. Text link ads are one thing. Advertisers can control quite a bit in that transaction (not just the publisher, BUT ALSO the anchor text of the link). However, with a review, a lot is out of their control.

While I do hope Review Me will end up generating quality content not only for advertisers but for readers, I wonder whether the concept of fully disclosed paid reviews will catch on. It seems to me it could see a similar fate that the concept of “newsmastering” has. The latter faced ethical (and legal) concerns over the monetization of other people’s RSS feeds. Will ethical concerns over the paid review seal Review Me’s fate? (even IF the nature of the review is fully disclosed?)

Disclosure: This is a paid review. What does that mean? Simply, I received money to write this post. I was not paid to be positive nor negative. I wrote this review because I wanted too, not because I had too.

UPDATE 2010: Been a few years since I wrote a paid review. I think I only wrote five. I no longer write paid reviews.