The following is not a paid review
Time to get used to that (without the not) or the words sponsored review appearing on blog posts from now on. ReviewMe is a new pay per post venture for bloggers and advertisers. Bloggers register at the ReviewMe site and once they have added their blog to their account the site works out the price your site is worth depending on Technorati, Alexa ranks and subscriber numbers. Advertisers can then ask you to review a product on your site – review it (good or bad) and you’ll be paid half your site value. I registered and my site price is $40. So if asked to review a product and if I did so I would be paid $20 into my paypal account. Indeed I could be paid $20 from ReviewMe by linking this review to my account. I won’t.
The whole thing just stinks. For me paid reviews will always be devalued. For each blogger that reviews honestly there will be another ten that will review positively so that advertisers use them in the future. How many blogs will be set-up just to do paid reviews? For me it’s another form of viral marketing that will only devalue the usefulness of bloggers and their tech reviews. Ventures like ReviewMe only increase the value of forum sites – AVForums, Apple Discussions for example, where most people are reporting honestly about products and issues and helping other users. Would you trust a blog post that someone’s been paid to write?