Review of ReviewMe.
ReviewMe just launched this past week, and it is a new service allowing advertisers to pair up with enterprising bloggers. Basic premise: Advertisers pay bloggers to write a review of their product. A blogger wants to make money, and advertisers want to get their products out there. Seems to be a good system if it doesn’t get too abused.
This isn’t the first company to offer something like this, PayPerPost was the first one I knew of, but there might be more as well. (TechCrunch wrote a review on PayPerPost here.)
Anyway, ReviewMe has gotten a lot of press because they are the first to require absolute transparency in their system. If you write a review for a company, somewhere in the post you have to reveal it. I think this is a pretty reasonable system, and creates value to the advertiser while allowing independent publishers of blogs the opportunity to make money. As others have pointed out before me, the key to this working is maintaining a transparent system.
I have signed up for the service, and this post is in fact a purchased review of the ReviewMe product.
So far the process has been really straightforward. Sign up, add a blog, get accepted, write reviews. Once a site has been accepted, they use a ‘hidden’ algorithm that takes into consideration your Alexa Ranking, Technorati ranking, and estimated RSS traffic are the primary tools for determining your blogs value. Once a star rating has been established, you are then worth a flat fee per review. I got 1 star, which means that I’ll get paid $20 for every post I write. Pretty cool. However, now, I have to wait for someone to deem my site worthy of paying me $20 for a single review. Which I’m not holding my breath on.
However, we’ll just have to wait and see.
There are problems inherent in the system, as John Chow wrote about here. Basically it seems you can game the system, making your blog ‘worth’ more than it should be. However, if it is deemed too valuable, nobody is going to pay, as it’ll be worth much less than asking price, which will then end up hurting the publisher. I’m sure these guys will work it out, but there seems to be some work necessary still at this point before it’s a flawless system. More than anything, I think it’s very novel, and probably going to be very succesful.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that one of the nicest features of ReviewMe is that they allow the publisher to write whatever they want, and do not require positive reviews of the products. That’s pretty key, sorry for leaving it out.
