Notes, links and conversation

Aaron Wall,  a reputed SEO, and Text-link-ads.com, an ad broker, have teamed up in Reviewme.com, a place to connect companies with bloggers that want to review their products for a fee.  Bubble 2.0 overspending?  Corruption of bloggers’ ethics?  Let’s see:

Ethics

• Another similar service, Payperpost.com, attracted a lot of negative comments.  With Payperpost you commit yourself not to disclose you’re being paid, and your review has to be approved before payment (so needs to be positive…) .
• The opposite is true with Reviewme: no commitment to a positive review and the obligation to disclose you’re being paid.  Seems to be a fair and transparent, the only consideration left is whether or not to annoy readers with a paid review (and whether being paid will influence your subjects and posting frequency…) - see this mixed evaluation at Publishing 2.0.

Economics

• Paying for possibly bad reviews?   Seems pure madness from the sponsor’s point of view…  (Prices vary from $30 to $250, see the screenshot of the “Web Development” blog listing.)  But it might not be totally so: 
  • It’s hard to imagine a review, even a negative one, without a link to the company site or product page.  Links are worth money, and especially links that are in-text  and in-context will make sure you end high in the Search Result Pages for relevant search words.
    • (in-text= in the body text, not in some obscure link list in the sidebar)
    • (in-context= embedded in a text with keywords relevant to the product discussed),
  • If your product or service sucks, it sucks, and a positive paid review wouldn’t help anyway.  But on the other hand: even if it’s really good, it’s going to fail if nobody knows about it… 

• So how much is the value of a link in a review, without taking the directly generated traffic into account?   Selling links on web pages (for traffic and pagerank) happens to be the business of Text-ad-Links, and the calculator on their site (click screenshot thumbnail) values a link in the “primary content zone” on a single blog post on this blog to $24/month (that’s what they charge advertisers, 50% goes to the site owner).  
• Compare that to a paid review on this blog: $60 (50% payout here as well) for a permanent link.  Seems like a sponsored review is a better investment than a paid link… 

Execution

• From the blogger’s perspective:
  • your remuneration depends on a mixture of Google pagerank, Technorati ranking and feed subscribers (Bloglines!).  (Comparable to the Blog Juice Calculator, a valuation gimmick by Text-link-ads).
  • you have 48 hours to accept a proposal for review and probably another 48 hours to write the review.
  • slick interface, clear workflow
• From the advertiser’s perspective:
• search through the blog inventory via tags, sort on ranking
• What’s lacking from the advertiser’s perspective is a search engine that lets you seek through the full text of the blogs that have registered at Reviewme - I assume a Google Custom Search Engine or a Live.com Search Macro is out of the question here :-D.
• 50% is quite a high share for the broker.  Common wisdom has that the payout rate for Google Adsense is 80%.  It’s not unthinkable for other companies that have gathered blog metrics and contact data, to  jump on the bandwagon, so prices might go down (think feed readers à la Bloglines, Netvibes, stats trackers like Performancing, IceRocket and RSS services like Feedburner, Feedblitz).
• As always with this kind of services, Tech and Webdesign blogs are overrepresented… 

Localisation

•  I found some Dutch-language blogs by searching the keywords “Dutch”, Nederlands”, “Netherlands’” or “Belgium”.  The interface seems to be unaware non-English-language blogs at the moment.

Results

• You can’t say they missed their debut…  Since launching, hundreds of reviews have been posted - since they practice what they preach and pay for a review…  Be quick if you want to scoop up your part of the $25.000 giveaway.
• Also this blog posting is being paid for.  If everything works out fine, that is :-) .  (Also note: the link to Text-Ad-Links contains a referral ID.)

Will I post more paid reviews?  I will definitely have a look into more offers, but it won’t be for the money - I’ve been labouring 2-3 hours on this post, so the research be better worthwhile… Feel free to trackback or comment to let me know your thoughts (or your own experiences).

Bookmark this post:
Subscribe to future posts:

This entry was posted in Advertising, Blogging, WebWatch on Monday, November 13th, 2006 at 00:57 and tagged as: Aaron-Wall, aaronwall, Blogging, marketing, payperpost, payperpost.com-advertising, reviewing, reviewme, reviewme.com, reviews, seo, Text-link-ads, text-link-ads.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.