kartooner

The fol­low­ing is a spon­sored post, paid for by ReviewMe and it’s adver­tis­ers, a new ser­vice that rewards blog­gers (in mon­e­tary form) for reviews.

I first read about ReviewMe on Techcrunch in an arti­cle that basi­cally stated — matter-of-factly — that it would out­shine Payper­Post, a ser­vice that shares sim­i­lar­i­ties in that a blog­ger is paid for reviews by adver­tis­ers seek­ing buzz about their prod­uct or service.

It’s a con­cept that has been long over­due, con­sid­er­ing that blog­gers have recently become the advertiser’s best friend in terms of being able to con­nect with var­i­ous demo­graph­ics instan­ta­neously. Quite lit­er­ally at the push of a but­ton a blog­ger can pub­lish a review and within a few sec­onds the arti­cle is read by hun­dreds and some­times thou­sands of people.

The key to this is of course the rela­tion­ship that the blog­ger has with his or her read­ers. That is, one is more likely to suc­cess­fully con­vince oth­ers of a new­found prod­uct or ser­vice because they’ve (the audi­ence) cho­sen to sub­scribe to said feed and par­tic­i­pat­ing by inter­act­ing with the author and other readers.

The caveat of ReviewMe’s influ­ence is that you are required to dis­close that the arti­cle is a spon­sored post. One of the most noted crit­i­cisms of Payper­Post is that blog­gers can choose whether or not they feel they need to dis­close such information.

The advan­tage of being hon­est from the get go is that your audi­ence doesn’t have to feel cheated or dis­re­spected because this is another method to sup­port your site through mon­e­ti­za­tion. To deter­mine a pay­out fig­ure ReviewMe uses an algo­rithm that essen­tially cal­cu­lates your site’s traf­fic rat­ing accord­ing to Google’s Pager­ank, Tech­no­rati and Alexa.

Yet, with ser­vices like this in exis­tence there’s bound to be some crit­i­cism. One argu­ment could be that spon­sored reviews dam­age cred­i­bil­ity and that’s a valid con­cern. I sup­pose it’s only a mat­ter of time until spon­sored articles/posts are ignored for this very reason.

Despite this, it’s an inter­est­ing ser­vice that I’m sure many will ben­e­fit from, includ­ing the adver­tis­ers who are sup­port­ing ReviewMe and it’s legion of high-ranking (at least accord­ing to Google, Tech­no­rati and Alexa) bloggers.

As their tagline states; “Adver­tis­ers, Get Buzz. Blog­gers, Get Cash.”, ReviewMe seems like they’re seri­ous about con­nect­ing the best of both worlds. Whether or not this kind of pair­ing will work out is some­thing yet to be seen.

From this point on the ‘blo­gos­phere’ as a whole we’ll have to see how it works out and if it will either ben­e­fit or crip­ple the long stand­ing cred­i­bil­ity that read­ers typ­i­cally have with their blog authors.