Sumolabs

At first glance, ReviewMe.com looks like a great service. Pay reputable bloggers to post about your product or service and receive feedback good or bad. I decided to take ReviewMe.com for a spin as an advertiser and see if it was worth the dollars.

I decided to purchase some blogging reviews for my fitness site gimme20.com. I selected a number of fitness related blogs with reasonably high PageRanks and Alexa rankings. After all, product feedback only goes so far: It is nice to get a quality link sometimes.

Two fitness blogs responded to my request and decided to write articles on Gimme20.com. The first blog, Self Help Daily, wrote an excellent blog post, outlining negative and positives about our product. The article appeared on the front page (where latest posts usually do), and could easily be found by browsing the helpful menus in the right sidebar.

The second reviewer, who I will no mention, also wrote a decent review and post. However, the blog post could only be navigated to directly by the URL they submitted to ReviewMe.com. You could not get to it via menus in the sidebar or any other way. This means that the blog's visitors and web crawlers could never even find the review that was submitted to ReviewMe.com. Essentially it only exists to the author, reviewme.com and myself. Useless.

So what are you really paying for if you pay for a reviewme.com post?

The ReviewMe.com website declares: "ReviewMe's marketplace of web authors will review your product or service on their Web site sending your site traffic, viral buzz, and invaluable feedback."

In a nutshell, you are buying into the value proposition that you get:

1. Feedback for your product, whether good or bad. Improving your product is always a good thing.
2. Exposure to a blog's readership. If you think a blogs readers will truly be interested in your product or service, raising awareness with them is key.
3. Exposure to Web Crawlers. Buying a link. Links are valuable after all. However, there is no guarantee a blog will link to you

So, at best, one of the reviewers only fulfilled the first criteria.

For obvious reasons, I informed ReviewMe.com about the incident and expected some resolution to what I though was a blatant scam by the publisher. Clearly he wanted to get money for writing reviews, but did not want to tarnish his blog with paid reviews. He wanted to have his cake and eat it too.

Here is what I wrote to ReviewMe.com:

I want to register a complaint for the review at:

[URL OF OFFENDING BLOG POST]

The content of the review is fine. However, the ONLY way to navigate to that post is via that link. There are no categories linking to it, it does not appear in the archives, and there is no way to browse to it. Essentially, the readers of the blog (who we wanted to target) will NOT be exposed to this writeup.

Please resolve this problem with the website and the problem will be resolved.

The response from ReviewMe.com was less than assuring:

Jordan, we will send an email to the blogger and hope it gets fixed but we can't guarantee they will make the change.

A polite response no doubt. But if they do not intend to stand behind their value proposition (review, readership, links), then they are going to have some serious problems with their product in the long run. I am an currently an unsatisfied customer.

Despite all this, I think ReviewMe.com has the foundations of a great service. Moreover, they have all the right building blocks and ethical policies in place to make "Pay Per Reviewing" tangible and profitable. Paid reviews and blog posts are clearly an upcoming trend.

The only think they need to do, is establish clear guidelines for publishers that paid blog posts need to be included into the sites navigation as if they were regular blog posts.