reviewme.com, smart idea
Posted by David Harris Mon, 13 Nov 2006 21:54:00 GMT
This is a sponsored post for Reviewme.com:
Somewhere in the midst of today’s feeds I ran across the site reviewme.com. After seeing what it was about, I was surprised to see that googling for a minute gave no other similar services out there. In an age where the top bloggers (such as the TechCrunch and Engadget tier) get free PSPs to test out and review, I was shocked to see that nobody else had already capitalized on this yet! Correct me if you’re able to find another place. So props to these folks.
(Edit: I have since found a similar service)
The basic premise is simple—companies want to advertise, bloggers want to defray server costs. I once read that a corporation spends on average $100 for each customer they get, in terms of marketing and advertising costs. So, with a service like reviewme, assuming a review gets only one customer (and not several), businesses essentially save money by using this instead of traditional methods. Plus, it tends to promote an image of being culturally relevant; the product or service gets into the blogosphere, and we all know that never hurts.
For the blogger, it makes sense, because it might eventually get rid of all ads. As much as I like Google’s Adsense, I don’t yet get enough to defray the cost of renting a server. Granted, I’m not a Michael Arrington, but still, one of these reviews per month gets me what Google does, with more whitespace around and slightly less of a load time.
For the reader, it makes sense, because you’re alerted to a product or service you might otherwise had not known about. Reviews are impartial and biased only to the feelings of the blogger, so if you trust your rss subscriptions, you can trust the reviews. Some people believe this system isn’t as ethical as ads, but they do come with a disclaimer of being a sponsored post, so I don’t see any major ethical faux-pas. I think if your readership dislikes them, the blogger should probably not go that route, but these days most readers understand the need for an advert placed somewhere, so this will probably catch on too. Bloggers can accept or refuse offers, so if they don’t want to review Viagra, they don’t have to. And at the least, it keeps new content up on the site. On a slow news day, why not put a nice review up?
The main thing I love about it is that for once, it allows the small-medium sized blogs to actually succeed. Where large blogs get plenty of revenue, they might have to post 2-3 times per month to make the same revenue they get from a strategically-placed google ad. A small blog can post one per month and equal that amount, and still be a good benefit to the company being reviewed. At least, I hope companies won’t only go for the large blogs and ignore the untapped small to medium market.
So thus far, I give reviewme.com a good chance of succeeding. They basically seem to split costs halfway with the bloggers, so it’s much more fair than most advertising systems. I only hope, as with all systems, that it doesn’t get abused somehow. For now, it definitely seems to make a blogger’s life easier.
