A recent trend in the blogging world are paid reviews. Bloggers give their opinions on products, services, or web sites and get paid by the advertiser. It seems innocent enough. Get paid, make a review. What could be wrong with that?

You would never see anything like this from reputable journalists. If a company paid them to review their product, they would lose all credibility with their readers because it would be suspected that the review would biased in favour of the company.

There are two major players that host paid reviews: ReviewMe and PerPerPost. They both operate on the same principles. An advertiser chooses a blog which gets high traffic to get maximum exposure for their company. The reviewer is then paid a commission based on the price they charge for their services. This can range from $40 to $750. Its whatever the market is willing to pay. The commission given for the review is very high. ReviewMe gives 50% of the review price and PayPerPost is at 90%.

The review can be positive or negative, but its usually positive since too many negative ones will discourage future review requests. No business will pay $400 if its likely they will get a poor review. Its true that a negative review can drive traffic to a web site, but a positive review will push even more traffic there.

Is this an ethical way of reviewing products and services? If a journalist working for a magazine received money to review a product, do you think the review would be unbiased? People want to read an objective analysis and criticism, not a paid evangelist trying to make a sale. This is what destroys the credibility of bloggers doing paid reviews.

If you look at the types of web sites and companies that are being reviewed by bloggers, many of them are just plain garbage. They would never get noticed by a reputable publication and have to resort to paying someone to get a review. There are good companies that get reviewed, but that’s rare. Someone with a good product can get a free review from journals from sending out press releases, that is, if what they are selling is worth talking about. I’ve never seen a company like Microsoft ordering a paid review from a blogger for their software.

Most bloggers want to make money from their web site and paid reviews are seen as a cash cow. There are successful blogs that claim to receive over $1000 per month with their reviews. This is an easy way to make money as long as the traffic to your site is high enough. Its not just your opinion that’s valued, but also the page views and user sessions for product exposure, and not to mention the link back to the advertiser’s web site.

Paid reviews are good business for the review hosting companies and can give decent revenues for successful reviewers. Do these reviews have any real value? It benefits the advertiser, but the shopper is left with a biased review from a paid blogger.

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