What’s Wrong With ReviewMe’s Advertorial Product?

ReviewMe recently launched a new blog Marketing tool that promises to make life easier for bloggers, but did they miss something significant?

How Does ReviewMe’s Advertorial Product Work?

An Advertiser writes 250 words about their own product.
The advertiser picks the blog that will receive this review and pays the fee.
The blogger reviews the advertisers review and accepts it if they like it.
The review shows up on the bloggers site.

Pros of ReviewMe’s Advertorial Product

Blogger doesn’t have to write anything.
Advertiser controls the message.
Both advertiser and blogger get to choose whether or not they will play.

Cons of ReviewMe’s Advertorial Product

Bloggers do not write Review in their own words.
Potential Duplicate content issues if the advertiser puts the same review on more than one blog.
Similar to programs where advertisers pay for comments with links in them. (Bloggers in an uproar over this even bloggers that write sponsored articles.)

Moot Points (not good or bad just is)

Review is called out as a sponsored review
Advertiser gets to cherry pick blog (can do that any way)
No idea if this will inspire ReviewMe to come up with a pricing plan that actually drums up business.
I saw a similar program to this about 4 months ago in a form that enabled bloggers to sell these types of things directly from their blog with no ReviewMe middle man (presumably taking a 50% commission.)
BloggingAds has the same program already. $5 gets you the opportunity to drop your article on a blog in your own words.

Making Bloggers Think

The service will definitely make bloggers and Matt Cutts think about the sponsored article industry. For Matt Cutts this will be one more sign of the evil encroaching on Google’s Web advertising and search monopoly. (Anything that threatens their monopoly must be bad for business.)

For the blogger elite, this will be yet another example of how the web is going wrong and threatening their kick-back-way of life.

For bloggers they will be confronted again with a new non hypothetical example of how to sell out their blog. In the magazine world the advertiser provides the advertisement, right? This is basically an advertisement so everything should be just fine. Not so fast, even with the disclosure it all goes back to who the reader thinks wrote this article.

For advertisers, they will need to figure our if they want a review written in their own words on 1 to 100 blogs. Then they will have to ask themselves if they want their sponsored article next to some other advertisers sponsored article. Within 2 articles of each other? 5 articles? 10 articles?

What I think

This type of practice is already available in the Blogosphere in the form of guest blogging and ghost writing. However, before I would take an advertisers pre-written article and put it on my blog, I’d probably just ask the advertiser to send me a quote to buy my blog all together. If you want to write one, why not all the others? If you think this type of advertisement will help, why not just go buy 100 domains or 1,000 domains and start up a bunch of your own blogs.

The answer to that hypothetical is that there is no value in it to an advertiser. The benefit of a sponsored review to an advertiser is the exposure to the audience and the link but also in the perspective of the blogger and the bloggers ability to describe the product or service or article and give it a fresh light.

There is no Buzz in repeating the same words over and over again in 250 word reviews spread through 500 blogs with a cutesie disclosure statement that the readers will interpret as ‘ignore this article at leisure.’

The bottom line is that if you do not mind people dropping spammy comments on your blog (and maybe you don’t) then you probably will not mind advertisers dropping entire articles, unless you have a problem with getting nailed for duplicate content.

The Program Description

we are excited to announce our new Advertorial product at ReviewMe! Advertorials are a huge step forward in the world of paid blog reviews. Check out the benefits:
For Advertisers:

You control the message. Enter up to 250 words including links back to your website and also an image of your choice.

You can login and get full impression and click tracking on your campaign.

You choose which top blogs to place your Advertorial.

For Publishers:

Less work. Simply cut and paste our code into your blog.

All advertorials are by default marked as a “SPONSOR POST:” so the disclosure is done for you.

You retain full control. Accept or reject any Advertorials purchased.

We think our RM Advertorial will revolutionize the paid blogging world by giving advertisers complete control over their messaging, along with a branding opportunity and the reporting metrics they have come to expect with traditional online media buys. Bloggers will also benefit from an additional revenue source to supplement ReviewMe’s suite of offerings. You can view a live Advertorial here. For more information and to order Advertorials visit ReviewMe!
Thanks,
Patrick Gavin
President

Disclosure – This article does not endorse any of the products or companies listed above. This author has written 3 articles for the old ReviewMe service, but that was 6 months ago and not on this website. All the links above have a rel=”nofollo” tag in them with the exception of the link to the blogger uproar which points to a fellow bloggers website and not a company (that I know of.) The author has not personal issue with blog advertising nor sponsored articles and feels that disclosure is a crock, that Matt Cutts is walking on a dangerous anti-trust line and that TechCrunch is in elitist terms – stupid.

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