Thursday, July 12, 2007

ReviewMe Advertorials

Patrick Gavin’s ReviewMe service in the past allowed bloggers to create paid reviews of websites; though you didn’t have to write anything positive in your review, these services are controversial. (Disclosure: I consulted Patrick on the ethics/ non-ethics of paid blog post ads in 2006.)
They now have a new additional service at ReviewMe called RM Advertorial. Wikipedia defines “advertorial” as “an advertisement written in the form of an objective opinion editorial, and presented in a printed publication – usually designed to look like a legitimate and independent news story.” There’s some differences to the old ReviewMe style:

• The blog post in question will not be written by the blogger, but by the advertiser. It’s much more of a classic ad this way (except that it’s in the blog post area). One of the side effects of pushing an ad out as a blog post is that it will appear in RSS aggregators and readers. So not only will it appear as a new unread item – which I’m sure annoys some of those reading along – but it also appears on aggregation sites which automatically reprint specific RSS headlines. (At least one can now build filters that reject anything with the “sponsor post” keyword in the subject, though it may be easier for the aggregator to remove the feed altogether.)
• All posts are labeled with “Sponsor Post” as disclosure in the title.
• All links go through a redirect, which acts as a counter for the advertiser but is also supposed to prevent PageRank from passing (as Google objects to paid links which pass Googlejuice – even though TextLinkAds, Patrick Gavin’s other business, depends on this). I’m not so sure the PageRank prevention fully works; at this time, as you can see at this sample sponsor post, the links use a “temporary redirect” HTTP header, but the redirect URL is not blocking bots via robots.txt.
• For each post – which contains up to 250 words plus an image – the blogger receives a flat payment (suggested by some of ReviewMe’s algorithms, but determined by the blogger).

I don’t think I’d want to use such a service, but I think it might actually be better than paid blog posts where the blogger has to say something... because here, at least it’s a clear-cut thing (provided the blog template makes it very clear who’s the author of a post). It’s an advertisement, period, and not aiming to be “natural conversation.” The blogger’s opinion isn’t needed, and perhaps the blogger decides that one paid post every other week is less annoying to readers than lots of AdSense, or affiliate links, all around every post.

Still, I have a suspicion especially those using RSS readers won’t like to have one more channel of noise to enter their info world. While RSS ads may become the norm – e.g. Google didn’t buy Feedburner just to be nice and make it free, but likely also to include AdSense – at least “normal” RSS ads don’t pop up as unread items.

[Thanks Patrick!]

ReviewMe Advertorials by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (1)

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