wahlau's online hut

was reading through myoss planet, and saw byte writing about reviewme.com. being curious, i went ahead and checked it out. It turned out to be a site that uses the power of blogsphere to allow people (advertiser) to promote their products. The concept is - you, as a blogger, are paid according to your blog's worth. ok, not all, but 50% of your (blog's) worth. The business model is based on sharing the price of advertising with the reviewer.

looking at this perspective, you might think:

1. boy, they are taking 50% away.

2. boy, finally i am can get 50% from the review/advertisement instead of puny portion from other models.

first point is valid. but they are providing bloggers the platform to get paid. so i believe they must get some income out of the system. second point is where you might take back the first point. Normal advertisement sites you get paid per click or page view, or with a fix rate of fee for your review of a certain product (some bloggers do reviews out of interests and are never paid!). The fee you receive might not necessarily be judge according to its worth. in other words, the middle man will usually get most of the advertising fee, and leaving you with smaller portion of the dough.

with ReviewMe (and if the concept works) you should get paid according to the popularity of your blog. it uses some ranking combining ranking such as Technorati rankings and Alexa ratings to value a reviewer. Therefore if you have regular visitors, and you should get at least 20USD for a review. I doubt when your google adsense can bring you 20USD per month, your site will worth lesser than 50USD. Even wahlau.org itself gets 40USD (which is the minimum :P) so any serious starters should not be worried.

The review concept is also worth mentioning. I think they see the strength of blogsphere. Firstly, the blogsphere are connected with regular visitors to a site. That means, people who visit a blog should be mostly people who regularly reads its content. Else the visitors should be people who will have the same interest in the contents of the blog. therefore this blog should be the best place to promote products similar to the content.

Secondly, the concept is putting its bet on the good old "word of mouth" technique. This should be the oldest method of advertisement. If visitors from a blog built up trust and interest in the blogger's content, the trustworthiness of a review should be high enough to consider the comments from the blog. ReviewMe does even mention that one is not obligated to only say positive things in a review. Genuine and serious reviews are the ones that will bring trust and effective result to both advertiser and customers.

last but not least, some bloggers might want to share good stuffs to others, while finding a way to also make some income. Therefore if a business fits, they would not mind continuing things they love to do, while making some money out of it.

a little stuffs on ReviewMe. The site itself is rather simple and direct/straight forward. Registration is also quick and easy. At the end of my registration i got the chance to review ReviewMe itself (which is why i am writing this now), which i assume is the standard procedure. You can choose paypal as payment method, while another choice is cheque. I do find the FAQ part little too brief, and there is no information on stuffs like how ranking is being calculated, or payment info/methodology (i assumed and trusted byte's review with the 50% thingy, see my points above :P). It would be good to have such information ready and easily accessible.

We shall see how the site grows. At the mean time, let's see how many reviews i will get and when i get paid, then i will update this post :)