This is a paid review.

The first time I heard about SponsoredReviews.com was back in January. It was described as a service not very different than ReviewMe (reviewed here) and others. So now that SponsoredReviews has launched, I thought I'd take a look...

The first thing to note is that it is quite similar to the other blog review services. You log in, add your blog(s) and wait for advertisers to find you. However, there is a lot more here: firstly, you can set a desired price to charge for each review, something new to me. SponsoredReviews calculates a default price, but you can over-ride that. I did (tripled it) and I still got an advertiser to request a review! Not a bad move on their part to allow for these things. In essence, SponsoredReviews is actually a free market of sorts in that the sellers of blog space (the bloggers like me) punt their services to the buyers (the advertisers). If the price is too high or too low, it should naturally find its stable equilibrium. Incidentally, SponsoredReviews.com pays you 65% of whatever you charge, a bit like a tax for using their system. It's a very insightful move on their part.

But enough market economics, what else is there? The second cool feature is that bloggers can go out and find advertisers. I have mixed feelings about this as I see a conflict of interest: if you approach an advertiser offering a review, chances are you already have something good to say. If an advertiser approaches you out of the blue, I believe there would be more objectivity. Either way, time will tell how this plays out, and no doubt I'll approach an advertiser or two just to get a feel for this.

That's all good, but I'd like to end with a little note to SponsoredReviews: tone down your language a bit, willya? I'm referring to an email (I presume automated) I received today. SponsoredReviews gives bloggers seven days to complete a review once both parties accept it. Today is the 7th day for this review, and so I received an email reminding me. The wording rubbed me off the wrong way:

You are receiving this email because you have reviews that must be finished today in order for them not to be canceled and money refunded back to the advertiser.

Since we give our bloggers more than enough time to finish a review (7 Days) we take unfinished or late reviews very seriously. One of the things we will enforce is our right to suspend accounts to those bloggers who are not willing to comply with our guidelines.

Threatening to suspend accounts is bad enough, but it's made worse by the fact that you cannot cancel reviews once you accepted them (not that I can see anyway). I don't know about you, but sometimes I get caught up in other important things (like eKstreme.com being deindexed by Google; more soon), so the SponsoredReviews system is kind of a trap. Their email states that you can contact them to request more time, but they are very hand-wavy about how they may let you off. Gee, thanks.

Besides, if the review deadline is so darn important, why not send a reminder 3 days after acceptance or a day before the due date? Why leave the threat of termination till the very last second? That doesn't make sense.

All in all, SponsoredReviews is a neat system, that I think trumps ReviewMe in some respects, but also is worse in others. The good thing for us bloggers about all this activity is that the competition will (should) make the paid reviews systems better and the payouts should get better. The fun is about to being.

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