SponsoredReviews, which recently launched, is yet another service that promises to pay bloggers for their opinions. They do this by connecting advertisers and bloggers in a harmonious relationship of money and reviews. In a perfect world, this would mean that the blogger, showered with money, would still be totally unbiased in his opinion of the products. Many people are highly skeptical that this would ever be the case.

Tony Hung makes a good point by saying

While more details are sure to come in SponsoredReviews, when bloggers set their own price, and it turns out to be a princely sum, how can anyone possibly be expected to write an unbiased review?

The real issue is that anyone, no matter how much integrity they may claim to have, will, with enough money, become biased. The price point may be significantly different for different people, but, the price point will always exist.

A BETTER SOLUTION
I used to write for a blog on the Weblogsinc network, and was paid a few dollars per post. But, the difference was that I wasn’t being paid by advertisers, but rather, an intermediary. Weblogsinc never took money from advertisers and demanded that we write about their products. On these networks, bloggers are more apt to write unbiased reviews and opinions.

Paying bloggers directly is always going to be a slippery slope. A better solution is to form a hybrid between services like PayPerPost and Weblogsinc. The service would have various blogs focusing on different categories of products, and, a number of certified bloggers in each category. Advertisers would pay the service to have their product promoted, but, the amount paid would never be shown to the bloggers.

The bloggers would then be able to see products that are requesting to be reviewed, and based on how interested they are in the product, they would review them. Only after they review them would they be paid an appropriate amount for their post. In this way, bias would be kept at a minimum.

It’s a bit frightening to think of a blogosphere teeming with bribed bloggers, and hopefully, these services won’t be riding on the slippery slope. Perhaps what we need is a microformat that contains information about how much an advertiser paid for the blog post:

<span class="amountpaid">$30</span>


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Categories - Blogs, SponsoredReviews |