This Post is Sponsored « planetOzh

A few months ago, a new service went live : PayPerPost, connecting bloggers who want to earn money blogging, and advertisers who are willing to pay some random dudes for articles about their products and services. The concept has been majorly criticized, mainly because of their lack of disclosure policy : one could write a sponsored article without saying it was sponsored, hence inducing a bias suspicion. For a couple of dollars, you can write a positive review of a product you know nothing about, without telling your readers that you're selling a post.

A few days ago, the fine folks from Text Links Ads (affiliate link) launched a similar service : ReviewMe. Being the smart internet experts they are, they obviously improved the concept. They connect advertisers looking for reviews with bloggers looking for money, but with a twist : bloggers have to mention that a review about a product is sponsored, and don't necessarily have to be positive about the product.

As a test run, ReviewMe is offering bloggers a handful of dollars for a review about… ReviewMe. So here is mine. This is a sponsored post, and ReviewMe sucks !!

Not. I was already in love with Text Links Ads, which brings in about $80 each month for a secondary tertiary minor blog. Being run by the same folks that know a thing or two about internet promotion and online advertising, ReviewMe looks like a promising hot stuff. And they said that payouts will be "fat". How fat ? I'm not sure, but what I know is that I'm being offered $50 to write this post (I hope I'm not breaking any TOS revealing these amounts…) Is that fat enough ? I guess one can legitimately think that if serious people are offering a lot of money to write about them, those people are pretty confident about making a LOT of money from their business.

From a blogger's point of view, earning, say, $30 for a post may seem like a lot of money, but if you think about it, it's not that much : on a targetted post, Adsense is likely to bring this much on the long run. ReviewMe just pays quicker. And from an advertiser's perspective, this is not more expensive than buying straight links, and for the same price you get content and feedback about your product.

This said, I'm not sure I will write a lot, if any, sponsored posts. Time and interest will tell. But this was my first sponsored post and I don't feel dirty :)