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Warning to ReviewMe: Make Advertisers Accountable for Disclosure, Too

November 11th, 2006 by Easton

ReviewMe launched a few days ago.  It’s another service where advertisers can pay bloggers to write about a given product or topic.  The folks at ReviewMe say that unlike with PayPerPost (which launched a few weeks ago), bloggers paid through their system must disclose the fact that the blog posts are paid for:

"We are going to bypass this entire problem (opportunity?) and require that bloggers disclose posts that are paid reviews (in whatever way they are comfortable with and that is appropriate for their blog’s audience)."

But I still worry about the potential for advertisers to drown out online conversation.  The statement above by Andy Hagans of ReviewMe contains several problems that others have pointed out, such as the assumption that the mere requirement of disclosure of payment will enable ReviewMe to "bypass [the] entire problem" of corruption, or the disclaimer that disclosure may be made however the paid blogger feels like.

Think about it: "I love this product – Acme generously asked me ;) to write about it here and I jumped at the chance!" sounds very different from "DISCLOSURE: This blog post is a paid review of Acme Product X, paid for by Acme and enabled via the ReviewMe paid blogging program."  We need some clearer requirements here.

I hope Jim Turner can make some more noise about this.  I like his initial thoughts on ReviewMe.

Here’s a comment I left at the ReviewMe blog just now:

"Intriguing idea.  I appreciate that you say you will require bloggers to disclose the fact that they’re being paid to write about a particular subject.  One potential problem I foresee, however, lies in the manipulation of online conversation via advertising dollars.  Someone with enough money could pay a bunch of bloggers to drown out conversation about a competitor, for example.  Or have them focus on a minor political issue in order to lead voters to ignore a more important one.  For some advertisers, any buzz will seem like good buzz – and blogs make it easy to artificially inflate or deflate conversations.

I’m just warning you to consider carefully that one form of lying is to give a false or misleading impression, and that you might be setting yourself up to become a powerful means of deception or distraction on the part of advertisers.

I’m not sure how to fix that problem.  I’m just saying that I think it exists and should be examined carefully.  Please make sure you don’t become anyone’s puppet.  Thanks for listening."

Do you think I’m right to be concerned?  How should ReviewMe address this problem?

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