In an attempt to get a piece of the $25,000 that ReviewMe is offering the following. This is my review.

ReviewMe is service that pays bloggers to write paid reviews about advertisers who pay a pre-determined fee based on that particular blogs value. ReviewMe determines the value of each blog with an algorithm that is based off Alexa, Technorati and most likely a few other sources. Bloggers can decide to write either a positive or negative review, but they must disclose that they are being paid to write the review. ReviewMe splits the advertising fee 50/50 with the bloggers.

I know the guys behind ReviewMe and I think for the most part they have done an excellent job on the execution. The site is well designed and the UI is pretty good, I had no trouble signing up and finding my way around. The one thing I noticed that could cause a problem is that you can signup with any blog. Just for fun I signed up a few popular blogs under my name just to see what their posts were worth, I quickly deleted them from my account. They should probably add some kind of security feature to make sure this doesn’t happen.

Overall I am fan of these kind of services. I think it offers a great revenue model for bloggers to make a decent chunk of change for writing. The problem I see here is that Google and the other search engines will frown upon it, since they are against people paying for text links. At least ReviewMe requires full disclosure for the posts and because of that I think they have a great shot of kicking Pay-Per-Post’s Ass. That and the guys behind this business know this market inside and out.

It’s a relatively new advertising method, and one that if handled properly, in my opinion, has some viability. Others are experimenting with similar ideas as we speak. Take the great Techmeme. If you visit their site, you’ll notice on the right sidebar a column of ads that are written by the sponsors themselves; they are all composed of short articles, fed directly there through RSS. However, the section is clearly labeled “Sponsors” and there’s no confusion that the copy in that area represents someone’s presumably slanted opinion. It’s new, it’s smart and it works. No one loses.

So, are there no flaws? Well, no, there are. A case could be made that there may be pressure on the blogger not to write negative reviews for fear of scaring future potential advertisers. Also, the specific wording of disclosure is left up to the blogger, which may lead to some potentially misleading phrasing. And these are very valid points. Supposedly a blogger may be able to overcome them if he’s already established a certain level of trust among his readership, and isn’t overly dependent on that particular source of income. But is that enough? Well, in my opinion, yes.

Overall it looks like a good idea, and as I often share links to other sites and services I feel worthy, if somebody’s willing to give me money as an added bonus for doing so I’m not going to turn that down.