Zen Zoomie’s Place: Chronicles of a (Wannabe) Pro Blogger

While researching what has made JohnChow.com so successful, I came across an interesting question on a recent post. John Chow accepted a ReviewMe offer. That, in and of itself, is nothing new. Chow frequently reviews and promotes websites for a flat $400 fee. The thing is, it turns out that this particular site was actually scraping content from John Chow’s blog (among others). The recipient of John’s review, "Andrew", is not too bright it seems. John happily took the $400 and proceeded to rip "Andrew" a new one.

In response to John’s review, a number of comments came up questioning John’s morals for taking poor Andrew’s $400 while raking him over the coals for his complete and utter lack of common sense. The root of the question is:

Is it immoral to accept money for a paid review
and then give a negative review?

"Paid Review" Programs

If you aren’t already familiar with paid review programs, here’s the quick and dirty:

A paid review site arranges for someone to write about a product, website, service or company in exchange for money.

There are a number of paid review programs out there. Two of the more popular sites are PayPerPost.com and ReviewMe.com. All of these sites are commonly touted as good ways to make extra money online. In essence, paid reviews are the antithesis of Consumer Reports. They are, frequently, completely biased in favor of the review recipient.

Morality and Paid Reviews

The problem with paid reviews is that consumers often don’t know that the content they’re reading was sponsored. Bloggers frequently don’t disclose when they’re being paid to write about products. Everywhere you go, you must be constantly wary of tainted endorsements because whoever is writing the review is either being paid directly, or is writing a positive review in hopes that you’ll purchase the product using their affiliate link—earning a fat profit. It drives me crazy!

But back to the question at hand. Is it immoral to accept payment for a "paid review" and then give a negative review?

My personal opinion is that consumers deserve an honest representation of the products they’re being presented with. So no, I don’t think John’s negative review of Andrew’s blog was immoral in any way. I believe it’s far worse to take someone’s money and then give a falsely positive review. I’ll tell you this much. If you ever see a paid review on this site, you can count on two things:

1. There will be a prominent disclaimer that the post is a paid review, and
2. The review will be my honest opinion–no punches pulled.

P.S.

It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if this was just a John Chow publicity stunt for a new blog. It might even be his new "Nobody" blog. At any rate, the stunt hasn’t been a complete flop, and "Andrew" has received a lot of traffic for his $400.

Note to self. Add the following plan to my bag of tricks:

1. Create a blog that is sure to completely piss off the owner of another extremely popular blog.
   
2. Pay the owner of that blog to review my new blog
   
3. Move on to phase 2 of my marketing plan