a blog about things that I've been thinking hard about

A New Form of Advertising: Transparent Paid Reviews

23 November, 2005
An alternative to advertising is paid reviews. But if the reviews are to be credible, the process by which they are paid for must be totally transparent, and the reviewer must be prepared to put their own reputation on the line.
by Philip Dorrell

What's Wrong with Advertising

When you are on the receiving end of advertising, it's obvious what's wrong with it:

When you are in business, it's obvious why you need advertising:

A corollary of these two opposing forces is a market for attention. For whatever reason, various people have some ownership of other people's attention, and these people are prepared to sell that ownership to advertisers. As a result, we have television programs constantly interrupted, countryside bespoiled by billboards, and annoying pop-up windows when we surf the web.

What's Wrong With Selling Advertising Space on Your Website

There are some people who make money out of websites that sell advertising space, so it can't be all bad.

But advertising does undermine the credibility of your website. You are using your own reputation to do someone else's selling. If you associate yourself too much with the advertising, then this undermines your own credibility, because the advertisers who want to pay you the most for the value of your credibility are the advertisers who have no credibility of their own.

On the other hand, if you distance yourself from the adverts on your web page – put a box around them, write the word "Advertisement" at the top, and in general present them as something essentially independent of your own content – then the readers of your website have every reason to ignore the adverts, since they have nothing at all to do with the reason why your readers are reading your content. And if the readers ignore the adverts, then there will be no clicks, and the advertisers won't pay you much.

A Better Advertisement: The Review

Thinking about these problems got me to thinking about what a more ideal form of advertising might be. What the honest business person really wants is a description of their products by a third party, a description which is seen by the customers as being independent of the business, i.e. some sort of review. Unfortunately, the very action of paying a reviewer for doing a review undermines the credibility of the review.

You could wait for reviewers to review your new product, and not pay anyone anything. But this creates a chicken and egg problem, because why is anyone going to review something that they have never heard of (because it has never been advertised)?

An Example: Forward Reviews

This article from Wired describes the services offered by Forward Reviews. The Wired article is from 2001, but the company still appears to be operating in the same way. Book authors pay $295 (US) for a review of their book, and – according to the Wired article – the reviewers are paid $50 for each review.

This seems like an expensive way to pay someone $50 for a review, and there are other problems, like:

An Improvement: Transparent Paid Reviews

If paid reviews are to work at all, I think the whole process has to be completely transparent, and the reviewers have to demonstrate that they are putting their own personal credibility on the line. These criteria suggest the following design of a Transparent Paid Review system:

Terms and Conditions

One important condition is an anti-sue condition, that the advertiser not be able to sue the reviewer for a bad review. One of the pre-conditions for discovery of the truth is freedom of speech, and by foregoing the right to sue, the advertiser can be seen to aiding the discovery of truth about their own products. (A caveat is that any content which is protected by an anti-sue condition should explicitly acknowledge that it is protected in that way, otherwise readers may attach more weight to abusive or offensive criticism than they should.)

The reviewer may wish to offer a money-back guarantee, i.e. the advertiser can decide that they do not like the review after it has been done. This will encourage an advertiser to consider getting a review done, if they are uncertain of getting their money's worth. However, even if the advertiser rejects the review, the reviewer will retain the right to post the review and to state that the advertiser has decided not to pay for it. (Unless foregoing the right to sue depends on the advertiser's acceptance of the review, in which case the reviewer who had written a review which was rejected by the advertiser would still have the right to publicly record on their website that they had written a review of the advertiser's product, but the advertiser had rejected it. The website's readers can then make their own judgements about what the review might have said.)

It is to be expected that sometimes an advertiser might wish to reply to part of a review, and that a review writer would be willing to make corrections to their review if they saw that they had made a mistake in their judgement of the product. However, if too much correspondence is entered into, doing reviews will cease to be a viable business proposition.

Why Will This Scheme Work?

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