To review or not to review? This is not the real question. The question is: “is moral to get paid for writing a review for an advertiser?” I think the only good answer is YES, but only if they are free to express their opinion and if the “sponsored” nature of post has been declared. If you accept to host google adsense banners, why not hosting some paid reviews?
This post is paid by the new “reviewme“, a new pay4post system that gives you 25 to 2500$ for a single review. My blog has a 60$ Price (the Payout is 30$, so only 50% of the advertisers price and this is the only thing I think that sucks).
How does the system work? Here’s the answer from the site faq:
How do I get review offers? How can I review more stuff?
In the ReviewMe system, advertisers choose which blogs review them. So basically, sit back, and let the review offers come to you.
p.s.
When you are accepted as a blogger by ReviewMe, your first review offer will come from ReviewMe itself. We will keep ordering reviews from new bloggers until we have paid out $25,000!
This is my page for Advertisers. So, let’s ask for a review!!
[...] As seen on sanbaldo I’ve just discovered Review Me, one of the new thriving services that link together bloggers and advertisers. Taking the next step from targeted ads, Review Me let bloggers subscribe to thier network and get a popularity ranking for their blog, based on Technorati, Alexa and RSS readers stats. If your blog is accepted, you will get a pricing (derived from popularity stats) and then you could be contacted by advertisers to write a review of their products and/or services. So, you get paid for writing reviews. The idea is cool (not new, but cool): the only concern is about the review contents: as I get paid to write a review, you can think that my review will be biased. Even this post is a paid one, as Review Me let you write your first review on themselves. But guidelines on their website are pretty clear on this: Can advertisers require a positive review? We do not allow advertisers to require a positive review. The vast majority of reviews are measuredly positive, although many do contain constructive criticism. We view this as a bonus: how else can you quickly and cheaply get feedback on a product or service from influencers? [...]