Review: ReviewMe

There's been a small explosion of writeups for the new review placement service ReviewMe. The reason? ReviewMe is another way that bloggers might get some money for their hard work. The idea is pretty simple: write reviews for cash.

The Chain of Reasoning

The reasoning goes something like this:

1. Blogs have become a credible way of building buzz and interest in a product or service. It's become a marketing channel in its own right.

2. Unfortunately for advertisers who would like to exploit this channel, it's comprised of many tens of thousands of independent bloggers. How do you reach them effectively? How do you convince them to talk about your product? And which ones do you talk to?

3. Enter ReviewMe. They are a matchmaker between bloggers and advertiser. Bloggers are ranked by combining Alexa, Technorati, and estimated RSS readership. Advertisers choose blogs they'd like to review their product. ReviewMe passes the request to the blog owner, who chooses to accept or not. Upon completion of the review, the advertiser pays out cash, which is split 50/50 between ReviewMe and the blogger.

The amount of the payout ranges from There are currently 5 ranks, from one star to five stars, and the payouts look like this:

I haven't actually seen a 5-star site listed yet. I would assume that the payout curve resembles the long tail. UPDATE: Here's a nice explanation of the Long Tail on...Alexa!

But is it Evil?

The idea of "buying reviews" has the smack of something that could be abused, but the ground rules established up front is that ReviewMe does not require positive reviews. If ReviewMe maintains a list of reviews that a blogger has written, maybe that would have an effect on what people write, but this is the same issue anybody with the editorial / advertising mix has to face. Time will tell.

ReviewMe also has some other mandatory requirements for a "hosted review". The review must be at least 200 words long, but can be written in any way the blogger desires. Additionally, disclosure is required to the blogger's audience. Since the power of the blogosphere is based on authentic voices, this makes perfect sense to me.

I signed up for it a few days ago, and this post is indeed a paid review. I have some mixed feelings about doing this. On the one hand, it does seem like a possible way of generating some income in a way that is less gauche than AdSense adblocks. On the other hand, it does start to blur the line between "authentic content from the heart" and "content influenced by the wallet". Writing about ReviewMe itself is fine, because I think it's an interesting model that puts some revenue earning potential directly into the hands of content creators. Yeah! I'm not sure how I would feel, though, writing a review on something I was less passionate about. If I can maintain my personal sense of authenticity, that's great. But I may lose authenticity in the eyes of the audience, and by extension citizen journalism may be perceived as just another branch of the marketing channel that's for sale at the right price. I think people will take it on a review-by-review basis; a good review stands on its own, and I would hate for people to become even MORE cynical about the media they consume.

DISCLOSURE: I'm writing about ReviewMe because I have been paid to think about it and put some words down. While I believe my words are my own and are just as authentic as if I had thought to review ReviewMe by myself, there is nevertheless the smell of crisp dollar bills in the air as I write this. Let me know what you think: EVIL or NOT?

Ad Age Agency Report 2006

Ad Age Online has released three free documents about the 2006 state of agency:

• The 2006 Ad Agency Family Trees Poster
• A 15-page Agency Report
• An 81-page Agency Profile Report

You may have noticed an uptick in the economy that feels like the early 1990s, and these reports comment on the same trends. Of particular interest is their identification of interactive as a hot growth area, which is good news for anyone working on the Web.

What I find really fascinating, however, is that I have a giant pool of data that can give me an understanding of the advertising agency landscape; this is the shadow network that, along with the news media and entertainment, shapes our culture by controlling what we experience through mass media. Knowing who and what they are is good for you :-)

Online Advertising Trends

I was catching up on Ad Age Online, and hit upon an interesting string of articles that gave me more insight into the wooly world of online click advertising. Like, how it's going to change.

As an added bonus, I am including examples of online click advertising in this very post! ;-)

US Advertising Spending Total

Advertisers spent a total of $143 billion in 2005. Of that, Internet-based ads drew $8.3 billion (50% from web companies). Local newspapers, by comparison, grabbed up $25 billion. National newspapers, which might be more equivalent to the reach of the Web, drew $3.5 billion. The power of locality has been on my mind a lot lately as a business strategy; there's a lot of money in the local markets, but it's spread thin across the whole of the United States so it's hard to harvest. However, every town seems to have an Office of Economic Development, a Chamber of Commerce, and a Small Business Development Center...I imagine that these would be good resources for figuring out the economic lay of the land.

Online Advertising: Sue! Sue! Sue!

Of that $8.3 billion spent on online advertising, advertisers are griping that between 5% and 35% are fraudulent, and they blasted Google and Yahoo at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in NYC. They also complained about sham websites that served only to harvest and deliver low-quality clicks. That's really interesting; I had assumed that those sham websites that exist purely to rank high on search engines and derive revenue from AdSense, while pure crap, actually did provide a service by sending advertisers tons of traffic. Au Contraire! The advertisers hate them too, because no one buys! So they're suing Google and Yahoo in increasing numbers to do something about it. When the money is threatened, companies get on the ball or they die, so I'm looking forward to seeing some improvements here. Google's acquisition of Urchin and Measure Map make a lot more sense to me now, as they will provide the "full picture" needed to squash low-signal / high-noise crap websites.

The Hammer of Click Justice

Apparently Google is already getting serious about this overseas; they de-indexed the German BMW Website for employing fishy optimization tactics, such as serving different pages to search engine spiders. These were not the same pages that users saw; I imagine the special pages were SEO'd to deliver very targeted results. I admire the trickiness, but detest the underhanded lameness.

Who Will Pay for Content?

There's good news and bad news. Bad news first: creating content is expensive. In the case of newspapers with both print and online editions, it takes 20 to 100 online users to make up for one print subscriber in terms of revenue. The newspapers, we've all been told, are losing subscribers to the Internet, but the Internet ain't paying for it.

The good news is high-quality content will pay off even more, as Google and Yahoo address the concerns of online advertisers. Complaints didn't work; litigation talks!

This is where a blog network like 9rules could make its money; a carefully-cultivated blog network represents a higher quality source of links. In fact, blog networks represent the evolution of the Newspaper more than I imagined, since they can flexibly repurpose content into more granular categories and pushing editorial responsibility into the actual reporters /content generators. Of course, it's one thing to form a blog network, and quite another to build a news organization. It's got to deliver tangible value to both advertisers and content creators, which is an interesting line to straddle. The difficulty I'm thinking is that blog readers don't generally click on ads, so repurposing the content for a larger general audience that does will be critically important. Harder said than done.

So it's Portal Tactics versus SEO yet again, referreed by Google. What round is this again?

Solopreneurs

Jeff forwarded me this advice for solopreneurs, which is a list of 10 things one must do to be...successful? I'm not sure. The takeaway, though, is the term "Solopreneur", which the author says is a buzzword on the upswing in the Blogosphere. What's a Solopreneur? Essentially, a solopreneur is a one-person business., but he writes further:

I consider myself to be a reluctant, yet committed Solopreneur. Reluctant in the sense that I would rather be collaborating with other like-minded people instead of slogging along solo. But committed in the sense that I am compelled to continue slogging along solo until I can actually find some other like-minded people [...]

Yes. That's what I'm talking about.

Planting Ideas for Profit

I just read an interesting article by Paul Graham about how PR firms work. For small companies looking to generate some attention, hiring a PR firm will gets them into the press and by extension the public consciousness. Graham relates how a "good" firm charged $16,000 a month, and was worth every penny. Ever wonder why "suits are back" this year? Because some company paid a PR firm to say so. Is it coincidence that this happens to be the advertising slogan for The Men's Wearhouse?

If you want to sell, people have to know/remember you exist and provide a product they desire. You can advertise, or you generate word of mouth. A Public Relations (aka PR) firm does the latter by packaging your "content" into a form that is readily digested by the News Media: reporters, editors, and other journalists. A good PR firm will package your meme in a manner that is not only credible, but reportable. The law of authorative referral comes into play: if you can get a person to repeat something you've planted, the relayed information attains the same level of credibility. PR firms "game the system" by targeted the influential mouthpieces of society that we still, more or less, take at face value.

It's an interesting article...well worth reading if you enjoy discovering the root causes of trends and how the power of persuasion is used to influence your every opinion. Paul Graham also says something really useful to remember:

Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, where you had to look at a piece of writing and step back and ask whether the author was telling the whole truth? If you really want to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he's writing about this subject at all.

That's part my own triumvirate of framing questions: Intention, Expectation, and Motivation. If you can figure out those three things about a given action, you have a good chance of developing an appropriate response on your own.

Via Slashdot. One of the threads there reminds me that William Gibson's recent book Pattern Recognition is a good look at the world of professional trend watching / making.

Game Industry Quickies

This morning's Gamasutra Newsletter had a couple interesting tidbits:

The Game Audio Network Guild is a non-profit organization that was "established to educate the masses in regards to interactive audio". They announced their 3rd annual award winners for 2005 at this year's Game Developer Conference, which wrapped a couple weeks ago. What's interesting about the list is the number of high quality entrants there were. Game audio is phenomenal these days, if you haven't been paying attention. 5.1 channel surround sound, baby...no boops and beeps here. Witness instead the terror of WW II soundscapes! Bop to original pop songs and live musical performance! The biz has come a long way since the SID chip and FM synthesis.

This year's Electronic Entertainment Expo (or E3, as we like to say) has apparently sold out its exhibit space in a 5-year record time. So this promises to be a huge show:

540,000 net square feet of exhibit space has been sold, covering five exhibit halls, making it the largest expo since 2000 – at the outset of this current generation of consoles. Further details of the next generation of consoles are likely set to be debuted at this year’s expo, with new information from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo all promised in some form, with the next-generation Xbox extremely likely to get a full unveiling.

Ooooo.

The New 3D Wave

It's been coming for a while...

• Every desktop sold has some form of 3D hardware acceleration built in
• 3D hardware acceleration just gets better and better
• Applications are in a kind of GUI design rut

We're starting to see more use of hardware accelerated 3D graphics in mainstream apps. Google's recently released Picasa 2 image browsing software implements a 3D image browsing mode. Microsoft has been developing Avalon, the new graphics engine for next-generation Windows, for a number of years...you can even download an early preview release to see what the fuss is about. Apple is doing it too, sorta, as a more integrated underlying technology.

So what's so great about 3D hardware acceleration? For one thing, it's an untapped processing resource lurking in the guts of your machine, unless you're playing 3D games on a regular basis. And it's been there in probably every computer shipped since 1997, with possibly more transisters than even your Pentium or Athlon, specialized completely toward 3D graphics. If you're not playing 3D games on your computer, you probably never even seen what it's capable of doing.

I was reminded of the impending wave of 3D by a post on Slashdot about 3DEdit, a video editing program that using real-time processing on video streams and sports a 3D interface with whizzy interactive effects. I have not tried the product itself, but it may very well be the starting shot in a home productivity 3D application war.

This is a window of opportunity to get in on the ground floor of 3D interface design...there aren't many people who do it. The push for 3D has been a long time coming; there are browser plugins that date back to 1990s that attempted to push 3D, various incarnations of virtual worlds and toolkits, but none of them have stuck. In a couple of years, should Avalon ship, there will suddenly be a market for such things, built-into the operating system.

Technically, video game programmers will have an edge in implementing 3D interfaces now, but programmer-designed interfaces usually look like ass. 3D artists can design cool looking things in 3D, but most don't have the eye for information and graphic design to pull of a really sweet UI. I'd look toward the Industrial Design and maybe Environmental Graphics people as an interesting hire to help pull things together...that is, if 3D interfaces take off as a differentiating feature for applications. Oh, and of course there are plenty of ex-game industry developers and artists who are kicking around too...they're used to dealing with bleeding edge tools and funky technical workarounds.

The biggest hurdle probably is some kind of 3D interface standard widget set. Not all data sets and applications require a navigable 3D space--it just looks cool in Minority Report. I suspect we'll see some enhancements to the basic 2D experience first, much as Apple has lead the way with Expose and its Quartz engine effects. Secondly, we're a bit stuck with our mouse-driven input devices. Using a mouse to "drive" a 3d space is not very quick or intuitive, unless you're part of the generation who grew up playing Doom. What is the equivalent of simple "point and click" in a 3D navigable space? Can you imagine your grandma doing this successfully?

If you want to play with 3D interfaces now, Macromedia Director version 8.0 and higher have included crude 3D support for a number of years. You thought you could finally escape Director when Flash MX came out, didn't you? Wrong! :)

If you want to brush up your 3D skills, check out Blender3d...it's a free download.

Video Games and The Line

Came across this link to JFK Reloaded, which is apparently a simulation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It uses video game technology and ballistics to recreate the crime scene. It's a fascinating concept that, while similar in content to the spate of WWII and Vietnam first person shooters (FPS), generates a greater feeling of horror. Is it because that we actually know the people involved? In a lot of these FPS games, we assume that the characters are nameless fictional characters in a fictional setting, or they're monsters of historical proportions (e.g. Hitler) in an alternate history. Participating in the re-enactment of the events seems more macabre.

That JFK Reloaded appears to be a straight-up simulation makes it seem even worse than if it was a twisted parody. On the other hand, from a forensic and training perspective, this is a fascinating product. The US Army already develops and distributes training simulation games in the form of America's Army, and I expect we will see more 3D simulation of this kind of thing since the hardware capability has been part of the standard PC for at least five years. What is missing is broadly available talent to build convincing 3d worlds; I expect this to change in the next 3-4 years.