Paid Blog Reviews: How Can You Trust Them?

I had the misfortune of reading a column in BtoBOnline magazine on the practice of paid blog reviews. The writer, Matthew Schwartz, citing ReviewMe.com and PayPerPost, two companies that pay bloggers to write stories for their clients, gave an aura of legitimacy to companies that allow their clients to pay bloggers for posts directly. Despite the fact that the system is simply a glorified link building campaign where compaies pay for post with links rather than just the links themselves, many of us in the blogosphere have warned that systems like these are bad for the reputation of the blogosphere as a whole.

Let's ignore the fact that a blogger who writes a paid review is selling themselves short. If they really want to make money off their blog, they can usually get a company to give them more money directly. The bigger bloggers do just that, with advertising and sponsorships. That is an established model. The thing is - by the time you have enough traffic to make any real money, you don't need sites like PayPerPost.

I don't like paid review blogs, and I do have a stake in the battle. Blogs, when they first started were a more honest way of getting news and reviews. I'd be a fool to think that would last forever, and once the general public found out about them, the general view was that bloggers are just a bunch of amateurs talking about what they had for lunch.

That's not true of course - blogs are trusted sources of information, but only for the communities in which they have earned that trust. A reader that lands on your blog doesn't know you, and thus doesn't trust your review. A reader that follows your writing, comments, and returns your e-mail, on the other hand, has a high trust factor. It's what keeps them coming back.

So when I hear about surveys that show that only 30% of the respondents trust reviews they read in blogs, I wonder about the numbers. I wouldn't trust most of the blogs I read until I had a chance to filter them, or unless someone else I trusted referred me.

Paid Blog Reviews don't have any of that trust dynamic. Why would I trust a blogger who is eager to take small bits of money to write about a company? They have already demonstrated the ability to sell themselves cheaply. Why should I trust someone who has that little regard for their own opinion?

As for the article, what bothered me most was the legitimacy Mr. Schwartz gave to the issue. With just a short aside about critics being other bloggers, he swept aside th serious implications of paid reviews.

Now companies that don't know better are going to stumble over to those sites and hurt their reputations. Blogging requires honesty and trust. It seems Mr. Schwartz doesn't understand the dynamic of why blogs are trusted by their readers, anymore than Ted Murphy or Jarrod Hunt do.