Hired Without Applying
I regularly type wordsbykim into Google to see what it finds and today it found I am employed by a site called Review Me. People can buy a review in my blog for a mere 40 dollars according to the Review Me link I found (no longer working). If you add a review from me to your shopping cart you will be told that Review Me’s bloggers only accept about half the offers they get and they say you should order a few reviews to play safe. I guess that means they would tell people I refused to do the review?
When I first saw the page I thought they were saying I could buy a review of my site for 40 dollars but no, they are selling a review FROM me, and I don’t know if I am flattered or angry!
According to their site bloggers must submit their site to them and they may, or may not, be accepted to work as a reviewer for them. Yet here I am – on their list of accepted reviewers and I never even asked to be one! It’s almost like being invited to apply to be hired isn’t it?
On one hand it is misleading, to say the least, to tell potential customers they have me in their stable of bloggers who will review their products for a fee when they don’t.
On the other hand, how else would a potential source of income have come to my attention so forcefully?
Oh but how dare they make it look like my opinions are for sale to anyone with a spare forty bucks? I cannot be bought! Certainly not for the lousy twenty bucks Review Me would give me as my share of the forty dollar fee!
Then again, I am not exactly rolling in money here. If I could sell my honest opinions I’d be happy to sell them. Hell, I give them away free at the moment!
I am not against advertising and I am certainly not against making money. I just have some pretty rigid ideas about what is, and what is not, acceptable. I do not have Google ads on this site, for example, because I have seen ads I disapprove of on other sites. See picture above for an example.
Google will not be advertising porn, gambling, credit cards, abuse, or molestation on MY site of that you can be sure!
When it comes to Review Me, however, I doubt I would ever be asked to do a review of anything I disapprove of. No credit card provider, for example, would ever ask me to review their product. One look at what I have said about credit cards would send them elsewhere I’m sure. If they WERE stupid enough to ask me to review them you can bet they would regret it! I would start the review with a rant on how much I hate credit providers. Actually, no, I would refuse to review it I think.
Unless, of course, they offered me so much money I couldn’t resist. THEN I would start the review with a rant hehehe. Twenty dollars would not be enough though.
I guess it’s pretty clear I am corruptible but only up to a point. As far as I am concerned, because I have to answer to a higher power for anything I do or say, I have to stay honest.
I am very well aware, however, of just how much being paid can affect one’s honest opinion of something. I still remember some research I read about during my time at university.
People were asked to say how much they liked a series of products such as toasters and so on. They rated them from one, meaning the product they would most like to own, down to whatever the last number was.
The researchers then selected a couple of products from low down in their list of preferences and told them they could choose one of them to keep as payment for being in the study.
They then asked them to rate all the products again. Even without ever having used the products they now owned the people in the study had changed their opinions and rated them much higher the second time around. If memory serves me right some of the people actually altered their new possession from a desirability rank of down around the 30 or 40 mark all the way up to the top position or in their top 10!
There are products and services I disapprove of and I don’t think there is enough money in the world to buy my approval of those – porn for instance. There are also products and services I do approve of and I would be happy to earn money saying so if the opportunity arose.
I am keeping an open mind. I have emailed Review Me and asked them why they are claiming me as one of their reviewing bloggers. I have also asked them if this means they would accept me as a reviewer hehehe.
It will be interesting to see if they answer me. I don’t think it will come to anything though. I doubt their terms and conditions will be acceptable to me. I am guessing they will want the reviews to be presented as an integral part of the blog and I have no intention of scattering advertising entries through all my blog categories. The only way I would agree to do it is if I can create a new category to put them all into called ummm Paid entries or something that clearly labels them as paid for entries. I doubt they would accept that condition hehehe
Oh well – have to find another way to get rich I guess.
EDIT
Turns out my brother, aka my website designer, signed up to the site and, because my site was listed as under his management, it automatically went in. He has removed it now so the link has gone. He says nobody was asking for me to do reviews anyway 🙁
