Electronic Weirdness Department: Don sells out to ReviewMe.com

Over the last year-and-a-bit, my loyal readers have come to depend on me for… ummm… I’m not actually sure quite what my readers depend on me for, actually. Possibly a good night’s sleep? Proof that good grammar, spelling, and punctuation aren’t enough to make something worth reading?

But in any case, my many several readers have come to expect the utmost in integrity from You’ll Come for the Terrorism, The Blog That Couldn’t Be Bought.

In reality, of course, the reason that this blog couldn’t be bought was that I couldn’t figure out how to sell it. I’ve had the same problem with cars, cats, and lots of other stuff, which is why my closets are full, my bank account is empty, and I’ve got claw marks in all kinds of awkward places.

But now, thanks to Satan Tricia at Tricia’s Musings, I’ve sold my soul connected with an outstanding organization that promises to make me slightly less insolvent, without – I hope – compromising my precious ethical standards more than a little. The organization is called ReviewMe, and they offer opportunities for bloggers to review stuff in exchange for filthy lucre. (Actually, they pay via PayPal, so I think the lucre gets cleaned off somewhere in the process.) So far, so good, ethics-wise: In fully fifteen minutes since I signed up, they haven’t once asked me to say good things about shoddy products or websites. In fact, the only thing they’ve asked me to review so far is their own service.

Now, this is in fact a bit of a challenge. How exactly am I supposed to review their service if I haven’t actually done anything more than sign up and agree to write the review? It’s hard to come up with anything very substantive after such a brief acquaintanceship.

On the other hand, they’re paying me $20.00 for this review, so I’d better come up with something. (Blogs with higher ratings, based on Technorati rankings and the like, are paid more for reviews. While I wasn’t quite in the “beneath our notice” category, I’m one of their cheaper dates. ReviewMe takes 50% of the price paid by reviewees – so the review for which I receive $20.00 costs the reviewee twice that.)

Here, then, is My First Review: I signed up for ReviewMe. The “Create Account” screen worked flawlessly, although, annoyingly, the “Province” field is mandatory even for people who live in Israel, a country the whole of which would fit comfortably inside even a relatively modest province of someplace normal. The “Enter Your Blog” screen was similarly slick – or at least functional. The two automated emails I received (one congratulating me for having signed up, and the other reminding me that I’d agreed to review ReviewMe and that I had 48 hours to do so) were both brief, grammatical, and correctly spelled. The payment, I hope and expect, will be prompt.

The ReviewMe site’s visual esthetics are good; the fonts are all well-chosen, things are properly lined up, they used CSS (Cascading Style-Sheets) to good effect, and so on. Some of the background colors (notably the orange and green on the “Why ReviewMe?” page) were a bit jarring, but in general the website is well thought out. FAQ’s are brief but clear and informative, and navigation around the site’s pages is intuitive. (I hadn’t initially bothered to investigate most of this stuff – I raced straight into the nuts-and-bolts aspect of the service. Then I figured that for $20.00 I should actually look at more of the ReviewMe website, even though I tend to be more concerned with results than with esthetics.)

So – I’ve sold my soul for $20.00.

It feels great.

Categories: Reviews.