My ReviewME Nightmare

ReviewME was the biggest waste of marketing dollars I have EVER spent on an online promotion.

Sorry folks, this gonna be a long one… After Shoemoney posted his $50 ReviewME Marketplace experiment and extolled the performance of the online marketplace, I decided to give it a whirl.

I was sorely disappointed both as a blogger and as an advertiser with the ReviewME marketplace, the availability of support, and the soundness of its internal systems.

REVIEWME DIDN’T PAY ME FOR MY COMPLETED REVIEWS.

Before I spent money on ReviewME, I thought I would write a couple reviews first. I logged into the Marketplace and found that there were 6 potential reviews available ranging from $12.50 payouts to $5 payouts. I accepted all six, and started the review process.

First I wrote a review on Apogee . I finished the review, posted the URL to the marketplace, and was credited for my work with an official ReviewME email, as well as with an alert on their website.

But after completing my second paid review on SoloSEO I followed the same procedure but did not receive a confirmation email, nor credit in the alert log for completing the review.

In fact, the ReviewME databases seemed to be going nuts. My blog was listed twice in my account interface, and all of a sudden all of my reviews that I had accepted disappeared, preventing me from completing any more of them.

As you can see below, the ReviewME database was not working properly. The name of my blog and the name of the reviewed blog were missing from both the notification email and from the alert. I reported the problem to support, but never heard anything back.

Since there is no place to view your to-date earnings on the ReviewME website, I will update my readers next month if I actually get paid for one review at least. Maybe the database will lose that information as well…

ReviewME Poorly Screens its Bloggers.

Despite the signs that something was amiss, I decided to jump in on the advertiser side. I dropped $150 on 15 $10 ReviewME reviews. While I knew I wasn’t going to get any high caliber blogs for $15, I did not expect 30% of my advertising investment to be wasted on crap splogs.

My mistake was assuming that since ReviewME initially rejected my blog and than later accepted me, that there was some sort of screening process in place. Of the fifteen reviews I paid for on the 9th of May, I am STILL waiting for one of them to be completed. Here are the base URL’s for the 14 blogs where my reviews appeared:

http://techreckoner.com/ (Computer Related – Valid blog with readership)
http://www.broadband-voip.net/ (MFA Splog with no readership)
http://www.bsnl-broadband.com/ (Clone of broadband-viop.net Splog)
http://techstuff.goboardz.com/forum.asp (Decent site, Good PR and Related to topic)
http://www.softwaredriverdownload.com/ (MFA download site, no readership)
http://dazeee.i.ph/ (Brand new site, not related and no apparent readership)
http://pinvader.blogspot.com/ (Decent Blog, good related content)
http://ishawn.net/ (Made for ReviewME – all paid posts, some in Chinese)
http://www.techtreak.com/ (Good related content – legitimate blog)
http://neverblog.net/ (legitimate blog, loosely related)
http://www.5zcool.com/ (Legitimate Blog, related and well written)
http://starsdigital.blogspot.com/ (Legitimate Blog, related content)
http://woip.blogspot.com/ (Legitimate blog, related content)
http://www.selaplana.com/ (Legitimate blog, related content)

As you can see, nearly 1/3 of my total reviews are from worthless websites that are either not related to the tag I selected, devoid of readership, or just a pure splog, plain and simple.

If you are an advertiser that is interested in generating any kind of buzz or bringing any real traffic to your website, forget about the ReviewME marketplace. It may work great for A-list blogs, but for anything under $200 a review, your money is better spent on toilet paper.