Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while have come to realise that I do experiment quite a bit with online advertising. In an ideal world, I would also like not to have to use ads on my blog, but since I have bills to pay, every little bit helping, I decided I might as well monetize my hobby.

Let me share with you some of the conclusions I’ve come to in the past year I’ve been experimenting with online ads.

The most popular ad network is probably Google Adsense. However popular, it nevertheless has a low payback rate. Indeed, some people get good results with Adsense, but these people have blogs with high traffic and niched content.

That’s not the case for most newer, smaller bloggers, such as I.

Aside from the obvious Google Adsense ads, I’ve also been experimenting with other ad networks, with unconclusive results. After a year of experimentation, I’ve settled for fewer ads, with a higher payback rate.

Insofar, I’ve found that the most efficient and less invasive ad system was that of Text-Link-Ads. Those are the links just below my main menu. They are sold at a decent price, for a period of one month and take minimal space on the blog.

But as much as these are a good deal for me, is it a good investment for the advertiser?
Indeed, with the ad blindness phenomenon that occurs when one simply ignores the ads on a page, we can wonder whether it really is worth their money.

What blog readers are not blind to is the actual blog content. That’s why the new trend in online advertising tends to sollicitate a more intimate blogger involvment in the advertisement campaign.

Basically, you get paid to talk about a particular topic, of interest to the advertiser. It’s not that different from what happens in old media, with paid advertisement on television or “fake” articles in newspapers. In that sense, if they can make a profit with that scheme, what couldn’t I? Why couldn’t you?

Comes into play the newcomer ReviewMe, a PayPerPost (PPP) kind of ad network, with a twist.

There has been a lot of attacks towards PPP mostly aimed at the fact that there was no transparency in the process. Nowhere is the blogger forced to disclose the fact that he/she is being paid for blogging about a particular topic. It’s an ethical issue. That’s where ReviewMe differs from PPP. The contract between the ad network and the blogger makes it mandatory to disclose the fact that you are blogging for money. That’s why you can see a paid advertising image on this post. The way to makes this fact known is left at the blogger’s discretion. We’re grown up after all.

But that’s not the only difference, the only twist.

Whereas a single fee per post is charged to advertiser for any bloggers, ReviewMe determines the set price by using an algorithm based on Alexa, Technorati and other statistics. The asked price varies, from 30$, up to an enticing 1,000$ per post, depending on your blog importance in the blogosphere. In case you are curious, the price set for my blog is 60$. I’m merely a pawn. For now .

The blogger gets to keep 50% of that price for every review he/she accepts and successfully fullfils.

That’s not all. There’s more.

Since we’re being paid by an advertiser to talk about its product, we have to be positive about its product, right?
No. The tone is left entirely at the blogger’s discretion. The blogger can share his/her honest opinion and still being paid. Of course, I have some doubts personally about how this can really be implemented. It is obvious to me that ReviewMe is trying to give a non-partisan flavour to their ad network. This way, it gives it more credibility. However, looking at it from any angle, since we’re being paid by a third-party to talk about them, we can’t truly bite the hand the feeds us. Anyway, the fact that we have the illusion of that choice is still a nice feature.

The only other requirement has to do with the review length and time limit to come up with a review, 200 words and 48 hours for this particular assignment. No big deal.

Currently, ReviewMe is giving away 25,000$ to write about the service. I took that opportunity to give it a try. The fact that ReviewMe is affiliated with Text-Link-Ads gave me enough confidence in the product.

The user interface is rather intuitive, nothing overly complicated. It’s the standard procedure we can see in any web 2.0 service. A nice feature is that your list of tasks to complete and the associated deadlines is accessible through an RSS feed.

Payment can be made by check or by PayPal. Since I haven’t been paid yet, I can’t really comment about that now. I will update this article when I do. If I do ;).

I don’t know if the topics advertisers will ask us to blog about will interest me. This might be my first and only participation with ReviewMe. Time will tell.

Why don’t you try it yourself?

via Techcrunch

Update: Apparently, my review was good enough. I received a notification through RSS telling me my review had been accepted and I would get my share of the money. To be continued…