Writing Reviews Online
Can Money be Earned by Sharing Knowledge of Products or Services?
Nov 17, 2008
User reviews are solicited by many major online retail sites as a way to drive sales – particularly in an uncertain economy, consumers want to know about each others’ experiences. There are also many websites which specialize in such reviews, selling no products and deriving income from web traffic alone. The latter are likely to offer compensation for reviews which are posted on their pages.
Sites which offer pay for reviews do so in several ways. They may pay per review, pay per view, or even pay per review of the review. The reviews written must fulfill certain criteria, which generally include a minimum length and readability guidelines.
Pay Per Review
Sites that pay for each review written frequently have very stringent criteria that must be fulfilled. For example, PayPerPost.com, a paid blogging site, requires users to maintain a high-traffic blog of their own and create an agreed-upon percentage of unpaid posts to mix in with those that are compensated by PayPerPost.
The amount of money paid for a review can range from a few cents to several hundred dollars, the larger amounts being reserved for reviewers that have a proven track record for converting their opinions into sales.
Pay Per View
Sites that do not require reviewers to have an existing following may pay per view of the review itself, but these claims are often misleading. More likely, reviewers will get paid when readers click on ads on the review page. These micro-payments can add up over time, particularly for prolific writers. Reviewers are indirectly rewarded for providing helpful information about the product or service; more helpful reviews are more likely lingered over by readers, which presumably increases the chances of advertisements being clicked on.
Reviewing the Reviews
Some online reviews provide an opportunity for feedback to the reader: he or she may click on a button to indicate that a review was helpful, very helpful, not at all helpful, and the like. In these cases, reviewers generally earn money based upon this feedback system. Not only do the higher ratings earn more for the reviewer, their reviews are typically given greater prominence because of that usefulness. These systems encourage thoughtful reviews that summarize the main points well in the first paragraph.
Compensation Confusion
The manner in which review sites calculate payments for the reviewers is deliberately left vague – the sites sometime claim that this is to prevent manipulation of the system. Epinions.com uses a peer-review system to evaluate reviews, but its ERoyalties program doesn’t directly pay based on that feedback. Ciao.com may or may not pay a dollar for each review posted – the answer seems to depend on where in the FAQ one looks.
The amount of money paid is usually very small for a single review, and the percentage of reviewers making a full-time income is likely comparable to the number of athletes that get into professional sports. For someone already sharing his or her opinions in a blog or otherwise, it may make sense to add a small income stream to an existing hobby.
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