If you’ve not yet heard of ReviewMe, then you soon will. It’s a new service which plans to pay bloggers to write reviews on products and services that advertisers submit.

The service is two pronged - it allows advertisers to submit a product or service to be reviewed, optionally specifying which theme of blog they want to review their product (tech, politics, health etc.). The review then percolates down through to all the targeted bloggers, some accepting to do the review, some not.

Advertisers cannot require a good review from the bloggers so they’re not always going to end up with a positive outcome. It will, however, generate an interest in their product - if you believe that there’s no such thing as bad publicity then the service is going to sound like a dream come true; viral marketing at it’s most prolific. On the up side, the system allows companies to submit their product/service and be guaranteed an honest stream of feedback - flaws, complaints and whinging are more than likely to come out of the average blogger. Imagine being paid to whine about something? Ideal.

There is, of course, no guarantee that anyone signing up is going to get any attention from advertisers. The blogging giants of today are likely to be top of the target list for companies, as they pull in far more visitors than most of the blogosphere put together. For example, this site falls into one of the lower brackets - but should Jason Kottke, of Kottke.org, decide to embark on this (which if you’re a frequenter of his blog, you know he won’t) he’ll be looking at USD$250 for the default review of ReviewMe.com - the highest bracket there is. He’d be dead set to receive and endless stream of review requests, too.

Unfortunately the algorithms for calculating your site’s worth is not one which is publicly available - it uses elements of Alexa rankings, which is quite surprising, seeing as the target audience for writing reviews is the blogosphere, who frequently criticise Alexa rankings as being utterly useless (1, 2). Although as the rest of the bandwagon-jumpers for ReviewMe are pointing out, Technorati and Feed rankings are being taken into account too. This is certainly a more effective way of calculating the effectiveness of a site.

The site itself is soaked in Web 2.0 usualness, as one might expect. It’s easy to get around and appealing on the eye. There’s certainly not an excess of information on the site, and the FAQs could do with padding out a little - although this could be expected for such a new service.

I can’t see the popularity of the service rocketing too quickly. To be of use to an advertiser, their product needs to be reviewed by the Big Guns - and they’re unlikely to get on board with this, as the majority of these top bloggers will pull in plenty of revenue through usual advertising, or dedicated advertising networks - such as The Deck.

I can’t see too many advertisers wanting small fry to yap on about their product in a bid to claim USD$20.

As with the other 500 people (at the time) writing about ReviewMe.com - I’m being paid to do so!