Sure, $20 comes in handy. That is what reviewme.com is paying for this post. If you want to quit reading now, you have my permission. Otherwise, you can read about why I think this might not be such a good idea in the long run. Or maybe not. Just rest assured that not a word about Microsoft Project or Project management will follow. Except the news that Project 2007 hit "RTM" and is ready to download if you have an MSDN subscription...
ReviewMe.com is a company which hopes to match advertisers with "influencers", that is people who have something which is well read and presumably influential. The payout scales according to influence which they determine through some combination of technorati rank, alexa rank, estimated RSS readership (how they determine that I don't entirely know) and something else which I have forgotten already. Already I think something is broken here. Technorati ranks are kind of bogus in my opinion. They can be gamed and are pretty useless. Most traffic here is through search and the site shows up on the first page of google (and in some cases as the first site on google) for a handful of queries. To me that is more important than being linked to by some other blogger somehow. But then, what do I know? I do know that this will influence some people to work on those measures for their sites to maximize the payout. I'm not really one of them. I only care that people can find answers to whatever questions they have, and not what sort of ranking the site may have.
They also require that the post be 200 words minimum. Did I mention the 200 word minimum? Yeah, maybe I should just stop here and say that accepting $20 for 200 words makes me feel a bit cheap. But it would buy lunch for me or a couple of sixpacks and no harm done except for the damage inflicted on my reputation, and collateral damage to my readers, but then again, none of you ever donated even 20 cents to keep my site going in the past so be advised that the first who offers $21 can end this experiment here and now. For $22 you get a complementary link to your site. For $23 you can have two links and one of the beers I buy with the money. More than that and the sky is the limit.
Actually, I don't have much fear that it will be damaging. It will either work brilliantly and the world will be flooded with ReviewMe postings, and the occasional mercenary post will not seem out of place. Or it will fail and I can delete this and no one will be the wiser. I'm a bit worried about how it will encourage bad behavior by other people trying to game the system. It would be great if everyone had altruistic motives and was sharing information out of the kindness of their hearts, but those that are are already doing that, and paying for posts just brings in more people with different motivations. The web should be free in my opinion. This place is just a chance to give back for what I've received from it so far.
Anyway, if you are running a blog or are an influencer (whatever meaning that may have), you might want to check it out and see if it matches up with what you are trying to get out of your site.
https://www.reviewme.com/
