## What's Wrong with Advertising

When you are on the receiving end of advertising, it's obvious what's wrong with it:

- Most advertising is telling you something you don't want to know.
- Even when advertising seems to be about something interesting or relevant, it lacks credibility.

When you are in business, it's obvious why you need advertising:

- If people don't know what you have to offer, you'll never have any customers.
- If by some means you succeed in getting a potential customer's attention, you want to tell them all about how good your product is.

A corollary of these two opposing forces is a market for attention. For whatever reason, various people have some ownership of other people's attention, and these people are prepared to sell that ownership to advertisers. As a result, we have television programs constantly interrupted, countryside bespoiled by billboards, and annoying pop-up windows when we surf the web.

## What's Wrong With Selling Advertising Space on Your Website

There are some people who make money out of websites that sell advertising space, so it can't be all bad.

But advertising does undermine the credibility of your website. You are using your own reputation to do someone else's selling. If you associate yourself too much with the advertising, then this undermines your own credibility, because the advertisers who want to pay you the most for the value of your credibility are the advertisers who have no credibility of their own.

On the other hand, if you distance yourself from the adverts on your web page – put a box around them, write the word "Advertisement" at the top, and in general present them as something essentially independent of your own content – then the readers of your website have every reason to ignore the adverts, since they have nothing at all to do with the reason why your readers are reading your content. And if the readers ignore the adverts, then there will be no clicks, and the advertisers won't pay you much.

## A Better Advertisement: The Review

Thinking about these problems got me to thinking about what a more ideal form of advertising might be. What the honest business person really wants is a description of their products by a third party, a description which is seen by the customers as being independent of the business, i.e. some sort of review. Unfortunately, the very action of paying a reviewer for doing a review undermines the credibility of the review.

You could wait for reviewers to review your new product, and not pay anyone anything. But this creates a chicken and egg problem, because why is anyone going to review something that they have never heard of (because it has never been advertised)?

## An Example: Forward Reviews

This article from Wired describes the services offered by Forward Reviews. The Wired article is from 2001, but the company still appears to be operating in the same way. Book authors pay $295 (US) for a review of their book, and – according to the Wired article – the reviewers are paid $50 for each review.

This seems like an expensive way to pay someone $50 for a review, and there are other problems, like:

- How do you as an author know, before handing out your $295, that the reviewers are any good?
- Even if you can determine that the reviewers are professional, why should potential readers believe that the reviews are reliable or credible? Why should they even make the effort to find out? (After all, the world is full of new books and authors trying to sell them, and there are plenty of reviews from sources with less dubious credibility than reviewers paid by the authors.)

## An Improvement: Transparent Paid Reviews

If paid reviews are to work at all, I think the whole process has to be completely transparent, and the reviewers have to demonstrate that they are putting their own personal credibility on the line. These criteria suggest the following design of a Transparent Paid Review system:

- A website owner willing to do paid reviews announces this fact on their website, and states a per hour rate that they will charge. This rate does not have to be fixed, and quite likely it can start off low to attract new business, and increase as demand for that reviewer's services increase. It is critical that the whole process takes place in the context of the reviewer's website (rather than some central review-posting website), because the credibility of the reviews depends on the reviewer staking their own personal reputation of the public's perception on their integrity as a reviewer.
- An advertiser wanting to have a product reviewed sends an email to the reviewer. The email will state what is involved (for example will a product sample be sent to the reviewer, or is it just a matter of reading some content online?). The advertiser must state how many hours they are willing to pay for the reviewer's time.
- If the reviewer accepts the job, they email a reply to the advertiser. This reply contains:
  - A list of terms and conditions (I describe these in more detail below)
  - An invoice (probably through Paypal)
- The advertiser indicates their acceptance of the terms, and makes any necessary arrangements to provide the reviewed product to the reviewer. Payment may or may not occur in advance.
- The reviewer reviews the product, spending the required number of hours on the review.
- The reviewer posts the review on a particular section of their website. As well as the review itself, the posting includes:
  - A link to the website of the advertiser
  - The number of hours spent on doing the review
  - The hourly rate charged
  - The total amount charged
- The advertiser pays the reviewer the agreed amount (if they didn't pay already earlier on).

## Terms and Conditions

One important condition is an anti-sue condition, that the advertiser not be able to sue the reviewer for a bad review. One of the pre-conditions for discovery of the truth is freedom of speech, and by foregoing the right to sue, the advertiser can be seen to aiding the discovery of truth about their own products. (A caveat is that any content which is protected by an anti-sue condition should explicitly acknowledge that it is protected in that way, otherwise readers may attach more weight to abusive or offensive criticism than they should.)

The reviewer may wish to offer a money-back guarantee, i.e. the advertiser can decide that they do not like the review after it has been done. This will encourage an advertiser to consider getting a review done, if they are uncertain of getting their money's worth. However, even if the advertiser rejects the review, the reviewer will retain the right to post the review and to state that the advertiser has decided not to pay for it. (Unless foregoing the right to sue depends on the advertiser's acceptance of the review, in which case the reviewer who had written a review which was rejected by the advertiser would still have the right to publicly record on their website that they had written a review of the advertiser's product, but the advertiser had rejected it. The website's readers can then make their own judgements about what the review might have said.)

It is to be expected that sometimes an advertiser might wish to reply to part of a review, and that a review writer would be willing to make corrections to their review if they saw that they had made a mistake in their judgement of the product. However, if too much correspondence is entered into, doing reviews will cease to be a viable business proposition.

## Why Will This Scheme Work?

- Advertisers can find reviewers willing to review their products because they are paying to have it done.
- Payment is strictly in return for the effort made.
- The reading public can read the reviews made by a reviewer, compare them to other reviews, or to their own experiences of the same products, and they can judge if the reviewer is honest and credible.
- Advertisers can link from their own websites to reviews, so that potential customers have access to information about a new product coming from a third party.
- Website owners can decide what level of prominence they wish to give on their content pages to links which point to the paid reviews they have done for their advertisers.
- The only overhead making a difference between what the advertiser pays and what the reviewer gets paid is the Paypal commission.