MediaWhiz.com, the offbeat affiliate advertising aggregator that owns networks such as ShoppingAds.com (an eBay sub-affiliateship system) and Monetize-It, has been pushing a serive aimed at top bloggers recently.

The “Review Me” system brings together advertisers with a product or service they want publicised, with bloggers who are looking to monetise their scribblings and blog.  The concept is that the bloggers review the offered products in return for payment from the product owners.  Disclosure that such reviews are paid placements is required.

The main drawback is that the ReviewMe service is very picky on which bloggers can use it.  It’s nothing to do with literary abilities, nor partiality or iotherwise of the blogger – it’s all about traffic.  Even once the BuildaSkill blog had entered Alexa’s top one million traffic sites on the web, ReviewMe still refused to accept us into their list of scribes.  The site does warn of this and recommends trying again after a few months once traffic has built up. The same applies with another MediaWhiz agency – TextLinkAds.  The MediaWhiz FAQs explain -

We accept blogs into our system based on a combination of link popularity, estimated readership (Alexa), and estimated RSS subscribers.  Please feel free to re-submit your blog in a few months if any of the criteria above changes for you.

BuildaSkill is currently in the Alexa top 650,000 trafficked websites (out of an estimated 1 billion websites worldwide, and up from creeping into the top 1 million less than 8 weeks ago).  Comments read around the web suggest that even this ranking is not good enough for the premium programs from MediaWhiz.  I’ll therefore wait until we’re in the top half million before trying again.

If you’re thinking of applying for the service, be aware that they do like you to display your Alexa ranking and RSS feed readership numbers on your blog.  They also insist that you display a hit counter too.  All of those are in the sidebar of individual posts on the Buildaskill blog, but the hit counter therefore does not count blog home page hits, and is currently around 25% lower than total hits on the blog – I’ll get around to fixing that sometime … until then, I have plenty of other affiliate programs and agencies to play with if we’re not good enough for MediaWhiz.

John Donahoe will of course appreciate such selectivity for entrance to a money making system.

Ed