Ask HN: Should I pay $50 for a positive App review?

You should pull a Dreamhost and out this site. They are dishonest and should be called out.

http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/05/04/web-hostings-dirty-laun...

It is now a crime to do a paid review for someone? If so, can you point me to the law stating this?

If not, then you are making a big assumption and could hurt someone's business by blasting all over the internet "just how morally corrupt this person is".

Crime? No. But the whole point of a review site is the implicit promise to readers: "We will tell you whether this is any good or not". If what they actually do is to publish only positive reviews, for a fee, then they are deceiving their readers into thinking that advertisements are reviews.

Sure it's legal. All kinds of things are legal. Some legal things are harmful and dishonest, and should be exposed.

You're completely missing the point. There is a huge difference between illegal and dishonest. As far as I know, yes, it isn't illegal to pay for a published review but it surely is a dishonest business practice.

At the very minimum, this website is probably deceiving their readers by publishing these so-called "positive" reviews.

They are careful with words; they are only saying that they would not publish a negative review. They are not directly promising a positive review. But it would cost them $50 not to publish a positive review, so they are very likely to publish an undeserved positive.

I never said anything about a crime. Reviews are only worthwhile if they are honest. I believe that any site caught soliciting pay to play for positive reviews should be called out. Not sued, just publicly shamed.

It goes both ways, Belkin caught tons of flack for soliciting positive reviews on Amazon Mechanical Turk.

don't do it. we (colloquy, the irc client) submitted promo codes and requests to review to multiple people and review sites, and there was only one website who did exactly what you state. none of the rest wanted payment of any sort (ars technica, tuaw, daring fireball, etc.) and were all too happy to mention and review the app.

We've gotten more money from iTunes affiliate links to the application on our page (http://mobile.colloquy.info) than in sales from most of the iPhone-specific review sites that we could see. We've also probably made more sales promoting ourselves and providing support on Twitter.

(Also, for what it's worth this site in question seems to be super slow if you don't pay up $50 or pay for advertising, it's been a little over two weeks with nothing whatsoever. the promo code we sent will probably expire before they review, heh.)

Totally unrelated to anything.

1. I love your program.

2. I just bought your iPhone application because you guys deserve at least that much from me.

I also love this game, I used to play the card-based version all the time. I'm just pissed off that you made it for the iPhone before I did!

Edit: whoops, I was talking about the OP's game! But, I also love your IRC client. I didn't know it was available for the iPhone, I'll have to check that out...

haha, not flaming us for charging for an open source app? :)

thanks though!

Hey, nothing wrong with charging for open source! It's win-win: you get compensated for your great work and we enjoy the benefits of having the source code freely available.

Thank you.

I'm getting close to having my own iPhone app completed. Would you be kind enough to share the list of sites that you sent requests to? Stuff like that would be really helpful.

Thanks!

This is the list I've been using. It seems to cover the big ones.

http://www.mobileorchard.com/9-places-to-publicize-your-ipho...

Dang, I was searching for that :) That's where we got started.

We also sent promo codes to..ars technica, engadget, appleinsider, tuaw, gruber over at daring fireball, chris pirillo (plus a few extra codes to give away to his viewers, which was additional publicity), and some others I can't remember.

Depending on your application you may want to submit to sites specifically catering to your audience. I know some of our promo codes went to people at IRC news/review sites since Colloquy is an IRC client. And as an example, if your app was a game, you'd want to send a code over to sites like toucharcade, run by the same guy behind macrumors, who also frequents hn as 'arn' :)

Thanks so much mahipal and silencio for the pointers, greatly appreciated.

I've reached the point where my app and its webapp counterpart are both technically complete, so I'm all about the polish now.

My app isn't groundbreaking (it's going to be living in the Entertainment category), but I think that the similar apps that are currently in the store suggest that there's a place for it. Most importantly, it allows users to be creative and share their product with others; I'm not the gatekeeper, just the groundskeeper (clean up after the animals that mess my garden).

Throw up a quick blog post talking about this trend for apps. In the post make sure to talk about your app. Then promote the post on reddit/digg and let other blogs know about it.

You'll get more exposure for your app than a mere blog post on a 3rd rate blog(gotta be 3rd rate if they only want $50 for a positive post). And who knows, you might get some of those big name blogs to cover your story as an example of how their particular blog is so much better than others that charge money for good stories.

There is no right way or wrong way in business . There is only one way - The way that makes money ..

If I told that I paid $50 to a review site and it brought me $5000 . Will you ask anybody if you should pay $50 to bring in $5000 ?

Big Corporation pay celebrities money to give favourable reviews and endorsments all the time . Nike will only pay Tiger Woods Millions to give a good endorsement . They would be fools to give Tiger Millions to give his honest opinion . Its business .. The only way you will make money from your products or service is to get good reviews . If you are asking people for reviews and they are giving you bad reviews you will never make money .. This is part of marketing .. Your number one goal in buisness should be to make money .. If you will lose the $50 then its not a good investment but if you will make money then thats pretty much all that matters .. THERE IS NO CRIME BEING COMMITED. Its just business ..

the right way is "making money for a long time". plenty of dishonest businesses make a lot of short-term money. the really good players are in it for the long haul, which frequently means honesty, decency and sustainability.

I so wish this were true. Sadly, there are innumerable corporations that are dishonest and have been around for decades.

I would go one further and say that if you see a corporation that has been around for decades the odds are better than even that they have been / are dishonest.

Coca Cola and the whole murdering labor organizers thing comes to mind.

what about cisco? they seem to be pretty decent. they buy small companies and merge them in nicely and profit by it.

what about nike, which had a bad child-labor image back in the 90s and has really turned things around (though perhaps doesn't have a means to demonstrate this against the competition ?).

it is true that culture is changing. our concept of 'good' is becoming more humane, and possibly less financially driven. so yeah, we'll see what companies look like in 20 years.

Cisco, indeed seems to be doing ok in this respect.

Nike still had that image in 2001, yes, they've done a pretty good job of PR to indicate they're working on cleaning it up but I am not yet convinced that it's a solved problem. By the way, Nike has also been convicted of copyright infringement (a much lesser charge, the child labor situation really is in a different league).

> There is no right way or wrong way in business . There is only one way - The way that makes money

And so it goes. No wonder Americans, if not humans in general, more and more despise "Big Corporation".

Here's a novel idea: make a good, honest product. It will get good reviews without costing you an additional dime. Give value for value. Be honest instead of paying for lies.

You'll sleep better at night, and be able to look children and dogs in the eye.

Sadly, good reviews don't do much on the app store for sales, unless you have a competitor with awful ratings. Colloquy has 4 stars (skewed by the couple of people who didn't understand what the application was (sigh...) and the couple of people wanting feature requests in inappropriate places) but that hasn't done anything much. Neither has being in the top 10 for paid social networking applications for 2-3 weeks (now dropped down to top 20) nor having a recent release date impacted sales as much as I imagined..although this may be genre-specific, i.e. games would be more popular than social networking.

The only way to really get good sales of your app if you're not on the front page of the app store in any way is to promote it elsewhere, and typically the best places to go to are the big Mac/iPhone/tech websites with promo codes. TUAW reviewed Colloquy (well...more like Colloquy's built-in browser, it was a very odd review: http://www.tuaw.com/2009/01/22/first-look-mobile-colloquy/) and sales almost doubled the couple of days right after the review.

If the $50 review site in question is the site I think it is, the only reason why we haven't paid is because we've gotten reviews out of higher-traffic sites for free and can't justify paying for a review from a site that we can't even trust any longer for good reviews. It's one thing to charge everyone a flat fee, but another to tell developers they're just going to sit on the review until later unless they cough up a fee. Sure, it's their choice to do so and if they can profit that way, good for them..and there are developers who will pay and perhaps find it worthwhile, but we just don't see that happening for our app.

Big Corporation pay celebrities money to give favourable reviews and endorsments all the time .

The difference is that there is no pretense of it being an unbiased opinion. The kinds of review sites that offer paid placement generally rely on deceiving the reader into thinking the review is honest.

By the way, could you tell me the name of your product or service? I'd like to know so that I can be sure never to trust any reviews of it.

I'm guessing you're not on too many editorial boards... Perhaps you run hosting-review.com?

It's dishonest to offer "reviews" that are nothing more than advertising. It's not criminal, but it's not ethical. It's much like hiring people to be your references when getting a new job. You might be a kick ass employee, but if you really were why would you have to hire people to talk well about you?

I dont own a review site or a product I am selling right now but I have studied business and read a lot of books and articles and I have concluded that business in general is dirty and because you are not doing business in isolation you have to look at what your competitors are doing to succeed .. One of the books that I read was ALL MARKETERS ARE LIARS .. Read it .. but first see this

http://www.moveahead1.com/articles/article_details.asp?id=33 http://sethgodin.typepad.com/all_marketers_are_liars/

There is too much stuff to learn in business but creating a product is one thing and Marketing a product is a totally different ball game ..

There is no standard anything anymore -- everyone is playing with business models left-and-right. As long as they clearly tell end-users how reviews are done, they could be using monkeys to write the reviews on papyrus.

Can you ask them what kind of traffic they are bringing in -- and how much of the traffic leaves the site on the way to iTunes? If they can answer that question for you (and providing proof would be a bonus!), it would be an easier question to answer.

(I'd apply a formula like: 50 visitors on average go thru to iTunes after reading a link. 10% buy. That's 5 buyers. If your app is $10, you end up breaking even.)

a) is it disclosed? If it's disclosed as a sort of paid advertisement, then it's okay. It's more of an ad, than a review. b) what's their traffic? See if there really is a "backlog of apps to review". c) Be concerned that they will only publish it if it's a positive review. That means they're only doing this if it's favorable. d) What other apps are there? If it's third rate apps that look like they can only get a positive review if paid, then id abandon it.

Everyone is going to have their own opinion on this. No one is right or wrong, this is just my point of view. I hope it helps.

I agree with the disclosure rule. Look through their current reviews; do any of them mention pay, or even be vague about it, such as "we were asked to review this application" or something ?

If not, then what you want to do is "pull a dreamhost" with a post on your own web site. Then post that here, and on reddit and on slashdot etc -- the resulting traffic may be more than this site could give you, and your conscience will certainly be clearer.

None of the ads mention that the reviews were paid for.

I would not pay, as a matter of pride and taste. I have a strong dislike for influence peddlers.

Instead, ask your friends to review it on Apple's site. Promote it yourself. Advertise on Google and set the ads to show on the same sites you are talking about.

Ask your friends to review it? How is that ethically superior to just paying for the review?

I didn't mention ethics, only pride and taste.

Well, your friends aren't getting paid, and if you explicitly declare that you want their honest opinion, and that a bad review would in no way impact their relationship with you, then there's no ethical problem.

Ethics only becomes an issue where you're paying someone to be dishonest about your product.

The ethical issue here is that a review should convey the good-faith impression of an unbiased user.

Hell no don't pay. That's crap, for all the reasons you mentioned.

How many blogs have you sent your info to? 10? You should be sending it to 100.

I publish a tech blog. We're small but publish on Google News. Hit us up. Can't guarantee we'll review it. If we do and it stinks we'll say so. If we do and it's awesome, we'll say so.

ReviewMe.com specializes in this, they do not promise positive reviews just a review.

If you can get more the $50 of sales from it then pay.

So long as your not paying for them to give you a positive review (it's a leap of faith I guess) then it's hardly a huge misdemeanor.

If that site makes a practice out of bribing developers out of money for positive ad scores, they will eventually get outed, and (I imagine) will eventually die.

Joe consumer probably doesn't give a crap if some iPhone app site charges $50, but other tech journalists, and hardcore/cutting-edge users definitely care, and those are the people who drive that site's pagerank and reputability through linking to and discussing it.

Not worth it. My company, Viximo, has created numerous applications including our most popular TrueFlirt. We've had a number of reviews on the top application review sites (unpaid and unsolicited) and the resulting downloads is very minimal. Most consumers of applications don't really read those sites.

I had this situation (astroturfing for sale, which is what this really is) back when I was a Palm Developer.

Does anyone read their reviews? Do you look at their reviews when thinking about buying an app?

I usually find the answer to be no to both these questions.

I don't want to do business with a site that is dishonest to its readers

Then don't give them an incentive to be.

You appear to lack the business sense to point us to your iPhone app with this question. ;)

It is listed in his profile (which I though was the more accepted approach here).