[bisi]

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 ..

[GHFigs]

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.

[diN0bot]

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.

[cellis]

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

[jacquesm]

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.

[diN0bot]

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.

[jacquesm]

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).

[alnayyir]

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

[jonknee]

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?

[bisi]

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 ..

[logjam]

> 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.

[silencio]

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.