I’ve been reading Amazon reviews lately that have a disclaimer that the reviewer received a product for free in exchange for an unbiased and honest review.
How are people being selected to do this? More to the point, how do I get in on the action?
I don’t know, I’ve kind of wondered that as well, but I read something just recently that said they were putting an end to that.
From the middle of the article
That led me to another article which I didn’t read when I saw the first one. This article mentions that while you can no longer get free products from sellers in exchange for a review, you can still do it through Amazon’s Vine program (which I’ve seen as well). So I’d look into that, If I wanted to get swag for reviewing stuff.
There used to be a few websites where you could basically sign up to receive free shit in exchange for your unbiased (cough:bullshit:cough) review of the product.
To the surprise of absolutely no-one, the people who review products in exchange for free shit don’t want to stop the gravy train, and so they were very unlikely to give a critical review.
Amazon customers began getting annoyed with all the incentivized reviews, and in October Amazon basically put a stop to a lot of them. They still have a system for such reviews, but you have to go through the Amazon Vine program.
Here’s a TechCrunch story from October.
Edit: Curses! Beaten by one minute!
I was in the Amazon Vine program, from what I understood I was selected because my Amazon product reviews had gotten a lot of “helpful” votes. So, write a lot of good Amazon reviews.
The Vine program was fun while it lasted but the IRS caught up and started wanting me to declare free review items as income. By then the distribution process of Vine review items was enough of a mess that I just quit.
My wife was one of the reviewers for a while; basically there was a Facebook group you could subscribe to, and they’d post items that you could get (with special coupon codes) in limited numbers for a song, in exchange for a review. Of course, they recommended only 4 or 5 star reviews, and preferred that you just not post a review if you thought the item sucked.
Basically they post something like “Stainless steel can koozie $2 - first 100 respondents!” and the first 100 people who’d reply on the page got a link and a coupon code for a Yeti-style can koozie for $2 in exchange for a review.
Amazon shut it down pretty hard in October though; there were reports of items having hundreds of compensated 4-5 star reviews and nothing else, for example.
I got one recently for a prism. I’m a photographer, and I guess they found me from my online presence or something, and sent me a free prism to try out and post a review on Amazon in regards to a photographic technique called prisming. Came out of nowhere. I didn’t solicit it. But I got a free $15 prism.
Perhaps you could change your username to Prizmer of Zenda.
I’ve had a few authors (including one from the Dope) send me their e-books for free and I’ve posted reviews for them on Amazon - very informal arrangements and I was honest about how I felt about the books.
I also review things when I don’t get free samples, too.
I do surveys for cash. One site I belong to sends out some pretty nice items to the upper tier survey takers/reviewers. I was sent an iRobot Roomba, in exchange for an HONEST review, a week long diary of how the product was used, and several pics that showed the product being used. A product this great isn’t the norm however, usually it’s for things like skincare, vitamins, laundry detergent. Doing the surveys though, paid for all of the Christmas presents I bought last year.