If you have a habit of reading blogs, you no doubt have noticed a recent popular topic is the brand spankin’ new ReviewMe.com. ReviewMe is a new website that matches up advertisers with bloggers and offers payment to bloggers for reviews of products.

There has been a lot of controversy over another similar service that pays bloggers to post reviews. However, that service didn’t require bloggers to disclose they were being compensated for their review, nor were the bloggers allowed post negative reviews.

It is in these two key areas that ReviewMe is drastically different. ReviewMe requires bloggers to disclose they are being paid for the review and the blogger is free to give a negative or a positive review.

For example, what you’re reading right now is a paid review. Because my blog is still relatively new, I’m getting paid $20 for this ReviewMe review. When advertisers sign up, they’ll pay a certain fee depending on how popular the blog they want the review to be on is. I believe the highest cost is $250–so in that case ReviewMe would get $125 and the blogger would get $125.

Now, as for how I feel about all this. First, I think the disclosure requirement is great. However, there has been some discussion that bloggers will still be motivated to give positive reviews in the hopes of getting more advertisers to request they review their products. I believe this could be true; however, this is something readers will simply have to keep in mind. I’m not sure we need to coddle our readers too much. Anytime a reviewer is compensated in some way, the reader is smart enough to know there could be a conflict of interest.

So, the idea of the conflict is sufficiently satisfied by the disclosure, at least for me. What concerns me more is how this could change the content of blogs. Who wants to read a blog that contains nothing more (or at least a lot of) than paid reviews? I’m not sure if I’ll be reviewing products on here, but I do know that if I do it will be very infrequent and it will be accompanied by my humble apologies for the temporary disruption in ad-free content.

By the way, if you’re interested in seeing if there’s any fallout from a negative review, keep an eye on FiveCentNickel.com, which just posted a negative review about an advertiser.