We’d Like Your Input on Ethics in Blogging
November 19, 2009 by Evan Kline 
11 Comments
We’d like your input concerning credibility and integrity in product reviews that appear on blogs. Specifically, we’re interested in what factors you, our readers, think influence the credibility of a product review. Your input will factor into some decisions we make here at 40Tech.
By way of background, we’ve been contacted twice here at 40Tech by two different companies, with requests to run articles about software products. In both situations, the articles were written by the software developers themselves. We didn’t run either article, for obvious reasons. Situations won’t always be so clear cut, though. When, if ever, is it OK for a blogger to write an article, if solicited to write it by an outside party?
Photo by quaziefoto.
We don’t pretend to know all of the answers, and we don’t want to come across as "holier than thou," but our credibility is the most important factor to us. There are a few obvious lines we don’t want to cross. We won’t run a product review that we don’t believe in, just because we’d get paid, or because we get free software.
In one of the situations mentioned above, we were offered a free copy of the software to be "reviewed," as well as some free licenses for readers. We informed that company that we don’t publish articles about a product written by product manufacturers, but that we would be willing to perform a fair and impartial review of the software. We told the company that it would need to provide the software, and if the program met our standards, we’d want to be able to offer some free licenses to readers. If we couldn’t give the program a favorable review, we wouldn’t give out any licenses, and we’d uninstall the software and return the license we were using. We haven’t heard back from that particular company.
Even our way of handling it might be a less than ideal situation. Ideally, we could purchase each and every item that we review, so that we don’t subconsciously favor a company that was nice enough to provide a product. In fact, so far we have done that (except for programs that are free, of course). But some day I’m sure we’ll run into the same problem that many small blogs run into. Namely, we won’t have enough resources to buy everything we review.
This is an age-old problem with publications. For years, writers have received complimentary items to review. Sometimes they return them when finished with a review, sometimes not. And many publications run reviews of products, at the same time that they are accepting advertising revenue from the manufacturer of those same products. As far as I know, Consumer Reports is the only publication that purchases every product that it tests.
So, where should the line be drawn? What do you think of the "policy" that we developed on the fly, telling a company that we’d consider publishing our own impartial review, but that the company must provide the product? We truly are interested in your opinions. We’re not saying that we will make our decision solely based upon the input we receive here, but we will consider all opinions, and do want to hear from more voices on this.
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I think your policy makes perfect sense. By providing you with a copy of the software, a company would increase the chance that your would review it, but wouldn’t bias you towards a positive review.
Running a canned, company-provided, review would be bad and would kill your credibility in the long term.
.-= Kosmo @ The Casual Observer´s last blog ..Losing the War =-.
Thanks for the input Kosmo. Glad to hear you think our gut reaction was OK.
I agree that your policy is pretty straightforward and clear.
I have to say though that I tend to skip over your reviews of anything other than free/freemium software anyway!
I certainly agree with Kosmo that simply posting a review written by the company themselves would kill your credibility.
Thanks, Daryl, for chiming in. We’re glad you at least read the reviews of free products, which constitute most of our reviews. We know that other product reviews will have a limited appeal, but occasionally like to write about other stuff that we like in case it helps somebody out there.
I think you did just right. You’ve put in a lot of hours making this blog what it is, and your readers trust you. I think it’s perfectly OK to take free stuff for review, and I definitely trust you to be honest about whether something is worth buying or not. I seriously don’t expect you to purchase everything you’re going to review – for one thing it’d be great if you were able to review competing products to give us comparisons.
.-= Christie´s last blog ..Quiet! Trying to think here! =-.
It’s funny that you mention reviews of competing products. One of the earliest posts at the site, our comparision of eWallet, KeePass, and LastPass, still gets some of the heaviest traffic at the site. I think we may have to look at more articles like that. Thanks for the input!
To me, it’s a no-brainer, actually. I don’t believe in “influenced reviews” as there’s no way on a blog it will ever fit in. Sure they can buy links and banners (as ads), but that won’t be a review.
A review – to me- is like you defined it, impartial.
I’ve done 4 or so, paid reviews, on TechPatio over the past few months and none of them have been influenced by the fact I was paid to do the review, I also put that note at the very top of reach of the review and so far none of the companies refused to pay me, despite that note.
Keep up that good policy if yours :)
.-= Klaus @ TechPatio´s last blog ..iPhone Free Week: Introduction To A Week With HTC Tattoo (Android) =-.
Thanks, Klaus. Your site’s genre is pretty close to ours, so it’s nice to hear your thoughts.
Very interesting article. So far I have written reviews about free softwares and firefox addons. All of them are neutral reviews. The readers always expect neutral reviews. The moment we deviate from this behavior, we will surely lose some of the regular readers
.-= John Samuel´s last blog ..Retweet Support now in Twitter =-.
I agree, John. Perception is everything, and even if a product is great, people will be suspicious if the writer is the one who made the product.