Belkin paying for positive Amazon reviews?
Sadly, it looks like the answer to that question is “yes”. According to The Daily Background, an ad recently appeared on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk site looking for folks to fill out positive reviews of Belkin products, regardless of whether or not they had actually used them. In return, reviewers would be compensated to the tune of $.65/review. Sounds….shady, but perhaps the ad was posted by some frenzied Belkin fanboy looking to improve his favorite company’s product ratings, right? Wrong. Further investigation revealed that the ad was posted by gentleman by the name of Mike Bayard, who just so happens to be a Belkin employee at the helm of e-retailer sales. Yipes. Sadly, this probably isn’t the only case of such tomfoolery, but Belkin certainly should not be applauded for their actions. We’ll probably have to wait until Monday for an official response from the company, but in the mean time this is probably a good point at which to re-evaluate Amazon’s ranking system, perhaps only allowing folks that have legitimately purchased the product to provide a review? Just a thought…
AT&T and Apple paying for positive BoyGeniusReport reviews? Absolutely!
^The same can be alleged about Sprint and/or Palm resident cheerleading fanbois.
^damn, someone beat me to it!
Lame of course. Others do it too.
^Everyone’s a $5-whore. OK. Got it. Thanks for clearing that up.
Some people wouldn’t mind ’cause this country is in recession.
Posted from BGR Mobile (iPhone) at: Latitude: 40.627197, Longitude: -73.946259
And that is why you never trust user reviews. Makes me wonder how many other companies do this…
Other sites have Proof of Purchase requirements before allowing posting. I think it should be a minimum requirement in order to post.
In terms of cynical comments … really nice to see people looking on how to use technology more appropriately. Evidently it’s to throw one’s hands up in the air and say it’s all hopeless. Of course, in order to do so, one has to ignore sites which have implemented some of these basic controls.
I hope this isn’t common a practice.
Oh also isn’t the Exclusive Window for Att and the iPhone almost over?
In today’s info-now world it would be pretty hard to do something like this and get away with it. I think most reviews can be trusted as long as they’re more then a couple sentances so you can tell where the reviewer is coming from.
Lol this is hilarious but I don’t think anyone is really all that surprised to hear this info.
Now we know what Obama’s Acorn group does in the off season.
LOL hahaha.
BGR…Please answer the million dollar question….Does Apple pay BGR for positive reviews?
It’s funny Amazon didn’t catch this since he was using their own service to bring in users.
Posted from BGR Mobile (iPhone) at: New Hyde Park NY, 11040
Well i did have a really bad experience with a Belkin product once, it was a belkin n1 vision router i got at Best Buy, Dude i went throw 4 new routers in a single day No lie all seen to be defective, when to CNET left some reviews and notice in a few days i wasn’t alone and then after a few more days all these positive review started coming in also WTF LOL, so i don’t doubt the story to be true, i just can’t still believe i for once though of swapping my Apple Airport Extreme base station for a belkin product and all cause belkin said that although their product had a $199 price it also had a 1600 foot range but that was the least of problems that the device had
@MrHiDef & Greg: Thanks for manning-up up where principle is concerned! With your “leadership”, we now better understand the error of our ways. We will now go and sin no more.
Wow, so if Amazon makes sure you buy before you review all those Spore bad reviews will go away. Do you think all those anti-DRM low scores came from purchasers?
The ad was probably placed by a recently-fired employee.
I am sure a certain percentage of reviews are seeded but to be as careless as this and to entice positive reviews certainly points to an eager employee at a new position wanting to make an impression or an employee who has been in charge of a sales channel (ecommerce) that he is unqualified for. Sadly, the lack of a timely response from the company indicates this was not approved through internal channels (another example of inexperience) and thus the word of mouth credibility he was so trying to obtain will certainly work against him. Nice concept, bad execution. Thanks for letting all of us learn on your dime!
Should have gone a brand ambassador review method