May 10/05: What's With All These Review Sites?

I had quite a surprise a few weeks ago. I was signing up for an affiliate program and there was a drop-down menu for "What kind of site" I ran. I was all set to click on "Other" after scrolling past Paysite and TGP and the currently fashionable Blog (a TGP with personality), when--lo and behold!--there at the bottom was a chance to select "Review Site"!

Are there really so many review sites now that we've earned our own niche as affiliates? Just a couple of years ago you would have been very hard pressed to find more than six or seven Internet porn reviews. Now there seem to be three or four new ones every week.

Before you start thinking I'm going to rip all these new sites just because we were here first, there's something you should know. In addition to being one of the original Internet porn reviews, we were also the first to link to all other available reviews of a site. We did this because we wanted to provide as much information as possible. We don't make any money from referring surfers to other review sites. We lose on it. I'm sure we lose quite a bit. But the thing is, we always liked the other review sites. And we also thought that it was really important to guide you to as many different opinions as possible. An individual review can be misleading for a variety of reasons (the reviewer was lazy and didn't check everything out, or had an axe to grind, or didn't know what he was talking about, etc.). And even when the review itself is fine it can be out-of-date in a matter of weeks. I remember writing a review of Vanilla DeVille's site, which I thought was quite good, only to find out it set up under new management a month later. I decided to leave the review up with a note that it was probably no longer accurate. And when I link to other reviews I sometimes find that even the best external review sites have missed important information like the fact that a site is no longer updating, or has no exclusive content. No doubt I've made the same mistakes myself. That's why it's important to get as much information as you can from as many sources as you can. Which is why it's vitally important that there are a variety of sources to choose from.

So, you see, I'm all for having more reviews.

What gets me is that so many of these new sites aren't reviews at all, but cynical attempts to make a quick buck. Under the pretense of offering a consumer service they just throw a bunch of advertising at you. How, for example, would you distinguish the beginning of the following review (of a blowjob site I gave a "4") from the ad-copy trash you would read on a site tour:

"It may taste great but it's definitely not less filling. This site is full of sexy young hotties that open wide and gag as their throats are filled with load after load of hot sticky cum. There must not be any calories in jism because these babies have smoking hot bodies."

And the rating systems! Folks you've seen it as often as I have. What the fuck is the point of rating a site on a scale of 1 to 10 when you are going to give every site an 8 or better? All this grade inflation isn't doing anybody any good. Especially when really mediocre sites are listed as "Great!" and score 9/10 (or 4 out of 5 stars, or whatever). When I got started writing reviews I thought I was pretty generous. I even tried to think of some way to rationalize all the high scores I was giving out. Now I find I'm one of the toughest critics out there. But let's face it: The average porn paysite is just that: Average. So the majority of sites should score in the 6-7 range, not 9-10.

Making matters even worse are the rip-off review sites that are just stealing reviews (and graphics, and whatever else they can get) from established sites and posting them as their own. There have been two cases of this that I've heard of in just the past few months. And then there are the affiliate programs that are starting to get involved by launching their own in-house "review" sites. 

Credibility? Don't even ask.

So while I'm all for having more reviews, I haven't been very thrilled by any of the new guys. More is turning out to be less. The new review sites all look and sound exactly the same. They're just a bunch of cookie-cutter templates with generic, anonymous reviews (often only a paragraph, or even a sentence, long), attempting to run the search engines. They aren't trying to help consumers, they're trying to confuse them. 

It's depressing when you think of how all this clutter is going to make it even harder for a quality new review site (should one appear) to get noticed. But we've been here before. As with most things on the Internet, it looks like we'll just have to learn to manage the glut of information and see what lasts.

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