You should never pay to have your app or game reviewed
I this morning awoke to find yet another email asking me how much it would cost for a developer to have their game reviewed and charges for placement. This isn’t nearly the first such email I’ve received—plenty have come my way, and more so since I started writing for Tap! magazine.
I find such emails hugely disheartening, because publications should not be charging for reviews (which some laughably refer to as ‘expedited’, as though it’s a good thing)—they should be curating on behalf of their readers and earning their money through advertising and readers paying for content.
Reviewers do get sent stuff—hardware, software, online codes—and sometimes they get to keep it. But there’s a world of difference between getting the odd freebie and outright asking people to pay you to review their wares. Gary Marshall sums this up nicely on Twitter:
It’s a betrayal of the readers. You’re in the scoring free stuff business, not the reviewing business.
I totally agree. So, devs, please stop asking me how much money I want to review your app or game, because the answer will always be nothing, and just the act of reading the email makes me sad. If you want me to consider your software for review, send me some information about it—a link to your website or to an App Store page; if it’s a paid app and you have a promo code handy, fire one over, so I can immediately install it on my kit, ready to check out later. But please don’t offer me money.
I don’t know which is worse – that creators offer to pay for a review, or that there are review channels accepting payment. Even in the iOS era with games costing as little as a fancy bar of chocolate, value or money should be a consideration in any review and remuneration is goin to upset that balance. After all, we wouldn’t want a website to offer exclusive reviews of a new game while changing the skin of the website to promote the game, would we?
Value for money, that should read…
I agree it’s sad, but the whole iOS press ecosystem is training developers to think this way, and I guess devs who are fairly new – who have started out on iOS – can be excused for thinking that paying for reviews is the norm.
When we’ve send out press releases or requests for review for our game Magnetic Billiards: Blueprint, the vast majority of responses we get are either out and out requests for payment for review, or slightly more subtle emails pointing out that they’re very busy, but they’ll definitely review the game if you pay for the ‘expedited’ option.
The more respectable publications generally don’t even reply to little indies, so the typical new iOS developer is only getting a responses from publications asking for payment, one way or another.
@Ste: I get that it’s tough for indies, but some of us reply. Also, those sites that suggest expedited reviews clearly lack integrity and objectivity, and so I wouldn’t think exposure on them would be significantly beneficial anyway.
I can totally understand the frustration of developers with the ‘iOS ecosystem’ of review sites that require payment, however to suggest that review sites “should be curating on behalf of their readers and earning their money through advertising and readers paying for content,” is not entirely realistic. I don’t do expedited or paid reviews of any type on my site, Digital-Storytime.com, but I also made less than $500 for the entire year in 2011 … not many sites can afford this sort of a starting place. I happen to also be part of a development team, with my husband, so I empathize with developers on this, but I think it is also possible that your are not ‘walking in our shoes’ much when you consider this issue.
I only review book apps for kids 2-12, so my ‘readers’ are also the same ‘readers’ developers are after … I’m curious to know how easy they think it is to get ‘readers’ in this day and age to pay for content? Really!
So, developers can do whatever they want to make money, including ads, facebook & twitter & other annoying links in apps for toddlers, but review sites are evil because they want to charge to ‘move an app to the front of the line’? I don’t see the FTC investigating us recently, do you?
It’s easy to blame review sites for discoverability issues, but consider the number of reviewers at sites with decent search rankings … now divide that number by the number of apps on iOS alone … we’re talking a *huge* market that a very small number of people are trying to curate … I find that anything a site can do that doesn’t compromise the *content* of the review itself means that site is doing an enormous service to both readers & developers. While I don’t have a fee system in place for my site, I know of sites that manage to expedite reviews and still provide excellent & honest reviews for their readers – try reading a few reviews at http://smartappsforkids.com if you are curious for who is doing this well …
Carisa
@Carisa: As I’ve said to a bunch of people today, I question the objectivity and integrity of any publication—from indie level through to something larger—that charges for coverage. There’s a big difference between advertising and charging a developer to review their product, at which point you are a whisker away from an advertorial. As for not ‘walking in your shoes’, I’ve been a writer/tech journalist for dozens of publications, spanning well over a decade now, and so I’ve seen all sides of the industry. I also run two effectively non-profit sites myself, but while I’d consider advertising, I’d never ask someone to pay me to review anything, nor would I accept payment for doing so.
I can’t say I disagree entirely … after all, I also don’t accept any type of payment yet for my site’s reviews. I do, however, get a constant stream of requests from developers to ‘pay’ for a quicker review on my site. I guess
I just think developers are as much responsible for this trend as review sites – it’s hard not to consider it when people are offering to pay to get to the front of the line (or asking to advertise with thinly veiled suggestions that you also consider a review of their app). The number of reputable sites that can make it under these circumstances will be small as a result, in a time when we need more curators, not fewer.
I respect your position and the dialogue it creates especially. I just think it is a different experience for anyone trying to work full-time on a review site – you may run two sites in a ‘non-profit’ way, but if you spent 24-7 on a single site (which I do with mine), you might reconsider the idea that anyone could do this as a ‘non-profit’ and still eat.
Carisa
I am founder/reviewer at BestAppsForKids.com
I agree with Carisa. Carisa is a very well respected reviewer in kids apps circles and that will not change if she decides to accept payment to expedite reviews. I spent a lot of time building my reputation as a review before I even thought about offering advertising and priority reviews.
We accept review applications free and paid. Regardless, we only feature the “Best Apps For Kids”. If you paid for a Priority Review and it’s not a best app, we will not publish the review, but we will email it to the developer. It is not an advertorial.
The whole app ecosystem seems to revolve around (1) Everything is free, apps included and (2) Everyone wants the multimillion dollar “Angry Birds” pay off. Neither of those are sustainable business practices.
Developers have a choice of how they market their app – many are free, many are paid. It’s your choice, but the bottom-line is that you have to develop an absolutely stand out app for it to be successful. And even then you have to promote the heck out of it.
I also hear developers complain that they can’t afford to pay a graphic designer, build a website, or that they can’t compete with the big budgets of Disney. I don’t know any viable business that you don’t need to invest at least a little money into to make it successful.
Lesley
@Lesley: Thanks for your post; a few points… First, I find it curious that there’s such a difference between websites and other media. If magazines demanded payment purely for coverage (i.e. reviews), all hell would break loose. I’m not sure why that’s deemed acceptable online. (Although, to be fair, the practice is divisive—I had plenty of people on Twitter, some of which run websites, say that they cannot stand payment-for-coverage models.) Secondly, some developers—especially indies—seem to think this is the default now, in that you must pay for coverage. It’s strange as someone who doesn’t demand payment to have developers simply not get this and think you just want nothing to do with them by ‘only’ asking for a URL or a promo code. Thirdly, investment is something developers should do, I agree, but I’m not comfortable with that extending to coverage. Lastly, I do understand the point about sustainable business, but that certainly doesn’t mean I have to agree with the model, which has too much potential for conflicts of interest.
@Craig: Thanks for carrying on this conversation. I really do enjoy being able to think these things out loud. Anyway…
I have been on the other side of this and a print magazine did *heavily* sell advertising as a way of getting coverage in the magazine. Not editorial coverage, but it was clear that they were looking for advertisers with the clear hint that advertisers got preferential treatment.
Once again, I do not accept payment for coverage. I accept payment to put an app at the top of my list to review. I also accept submissions that are free, but most of the time I spend scouting for great new apps and other ways or packaging app reviews to be interesting and useful.
I agree that there it is a divisive issue, and see the points on both sides of the argument. However, I feel 100% comfortable that my site does not “clearly lack integrity and objectivity”.
Also, it’s easier to take the high road of being a “non-profit” website that replies to developers and features all sorts of apps when a site is new, has low traffic or is a hobby.
My website is a business and I look at a variety of ways to generate revenue so that I can continue to provide the best content to my readers, while also having the ability to pay the professionals I need to keep the business growing.
I absolutely, totally agree!
Apps for iPads has never and will never take payment for reviews. I know sites charge for what they call expedited reviews; I didn’t like it when I first heard of it and still do not agree with it. I think it opens up a whole issue that we will not deal with. You can call it whatever you like but paying for a review is paying for a review.
We are a small company, still building our audience, and not making as much revenue as we would like, but I do not think that accepting payment for reviews is any answer. We are continually analyzing our business model, but have agreed that this is one area that we are not comfortable participating in.
Indies are always relating to us that it’s a tough market, and it is. If developers can now pay for reviews who do you think is going to get them? The bigger developers that can afford it, leaving indie developers once again out in the cold and struggling to get their apps reviewed and recognized, trying to make a living.
So call me old fashioned but I run my online business like I always did my offline ones. We might not be the biggest name in the market but we are proud of what we do. We review apps that we feel are worthy of review, period. We are building our audience and our relationships with our peers, developers and PR firms. A business is not built overnight. We will continue to give honest and free-to-developers (yes, we do ask for a promo code for testing) reviews. Our readers can be assured that what they are reading is always the real deal, never tainted, and never paid for.
Marge
“I have been on the other side of this and a print magazine did *heavily* sell advertising as a way of getting coverage in the magazine. Not editorial coverage, but it was clear that they were looking for advertisers with the clear hint that advertisers got preferential treatment.”
That may be the case, but there’s a big difference between promo material and actual editorial content, and one which I think most readers are well aware of. Positive previews and the like may be par for the course, but letting that influence seep into your editorial would be considered taboo for all but the most critically bankrupt publications.
Once you accept money for reviews, you have compromised yourself and your site beyond acceptability. If you can’t see another way to make your work financially viable, maybe you need to look harder. There are plenty of review sites and publications in other fields that seem to operate just fine without having to stoop to this kind of panhandling, just because you’re covering a fairly young, emerging market doesn’t make you a special case. If anything that makes it worse, as you’re essentially teaching new developers that this is how the system works.