From my years of Freelancing, I can tell you - this has gone on since the beginning of time (<snicker> ) and is not just reviews. People think they can buy their way into anytihng - reviews, articles, FB friends, likes, tweets, all of it. Browse through a site like Elance -
- "200 PR 9 inbound links" - budget, $50
- "100 blog posts pointing to my site without nofollow" - budget, $50
"Spin 20 articles" - budget, $50 (This one in particular grinds my molars)
- "500 Facebook Page Fans" - budget, $50
- "Turnkey Website Solution" - budget, $500 (What these wind up being is some insane scheme to pay someone $500 to build a template of Amazon or some mega-crapsite and put it up on 100 domains with different designs, thinking they will make money by quantity, never having a clue about duplicate content)
The list goes on. People are looking for the one off, one button, get me rich and don't expect anyone doing the work (if you can call it that) to be paid.
What's **really** funny, and ironic - some of the people buying aren't even aware that many of the resources they buy are regurgitated. I've seen one instance of reviews turn up on 6 different and unrelated sites. They got what they had coming to them, I think . . .
What I think about it . . . it has degraded the web immensely. There are very few resources you can rely on and have to wade through a hundred to find just one. It's a mess.
