Deceit on the Internet: Product Blogs --- Strong Deceit.

In our blog entry dated July 20^th, we discussed how Product Blogs provided a strong opportunity for deceit. We decided to do some basic data analysis to see how strongly product blogs were used to spread the manufacturers’ message in such a way that the manufacturer affected the outcome of the “review.”

We did a Google search for the two bedwetting alarms A and B which were candidates for strong deceit. We did not include in our count any sites that were explicitly used for selling the product (like Amazon.com), or sites openly run by the manufacturer (like XXXXX.com or XXXXX.blogspot.com) or a site openly selling the product. We did include in our count blogs and sites being used by the manufacturer and not revealing the manufacturer’s ownership of the site, which either served as a direct display of the manufacturers’ advertising, or did the same indirectly as an “opinion” or “review” by the owner of the site or blog.

Some blog owners were reasonably open about their policies. To quote one site/blog:

“This blog accepts forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation. The compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog.”

That’s pretty straight forward. But our experience with the content of every site/blog was that the compensation received did influence the review in a very positive manner.

Searching the first 6 pages of the Google search results, our count for these possibly phony reviews was:

Product A:           29 biased reviews

Product B:           25 biased reviews

These numbers did not surprise us knowing what these products were, and who their owners were.

We do want to point out that these possibly fake reviews account for about one-half (fifty percent) of the first five or six pages of search results under Google search.

This is abominable in our opinion, that these manufacturers should be overwhelming the internet with such deceitful opinions and reviews, reviews that have been paid for or “sponsored” by them. It is also indicative of the lack of care or respect of the public by these manufacturers, who may do anything they can get away with to sell their products, including the excessive deceit that we could count.

We again recommend that persons reading opinions on the internet after an internet search should ignore almost every review or review site. The biases are usually excessive, generally quite substantially in favor of the manufacturer. We again suggest that the reader go to a neutral and very comprehensive data site such as www.urinealarms.com to examine the different products in the market place, and make straight forward comparisons of product qualities and prices.