A couple of days ago I was reading one of Marie’s articles over at pornresource.com. I really like her, because she’s always so bang on with things. This time it was a new twist on one of her familiar rants - quality of the membership experience, or lack there of. The gist of her message being, how many affiliates actually check the quality of the products they promote? She warns that every time you make a quick buck on a crappy site, you are adding to the growing numbers of jaded consumers. Her point, one I happen to agree with, is that by selling consumers a bad experience you make it harder for everyone in this industry to make future sales, including yourself.

Marie got me to thinking about how I select programs to promote. What I had to admit was, with some exceptions, my selection criteria are based largely on how easy the sponsor makes it for me to promote their properties. After all, who has time to stop and review all the sites in a program they are about to promote? That’s assuming you can even get permission. Then I thought, maybe we can rely on the review sites for guidance? If we can trust these review sites are legitimate, I should be able to visit a few and get a general consensus. I selected three popular review sites, one straight and gay, the other two all gay. Then I looked for sites that had been reviewed by all three.

What I found was anything but consensus. The evaluations, from one review site to the next, were all over the map. The first “reviewed” site I chose to compare is one I have been inside of. One review site ranked this site’s navigation as 10 out of 10, while another gives it 3 out of 7, and even comments on how difficult it is to navigate. The third review site starts right off praising the site’s ease of navigation. All very interesting, considering I found the site’s navigation to be nothing short of a complete cluster fuck.

One review site had published reviews on two different sites, that I happen to know are clones. The tours are different, but the member areas are identical. So you can imagine my surprise when the two sites got opposing reviews.

I noticed a lot of gay and fetish site reviews being done by individuals that have little or no understanding of, or experience with, the content. Its one thing to judge technical items, like photo/video quality, or ease of navigation, but the reviewer should also know and understand the content being evaluated. All to often this results in reviewers accepting, and giving validation to, claims being made by the site.

This was evidenced in one set of reviews I compared. The first reviewer gave praise to the site for all its exclusive models. She even published a screen capture of the so-called exclusives. A different reviewer said the opposite, criticizing the site for falsely claiming exclusive models. He went on to say those models are all over the place, an observation I know to be true. Some of the foot fetish site reviews I looked at were humorous, in a pathetic sort of way. The reviewers admitted having no interest in the fetish, so they concentrated on other things, like how cute the boys were. Or they would conclude it must be a good foot fetish site, because there are a lot of pictures of feet.

Mine was not a comprehensive study of all review sites, but of those I looked at, none offered an evaluation on quality of customer service. In my opinion, this is an important component of the membership experience.

At the end of the day, my conclusion is you can’t get a consensus by reading the evaluations of several review sites. I have concluded its better to pick one review site that delivers, in your opinion, authoritative and unbiased evaluations. Spot check a few of the reviews to see if the site is in agreement with your observations. You should also consider the date of reviews. After the 2257 shake up last June, many sites became a shell of their original self. I know of one site that got more than one rave review for its vast (mega site) collection of Miami Studios content. Today most, if not all, of that content has been pulled, yet the reviews go unchanged.

I’m not going to name the review sites I looked at, because it’s not fair to single them out in a field filled with others. I will say that out of those three, the site using multiple reviewers for each site was least impressive. I mention this, because I don’t think anyone should use multiple reviewers as criteria in evaluating review sites. In my opinion, this site is using multiple reviewers to cleverly disguise their self-serving motives. By my observation, they drop a high scoring review into the mix for sites that are converting well, and the reverse if they want to push a poor performer out of view. On the other hand, they probably are a good resource for determining which sites convert best.

If you can’t find a trusted review, at least try and pop in for a few minutes to determine if the site even comes close to their claims made on the outside. Like Marie pointed out, when you get inside a black twink site, and most of the models are white, you know it’s a stinker.