Hello! So I suppose you want to get a product reviewed at Obsession Rouge? That’s great! This page contains information about my rules, my terms and my conditions regarding reviews.
Everything here is non-negotiable. If you can’t accept all of these terms, you cannot work with me.
Confidentiality Agreement
You must agree not to reveal any personally identifiable information about me publicly, including my name. All public correspondence with me must be using the names ‘Obsession Rouge’ and ‘Adam’. This is very important, so please don’t forget.
You must give me tracking information when you send products
It is essential that you speak to me before you send me any sex toys. I need to confirm that I have time to review your product and I also need the delivery / tracking details. Things get stolen in my area sometimes and I’ve had several things stolen when I wasn’t aware that deliveries had been made to my mail box (including a sex toy). If you send something without warning me, you risk that product going missing and you also risk me not having any room in my queue – so always warn me when you’re sending anything.
You have to pay for product reviews
Writing expert product reviews is a service and I don’t work for free. I get requests for reviews every week and I cannot accept free reviews anymore. If I didn’t charge for reviews, I wouldn’t be making any money, because this blog would take up literally all of my time. So please understand… this is a job to me just like yours is to you!
If you need to skip my review queue and get your sex toy reviewed more quickly, there is an extra fee for that. I have to do things this way because it’s the only way that I can make it fair on all the companies that work with me.
My review fees are based on my normal hourly rate. When you send me a request, I will estimate how much time I need to write the review / produce the content and then I’ll send you a quote back. It is for this reason that sometimes it costs more to get some products reviewed than others. For example a cock ring or masturbator is much quicker for me to test than a complicated automatic machine or a big anal toy. My prices reflect how long it will take me to review the product properly.
You will only be sent traffic from countries you can make sales in
The geographic area that my audience covers is worldwide. In order for us to keep this website funded, I have to collect commissions from anyone in my audience who is kind enough to use our affiliate links. My website makes use of geographical redirects. It’s a simple practice that is privacy friendly, because I don’t keep logs. Basically, when someone clicks on my big red buttons, their IP address reveals which country they are from. My website redirects them to the most appropriate shop.
So long as your shop is a feasible choice for my readers, yours will be the shop they visit. For example if you operate in the USA and Canada, I give you exclusive traffic for those members of my audience. However if you don’t have a dedicated European warehouse, it would be expensive and impractical for readers in Europe to buy from you, so for those readers, I send them to different shops.
This is non-negotiable. Just to be clear, for any countries that you can ship to without incurring customs fees, yours is the shop my visitors will visit. So if you’re a company in the USA, you get exclusive access to my American and Canadian audience. If you are a British shop that can’t ship to America (or incurs customs fees for the customer when you do), I will sometimes use a different shop for America.
Please understand that it is essential to my business that I can gain commissions from my entire audience and not just a small selection of it.
You will only be sent traffic from countries that you give me commissions for
In some cases, companies I work with will give me commissions for some countries but not others. For example, if you give me commissions for your European shop but not for your shop in the USA, I will sometimes not send you traffic from the USA. This again goes back to what I was saying about it being essential for me to gain commissions from my entire audience.
If you don’t have an affiliation program, I will use other shops who do
There are some companies that get in touch with me who are well known and have products in many online shops. Yet they don’t have an affiliation program.
If I can find your products in shops I am affiliated to, I will link the ‘buy buttons’ in your reviews to those shops instead. I will still include a link to your website, however it won’t be the call to action itself. Again, this is only if you don’t run an affiliate program yourself.
Most companies who I work with and who meet this criteria are usually happy with this because they simply want to get more of their products sold and don’t care so much about the traffic itself. If you do care about the traffic however, it’s best that you don’t get reviewed here.
If you stop your affiliate program or lower the commission rate drastically, I may stop sending you traffic
Some companies try to get a lot of bloggers on board by initially giving very high commission rates. Then after awhile, those companies lower their commission rates a lot.
While I understand companies need to make business decisions that make sense to them, I have to make my own business decisions. If you lower your commission rate below 15%, I may change my calls to action to send traffic to a different shop.
If you use discount codes to drastically reduce commissions, I will stop sending you traffic
Some companies have very high commission rates advertised for their affiliate programs, however they have systems in place that reduces those commissions significantly. For example, there may be a company that offers a 40% commission rate, yet reduces that commission to 5% if the customer uses a promotion code (that the same company advertises themselves). In such cases, I will stop sending you traffic, because I consider such tactics dishonest and unacceptable.
Note that this refers only to cases where companies drastically reduce the commissions in certain cases. If the commission drops a little bit in rare cases, that is fine. What isn’t ok is for your company to deliberately use methods to lower commissions for the sake of lowering commissions.
I may review your competitors
If you have a review here, I might also review your competitors. I will not avoid your competitors or depublish content for them on your demand. Never ask me to remove content that I’ve published about your competitors.
You don’t get ads with product reviews
If you pay me for a review, you are paying for the review, not for any other advertising space on the website (including the sidebar and my newsletter). You are very welcome to buy ad space in those areas though, you can read more about advertising on my website here.
Your competitor’s ads may be site wide on my website
Many of the ads on my website are site-wide. I can’t hide such ads on specific pages.
All links to your website / shop will be ‘nofollow’
All of the links I ever put to your company’s website will be nofollow. I will never put a dofollow link as this is against most search engine’s rules. It’s not good for you and it isn’t good for me either! This is non-negotiable.
Reviews are published on this website, not yours
I write all reviews for this website, not yours. You are of course welcome to share small 50 word quotes that you like from the reviews. You are absolutely forbidden from copying more than 50 words or copying images/videos without my express permission.
How long your review takes to go live
I get a huge amount of requests for reviews and my queue is often quite long. If you send me a product for review, I will place you at the back of the queue. It is always worth asking me how long my queue is, because sometimes it can take several months for me to publish you.
Normally I publish one review per week (if I have products in my queue). So if I have 10 products already in my queue, it could take a while! If turnaround time is important to you then feel free to ask me about my queue length and how long I estimate it to take.
Some products take longer to review than others, so that is also part of my consideration. For example a very advanced smart sex toy with lots of features for me to test needs more time than a simple masturbator.
If my queue sounds too long, I have an additional fee that you can pay me to skip your review time down to one month. Understand that this doesn’t mean other companies tests are delayed. It means your review would go out on the same week as another company. The reason it costs extra is because it means I have double the amount of work to do compared to a usual week.
Bad scores
If I dislike your product or have considerable problems with it, then I will be honest about that. All of my criticism is constructive and I always try to review toys from several points of view. I hope you understand that I can’t always give high scores.
I will say though that I also try to only accept products that I think will do well. It doesn’t do me any good to review products that I don’t think people should buy!
Let’s get one thing clear though, I will not remove unfavourable reviews from this website and you cannot pay me to increase the scores.
Updated scores
Periodically, I update reviews and scoring. Usually I do this after a few years because I like to give my audience an overview of the product based on today’s standards, not of those from 5 years ago. I only update products that are still being sold and seeing as we’re such a small team, it sometimes takes me a long time to get around to doing it anyway. Occasionally I can’t update scores because I no longer own the products.
Updating scores may mean that your product’s score goes up or down. For example if there used to be a problem with software with your toy and you have now fixed that problem, I may go back and increase the score. If your toy is very dated or if I’ve heard that the electronics etc have died prematurely in lots of cases, I may go back to the review and lower the score.
I don’t translate every review into French
English is the main language of Obsession Rouge. I write all penis / prostate sex toy reviews in English. To translate a review into French is another large amount of work, so I will only do it if I think that the content will do well with my French audience. If a bilingual review is something that you want, make me aware of that before you pay me for a review. Otherwise it will be to my own discretion whether I get the review translated. If you’re an English speaking company, assume that you are only getting an English review.
Photographs and Videos
My photographs and videos are very nice, true! However I make them purely for this website. If you are interested in using them then you can get in touch with me but please don’t use them without asking.
I will always photograph the physical product you send me. I won’t put up photos from your marketing catalogue. Occasionally I will use company infographics relating to products that I find useful, however I choose when and how to use them myself.
I don’t make videos of every review product. I will only make one if I feel like it or consider it useful to my readers.
I never appear in either videos or photographs and never will.
It is to my discretion as to whether your product remains on my website
I don’t really need to explain this very much. This is my website and I manage what does and doesn’t stay here. So long as I have no reason to remove your product or review, it will stay on the website. If one day I choose to remove an article, that is my choice. You won’t be notified in such cases and you will not be refunded. To be honest, I wouldn’t overthink this too much because it is very rare that I take down articles.