Andrew J Smith had never promoted a mobile app when Spilt Milk Studios appointed him their community manager. Tasked with doing public relations to drive awareness of Split Milk's debut iPhone game Hard Lines in 2011, Smith did what any 21st-century human does when confronted with a new task: he turned to Google.

While on the hunt for blogs to pitch, Smith found something that struck him as slightly odd. A number of iPhone app review sites were very up-front about charging for publishing reviews of your app. "I was new to the scene and I just assumed that was the way things worked," Smith told me. Smith bookmarked a number of the sites but didn't think about them again until today.

Now a seasoned public relations practitioner, Smith is promoting a new game—Appy Nation's Fluid Football—and he's decided to take a stand against pay-for-play review sites.

"I had thought those sites I found were an aberration, but when I brought it up today on Twitter there was such a big response from people in every sector of the games industry—devs, fans, media, PR—that I had to write that blog post," Smith said on Friday.

The pay-to-review app sites that Smith has unearthed—which charge developers anywhere between $29 and $150 for a review—are brazen about how they work. iPhone App Review and Best10Apps have a selection of coverage packages a developer can choose from, ranging from simple text reviews to link-building services designed to improve SEO. Other sites like AppCraver and TapScape are a bit less blatant, calling their scheme an "expedited review" offer, implying that developers who aren't in a hurry can get a review without paying. None of the sites feature disclaimers alerting visitors that the review they're reading may have been paid for.

Wired contacted the sites listed in Smith's blog post for comment—only Best10Apps responded. "Best10Apps.com is a legal media organisation," the company said in an unsigned email. "It is legitimate that we help our customers' promising apps be learned by more and more people through our professional and hands-on review."

Despite their efforts to ape the look and feel of better-known app review sites, pay-to-review blogs don't appear to have a particularly active or engaged readership. iPhone Footprint, for example, doesn't have a single comment on any of its recent posts, and every individual piece of content has been +1'd on Google+ exactly 18 times, a suspicious coincidence. Its modus operandi seems to be built around attracting inexperienced developers who are desperate to get their apps noticed in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

"So many bedroom coders have come out with iOS and Android apps that there's a world people out there that don't know any better about PR," Smith said. "They're targeting those first-time developers with a tiny marketing budget and don't know that a professional site will never charge for a review."

James Vaughan, whose indie studio Ndemic Creations released iOS game Plague Inc. earlier this year says that review sites approaching him with pay-to-review offers is a frequent annoyance. "I've had lots of offers for rather dubious promotional services. Normally asking for money but often wanting loads of promo codes—like twenty or more—in return."

Jaako Maaniemi, the former editor of GameReactor Finland who now works for game developer 10tons, finds the divide between editorial content and advertising getting increasingly blurred. "I send out press releases and a handful of sites spam us back with a paid review offer. Another handful spams us their ad campaign rates," Maaniemi told me. "As a former games journalist I find the whole setup really fishy."

Smith plans to maintain a listing of pay-to-review sites on Appy Nation's blog. "It's crazy that this is happening, and they can only get away with it as long as first-time developers are in the dark about how PR is supposed to work. I'm not trying to start a witch hunt, just trying to start a dialogue so these sites can't exploit people off in the shadows."