ShopWiki, an incredibly innovative online shopping community, will announce today another step to expand their service’s offerings. The company will pay users $50 per video for the first 500 submitted product review videos selected for inclusion on the site – that’s $25k total. This site is nuts already and paying people to add video reviews is going to take it over the top in terms of usefulness. Or maybe it’s just really cool. I’m not Mr. Online-shopping by a long shot and even I think ShopWiki is loads of fun to use.
The company was founded last year by Eliot Horowitz, former DoubleClick CEO Kevin Ryan and DoubleClick Co-founder and former CTO Dwight Merriman. It’s self funded and aims to profit only from contextual advertisements. Its feature set is awesome.
ShopWiki says it crawls more than 120,000 online stores for its search results. Its search engines understand complex natural language queries. There’s a price slider and user written reviews.
The two most notable features to date have been user written and edited (but ShopWiki vetted) wiki buying guides for more than 1,200 item types and a color wheel that will filter your search results by the color of the item. The color wheel was launched just last week and is really quite a technological feat in and of itself.
The further inclusion of user created short videos about various products is likely to be a powerful addition to this already very impressive site. Lest you think that a start-up paying that much money for user generated content indicates Bubble 2.0, think about the subject matter at issue. All the lip-synched music videos in the world probably aren’t worth 25k, but product reviews by users just may be. Shopwiki already adds value to the user experience by leveraging users’ writing in its company-vetted wiki shopping guides. The availability of select videos on key pages should carry this strategy even further.
Whether the timeliness of those videos will be maintained in time-sensitive sectors like electronics is a question – but if a system like this takes off then many people will want to be the face in the newest iPod review video. The best video of all those submitted for that page should be worth well more than $50 to ShopWiki.
Nice, that’s a very smart move by ShopWiki. $50 for a good review is a bargain. It greatly increases site utility for the users. I also see a lot of prospective reviewers jumping in this offer. I might actually use this site now!
How much money have you spent on ShopWiki this year?
Hard to imagine they will ever have a real business if they don’t become an affiliate play.
Off topic for min. ShopWiki is the truth. I have been searching for these sneakers I really like. After reading this post I went to Shopwiki and found them. Thanks.
i don’t get it. why would you need to search on this page when all their results are from amazon? where is the added value?
Another shopping search engine? Nextag, Froogle, Amazon ….now we’re down to “search by color”??!!
Go ShopWiki!
http://www.tech...h.com/tag/Etsy/
Etsy’s color search is awesome to play with even if you aren’t shopping.
How do these guy do what they do legally? I mean I too am impressed with their service, but they are openly spidering 1000s of sites to get their content. This includes prodicut images, descriptions, user reviews and ratings. Anybody understand how that is legal?
Adrian-I could very easily be missing something obvious, but since when is spidering sites illegal? Isn’t that how all the search and comparison shopping sites work? For me the bigger question is what happens when Amazon decides it doesn’t like shopwiki and blocks its spiders?
VC Mike – As far as I know using somebody elses content is illegal whether the content is tajen manually or automatically through the use of a spider. Other shopping comparison sites are ok because they are not spidering at all. Rather, the merchant sites are voluntarily providing their product feed to the shopping comparison sites.
It’s also chock full of fake goods! My search for jeans netted me a list of $375 knockoff Birkin bags -
VC Mike – “…the bigger question is what happens when Amazon decides it doesn’t like shopwiki and blocks its spiders?”
Perhaps they have hundreds of proxy URLs ready to take over the moment that happens.
A new cooler project called WikiPurchase.org uses the MediaWiki software that Wikipedia uses, and best of all its free!
http://www.wikipurchase.org