Most product review sites fall into one of two categories: professional or community driven. Sites like CNET Reviews and blogs like CrunchGear pay their staff to review the latest gadgets and give you an authoritative, and hopefully unbiased, opinion on what tech toys make the grade. Community driven sites like Epinions and Amazon rely on the kindness of strangers to post reviews, which are presumably honest and useful when taken in aggregate. There is a whole other class of startup that is trying to aggregate user reviews from a number of sites. See our roundup here.
The latest spin on product reviews has been to combine the two systems. In a talent search less glamorous than American Idol, review sites are turning the their community members to find the best reviewers in exchange for a little more cash.
SharedReviews is soon to launch review site in this category. The site will be a community of reviewers each with their own profile consisting of their reviews (video, written), their experience related to the products they review, and a rating of their skill as a reviewer. Reviewers will be able to post reviews to the site directly and through widgets using their API. There’s a sneak peek of the site to the right.
From there it’s just a matter of separating the wheat from the chaff and rewarding reviewers. By taking a look at the flow chart below, you can see what SharedReviews has in mind. They want to create reviews, sell advertising, and then share the wealth with the community and reviewers. Shared reviews will take 50% of the ad revenue, and then split the remainder with the reviewers ranked by proficiency along with the community that voted them there.
They’re looking for private beta testers with plans to launch this fall. If you’re interested, you can sign up here.
Readers interested in earning cash for reviews should also check out expoTV and Shopwiki.
I think it’s a great idea. It’ll be tough to sort out if ratings are jacked up illegitimately, since there’s money at stake for the reviewer.
I was going to say a better way would be connecting their rating to sales conversions from their review, but I guess then you’d get stacks of falsely positive sales material instead of reviews.
I guess what would be optimal would be purchasers of the products rating the reviewer after they buy, but that’d be tough to get the info. If you could, I think you could get truly good reviewer feedback.
Reviews are becoming central to buying decisions and there is a lot of value in making it easier for consumers to find all reviews in one place. However, getting users to write reviews on a walled garden site is challenging. Its just not natural for most of us. And the ones for whom it is natural, they are posting reviews on their blogs, websites and other places….including Amazon which is probably the largest review site (its not easy to replicate that though).
The ratings will be skewed somewhat because people have preferences before they review a product but I’m sure they take that into consideration when whether to approve the rating or not. If you have a person filling out 300 reviews in an hour you know his “insight” isn’t worth crap. At least I hope they know that.
50% of the cut gets distributed to the community and then that is further split into half between contributor and voters?
Something doesn’t add up here? Looks like the reviewers are getting shortchanged.
Will there be a conflict of interest if the reveiwer honestly doesn’t like the product of one of the advertisers? Will he or she be pursuaded into downplaying or ignoring a products faults?
What do you think about a new project called amazingstartups.com?
1:10:89 rule is problematic with their business model
voters being 10% will take greater cut then 1%.
Ami Z
ViewScore.com
Loudervoice.com has a better shot at getting better review content, I think. I’d prefer have my own review content on my own blog. Likewise, I’d prefer to read reviews from somebody elses blog where my feeling is that people would have more personal investment in what they write. My initial response to SharedReviews was similar to Kewtr above that their model is ripe for illegitimate jacking up of reviews once money is introduced. I don’t think Loudervoice offers reviewers money but the payoff for me would be access to reviews that I feel (rightly or wrongly) have more integrity.
We’ve got a site in Beta called 3LUXE (http://www.3luxe.com/ ). It’s an editorially driven site that reviews the reviews (online and offline), monitors new product launches, and basically does the research you’d do if you had the time to find the best 3 products or services in any category. We then give users the ability to vote and comment on the picks to help make sure we get it right. We still have a lot of fine tuning to do, and reviews to add, but hopefully people will it to be a helpful tool.
wow.. just could not think how much similarity SharedReviews and my site, http://gizmoojo.com are. Gizmoojo was started as a pet project and I did not have time to keep up with development but.. it’s just so reminds me of my site.
I mean
1) The idea of community sharing reviews, and earning ad revenue from their review page was the main idea of Gizmoojo. Users can vote for the review by cheering a review or ranting a review.
2) The site layout, the top rounded corner banner and the color scheme( orange, silver and white… the left main column, then the right sub-column.
Why didn’t TC do enough research about ponzi and pyramid scheme?
This model will only attract set of unwanted reviewers. Making money like this (or similar to this) on the web has not worked.
Isn’t this just Web 1.0 company Epinions respun with a Web 2.0 face? C’mon. This isn’t revolutionary or even interesting. The world can do without it. It already has. Epinions has been flirting with death for a few years now.
agree with Aaron
from wikipedia
“Epinions.com originally had both an Eroyalties plan and an Income Share Plan. The Eroyalties plan paid writers per read of their opinion. The payment per read has steadily decreased and finally been unilaterally abolished, partly because cheating was taking place.”
disagree with Aaron
epinions merged with dealtime became shopping.com bought by ebay no death in the near future
I am biased in my opinion of this site, for obvious reasons, but will throw in my .02 anyways.
Personally, they are no better than PowerReviews, PayPerPost or any other site that does not produce original content. The untold goal of SharedReviews is not to provide a good service to readers, but to work the Google long tail as much as possible - and do it using your readers instead of doing it yourself. Compensate your readers with pennies on the dollars, and make sure that any product indexed by Google is added to the site. It’s as simple as that.
Google and the other search engines need to start penalizing sites like this (Google already does this with the shopping comparison sites like Shopping.com etc) by lowering their rank position in search results.
Anyone with a marketing research background will tell you what people look for when researching a product:
1) Professional opinion/review
2) Peer opinions/review
3) Price/value
Peer reviews only go so far, you still need the other two components in order to make a knowledgable purchasing decision.
Wow - is it just me or is the graphic describing the whole thing kind of off-putting? It’s not actually that complicated, but when displayed in a “look how easy this is” style, it kind of ruins the effect. Also, the arrows aren’t quite strong enough to distract my eyes from the normal reading pattern. They should have made it an actual circle.