Today, ExpoTV, a site focused on user-generated reviews and product demonstrations, announced a $6 million Series A round of funding led by Masthead Venture Partners and Prism VentureWorks, including existing investors. Brady Bohrmann of Masthead and Will Kohler of Prism are joining ExpoTV’s board.

David Beisel, with Masthead, writes on his blog that he feels the ExpoTV investment is a promising investment because of ExpoTV’s focus on the “intersection of online video and social commerce”.

ExpoTV is best described as a YouTube for product reviews. Users can peruse or upload video opinions by category. They also have their own reviews branded as ExpoTV on demand. To reward their users for their content, ExpoTV currently has a “Pay-per-Play” program where you will receive $0.01 each time any of your published Videopinion reviews is played. Payments are made once per month via PayPal. ExpoTV also has several holiday promotions on right now as they focus on collecting holiday gift reviews.

Readers interested in ExpoTV will also be interested in user-generated review site ShopWiki’s $6.2 million round of financing last July.

New York based ShopWiki is announcing $6.2 million in new funding today from VC firm Generation Partners. I wrote about ShopWiki at the end of last month and it’s got an impressive feature set – including wiki style buying guides, user generated video reviews and a cool search by color function. The new financial backing will power a multi-year plan for international expansion, marketing and usability improvements. The company plans to target five countries outside the US in the second half of this year and twenty-five in 2007.

ShopWiki was founded in 2005 by Eliot Horowitz, former DoubleClick CEO Kevin Ryan and DoubleClick Co-founder and former CTO Dwight Merriman.

I like ShopWiki’s features, but after initially writing a glowing review I’ve given the service some more use and thought. I’m concerned that the feature set, though innovative, is too incoherent. Wiki buying guides are cool, though I’m not sure how widely adopted they are likely to be. Searching by color for clothes and home decorations is impressive, but doesn’t seem very related to wikis. Paying users to submit video reviews is interesting, but seems like something entirely different still.

Perhaps some day we’ll look back at this funding announcement and think that nothing could be more natural than a shopping wiki. If that’s to happen, though, I think the company is going to need to use some of its new found support to develop a more coherent offering that makes sense to users.

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.