epinions www.epinions.com review

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By thewampster. on 23rd Nov 2002

thewampster.'s Ratings

Content	7/10
Overall value	5/10
thewampster.'s recommendation

Good Points

content

Bad Points

recently quality has dropped, pay structure appauling now

General Comments

Epinions is the grand-daddy of opinion sites and as a database to match. There are absolutely hundreds of thousands of reviews here on anything from 10p toys to £100,000 cars reviewed by genuine ordinary people like me and you. well you anyway, I'm far from ordinary... ;o) Anyhow, epinions is one of the many opinion sites I write and have written for around the web so I'd say I'm pretty well qualified to talk about them. Frankly, from a writer's point of view they are nothing to shout about anymore. You used to get paid somewhere between $0.01 and $0.03 for every reader your reviews earnered which on a site this busy worked out rather nicely. These days you still get paid but it's from a pool of cash they call "income share" and basically it amounts to zilch, zero and zip for most of the reviews you write. Electronics and car reviews pay well but everything else, forget it. You're lucky if you get $0.01 for a 2,000 word essay... Basically, don't get fooled by their promises of 'payment' for your work - it's not going to happen on any worthwhile scale! As a consumer resource it has suffered a little since the payment structure collapsed as well. There are still a large number of reviews being submitted but the quality isn't what it once was other than from the die-hard members who seem to have carved out an impentrable niche for themselves. It is still worth a visit for unbiased reviews but sadly the quality isn't what it once was in many respects. It is also an American site so you'll find a heavy US bias on what is both in the database and in the reviews themselves...although many British people do write there. For unbiased reviews with a Brit bias you'll want to check out the likes of dooyoo.co.uk and ciao.co.uk or indeed, this site of course, all three will offer you what epinions offers to the Americans. Navigation around epinions is something of a problem as well since they redesigned the site. They seem to have hidden everything behind silly menus and it's no longer a pleasure to use. In fact, forget the money issue, the navigation problem is the main reason many people, myself included, left the site some months ago. Overall, epinions is not a bad site at all but for unbiased UK-oriented advice you are better off checking here or one of the above sites I mentioned instead.

Total Respect: +2