Let the Death Spiral Begin
Oct 25 '01 (Updated Nov 01 '01)
The Bottom Line It's going to be easier for people to be elevated to Top Reviewer and Editor status in the future after thousands of members quit Epinions.
The news that Epinions is dropping Eroyalties is not surprising at all. I think we all saw this coming.
Unfortunately, it seems, a good percentage of my reviews are written about hard-to-find beers, wines, and other such things that produce virtually no income share. The strange thing: the reviews that made the most money for me where all written during my first two days of membership. I could take the income share from my last 200 reviews and it will not compare to the income share I received from a single review I wrote during my first week of membership at the site.
And, on top of this, the Content Partner program is being discontinued. My content partner site generates half of all income I ever made at Epinions.
I have referred over 3,800 new members to Epinions. Now, I have no incentive to do so at all.
Net result: fewer new members will sign up. Hit counts will decrease. Income share will decrease, and the death spiral will begin.
It's a little troubling that reviews can no longer be edited or deleted by members. The reason that this is so is obvious. Epinions does not want members to "quit and take away the marbles." Some members, who are upset with these new changes, will be tempted to delete all their content -- leaving the site with nothing and the search engines filled with tens of thousands of 404 results. (A site killer.) Several disgruntled members in the past have quit the site and taken away their content. Now, nobody can. Smart move, Epinions. At least somebody planned for the worst.
I'll still post reviews here, since I enjoy the site. Surely we will all see page views decrease, levels of rating activity decrease, and I even predict that we will see an increase in the level of abuse.
But the good old days... well, they are over.
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Epinions.com ID:
4-1-1
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 - Top 50 |
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Member: Tom Carr
Location: Southern California
Reviews written: 1090
Trusted by: 689 members
About Me:
Go U.S.C.!!!
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