Saturday, June 13, 2009

Product Review Website

one liner: a website with superior product reviews and ratings by offering coupons for helpful reviews.

Reviewing a product well isn't an easy job, you need to have some kind of expertise in the area, you need to know other products in the market, and you need to be able to communicate your feelings about the product in a clear manner. Just look at movie critics, game review magazines, zagat guides, etc. There are millions of people who make their living off of reviewing different kinds of products.

Many restaurants pay bloggers to review their food and make posts of it, but when reading any of those things, you can't help but question whether they really like the restaurant or they just got paid a lot to like it. It's an inherent paradox in product review -- people base their judgment on independant reviewers, but reviewers make their money from companies that make the product they review, which makes them biased. It would be much better if the reward system is fully disclosed or controlled.

But what is interesting is that these kinds of reviews can be analyzed statistically. There are plenty of signs that would tell if the review is really accurate or not. If people who expected a 5-star hotel, but only got a 2-star service, the probability of them complaining is very high. So it is completely feasible to find out how good the rating is by product sales, amount of use of the product, amount of complaints, etc. Reviewers that have both popularity and accurate ratings are the most valuable for a product review website, and it would be profitable to the website to provide such people some kind of compensation, whether it is a free product to let the reviewer review or a monetary compensation.

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