Are you in it for the money?

July 10th, 2006

We call videopinions authentic, unbiased reviews of products in ‘real world’ testing by consumers. But, yes, videopinions aren’t truly *unpaid* product testimonials. They are paid for by Expo when we run a promotion or contest.

Why do we create incentives? We want to pay for the time and effort you took to create a videopinion. We offer incentives to get you going to help develop this emerging “art form” of good video reviews. And guess what? Our promos were enough to push thousands of you over the edge to figure out how to put a digital video together and to show how much stuff you know.

Can you be that starved for Amazon Gift Cards? Well, definitely, some of you are in it for the money…some of you haven’t even used the product (yes, it’s that obvious). But, the overwhelming majority of you just had some loud, really smart and experienced opinions about your stuff. Based on the enormous scripting you went through to demonstrate your products, and how sincere and personal some of you were, the cash seems like it was an excuse to just *let loose* about your stuff!

Where does the money come from? We do *not* pay you to tell you what to say. We’ll never tie payments to whether it’s positive or negative about a product. Although we’re advertiser supported, we never reject a vpinion because of what you said about a product . We’re actually working hard to get manufacturers to listen to what you have to say about their products. And, by the way, we are a start-up, so we’re still in the red on this whole payment thing…

Now that you know what we’re doing, we’ve been playing around with promo incentives — trying to weed out the scammers, and get more reward to the really helpful reviewers. We’ve reached out to some of you, to help guide us as we build the site. One thing we learned is that many of you prefer cash. So, we’re working to move to a cash-based system. We also hope to launch some other new incentives in the next few months, including a videogame review contest going on right now with our buddies at GamePro . We hope you’ll like our new programs and that they encourage you to continue to talk about your stuff. Feel free to write any comments on this blog about new things you’d like to see, or things you’d like us to improve. We know that if it doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t work at all!

- Daphne 

Entry Filed under: Videopinions