Well, I hope everyone had a happy holiday.

After opening up our forums , we’ve been getting a lot of great ideas from you all. One question that came up is on our payment structure. Why have we been changing the payments, what we’re shooting for with the payments, etc. Here’s a bit of insight into what we’re doing. We feel like we are all (vpinion creators, employees, users) working to create an authentic community of consumers helping each other. The overwhelming majority of the Videopinion reviews are thoughtful, helpful and of great value. We have always thought that you should be rewarded for all the hard work you do to build this great library of knowledge. Believe me, there are a lot of sites (and a lot of people behind those sites) who argue that we shouldn’t be paying you anything. But the video creators at Expo are working hard — using video, getting personal , not hiding behind an anonymous user name, and sharing great advice with others.

Some of you have asked what we’re going for with our changes in the promotions… quality or quantity. The (not so) surprising answer: we need both! A small catalog of quality videos means that too many consumers wouldn’t be able to find anything relevant to their research and therefore dramatically limits the usefulness of the content to users and to our partners. On the other hand, a low quality library that’s really big…well, it’s probably obvious why low quality videos are a problem. So, we’re trying to give you the tools and the incentive to enable Expo (and you are part of Expo) to become a large, high quality catalog of reviews and show the world how powerful personal consumer advice can be. We’ve structured promotions that we’ve found help us achieve this goal, and are tweaking as we go.

But never fear… we’re going to be unveiling new promotions and features that will cater toward the best creators and videos over the next 3 months. We’re going to be giving bonuses to especially great reviews. We’re going to be inviting members to participate in certain promotions. We’re going to be adding a ‘how to’ section to help make better vpinions. We’re going to be inviting some creators to help us with focus groups, etc.

So keep the ideas and suggestions coming into our forums. All of our staff reads them, and we talk about them internally all the time. Thanks for your enthusiasm, support and those great vpinions!

- Daphne 

Add comment January 2nd, 2007