Product Reviews: Everyone Wants A Piece Of The Market, But PowerReviews May Get It
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
PowerReviews/buzzillions has a pretty clever business model. Essentially its creating Sheep that $hit grass. It is a step beyond it's competition iNods, which is two steps beyond ViewScore, which are both only marginally more useful than just searching google to find reviews.
But what I (we) think would be a lot cooler, is building a community around and for this tech consumer market.
Our site ( http://revvu.com ) uses a user-driven model for centralizing consumer electronic reviews on the web. Users can submit reviews that they find, or blog, or want to share. Then the community can vote reviews up or down (based on value) per each individual product page. (sort of reddit style)
Votes on reviews effect the weight of ratings, forming a dynamic review score that reflects the opinion of the masses.
We just launched on Monday, so karma is not yet visible. Also, our social network aspect is not in place yet. That aspect will be the key to creating a strong community, creating an addicting user experience, and creating a way to share (read: show off) the things you own & are interested in.
I think PowerReviews is a cool concept, and will probably work for some retailers... but they (like everyone else in this space) don't get "it" yet. Aside from the arbitrary use of tagging, their site isn't really reflecting any of the advancements or evolutions of the way people use the internet today. They have found a business model that seems feasible and built an idea around it in a market that NEEDS improvement. What they lack is a carrot to attract users (those seeking reviews) to care, return, or get involved. Which might be fine for them, if thats not what they want. If thats the case though, suggesting that PowerReview (or buzzillions) "may get the market" doesn't sound very likely.
Anyway, we'd really appreciate feedback on our site. This is a very sharp community. We would certainly be interested to hear from, or chat with, anyone who has feedback/suggestions for us.
I think PowerReview has an interesting strategy in that, aside of your sheep analogy, they aim for corporate partnerships; they are closer to the "B" in B2C. revvu's strategy, if I'm not mistaken, is much closer to the "C." And in this aspect I would think the "it" for the B-approach and C-approach are different.
A more immediate competitor for you might be epinions.com?
Our approach though, is mostly to let people submit links to outside reviews. There will always be CNet & engadget (and these will be submitted), but what we're hoping for is a place to help people find reliable reviews from lesser known sites like audioholics, i4u, GSM arena, or the hundreds or thousands of tech blogs like digitalconsistency.com that pop up all the time.
Forming a user-driven centralized hub for consumer electronic reviews from all over the web.
That is definitely something that has been a consideration since day one though. Epinioins was widely disqualified as a reputable source because people formed such "cartels" to take advantage of their paid review model.