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Comment by xenocratus | Hacker News Reader

I used it for a while until it got me wondering - what, exactly, is their business model? And why do I trust their judgement on how reliable reviews are?

This is not to say that Amazon reviews are generally good, just saying that Fakespot might have an incentive to... tune their reviews of reviews :) so where's the Fakespot of Fakespot?

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Considering FS is free and they are hiring, they must have some sort of monetization roadmap. My bet is either they become paid, they do paid whitelisting, or they provide some sort of sales intelligence to sellers. The first option is the best case scenario. In the latter cases, akin to Facebook, the actual customer would be sellers, charged based on the number of active users FS promises.

ReviewMeta, on the other hand, is clearly donation based, and also seems more honest at the moment (e.g., not claiming to be some sort of “trusted advisor”, showing a big warning that it’s adjusted score is only an estimation).

Monetization could be selling training data to big Amazon sellers on sentiment analysis of products. Or they just start whitelisting products, kinda like adblock does the "acceptable ads" we now have acceptable garbageproducts.

There's always the monetization roadmap of acquisition, possibly even by Amazon to shut it down.

Could be similar to AdBlock

Well, they heavily promote their browser extension[1] (at least for me, when I hit their homepage). The addon gets access to your browser tabs and website data. Their privacy policy grants them access to serve you targeted ads based on information you share with the service, so that seems like it would be their monetization strategy.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fakespot-fake...

They're excellent for curiosities now. I just bought linen bags with big dollar signs on them as props for a personal project. Amazon made it easy.

So basically any time you need something where the concept of fakes doesn't matter or is removed entirely.

Otherwise Amazon is a hulking pile of scams and garbage

Looks like they aren’t generating any revenue yet. According to crunchbase they received a 5.3m USD series A funding so far, which is gonna keep the company running for quite a while with less than ten employees.

They most likely are trying to get users first, and then look money printing opportunities later.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/fakespot/people

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