jsinkwitz

As someone in the influencer marketing space (100 players when I started, over 400 now), I view crowded spaces a bit differently. It implies, to me, a validation of consumer demand -- thus, those that can properly segment their offering to satisfy specific demands and execute more efficiently can pick up the available dollars.

Does this send emails based on what I need to remember?

As a stoic I'm getting an emotionally neutral response from this thread.

So very, very true.

I'm actually aware of some large FBA players that intend to create thousands of new 'brands' in the next year in order to push their wares.

Even still, they'll get their reviews, policy or no policy.

Keep in mind that this is more of a monopolistic move than a quality move; Amazon was already scrubbing for a while. 1. Amazon Vine reviews are still live and will still go live -- there's no more editorial quality to them than some of the other services. 2. This policy doesn't impact book reviews, where fake reviews, incentivized reviews, and review trading is most rampant. 3. The easiest way around the policy will be for vendors to get shadier and not offer upfront discounting. Instead, you'll see non-disclosed reviews where the reviewer is compensated for the product costs afterwards. If done properly, that'd be hard to catch.

As disclosure, I'm CEO of Intellifluence, which is essentially a marketplace for reviews (one supported platform of which is Amazon). We emphasize honest reviews and have been trying to fight some of the shadier players, but this policy move isn't going to fix things...it just is a move to push Amazon's own program.

I read that as "Management Contracts to Facilitate PS3s" and couldn't for the life of me understand why they'd want to use an older console.

This is good, but it would still be better if Bloomberg broke out top 1%, top 0.1% and then top 0.01% -- the graphing then makes it that much more obvious.

Yes, but not for the reason you're thinking.

Recruiters and sales people (guilty!) tend to network exceptionally well, which means by connecting with them, you'd just significantly expanded your 2nd level connections within your own industry.

Winz

It isn't working!

Should I add chocolate and a melted marshmallow for reinforcement?

According to their site, 176 full-time people, so that's pretty significant.

I enjoyed sharing her story with my 9yr old coding daughter; solid role model.

Most of the influencers are in the US; we are worldwide, but with a US focus.

We have a few thousand though and are growing as fast as possible to solve all the chickens and eggs.

It is fitting considering they just bought The Onion too.

It depends on the inputs required to prime the algorithm. Garbage in, garbage out.

The thing I am most excited about as a 38 year old is the prospect that I won't lose my independence in my golden years like I am now watching my parents generation undergo.

Self-driving cars and more efficient public transportation will surely add life to backend of gen Xers lives.

Accounting for the above, it is my hope that someone in Elon's camp is reaching out and explaining the benefits to AARP -- they'd be a powerful ally to ensure the progress isn't snuffed out.

If they see it a lot, then it sounds like it would be economically worth developing a version for pet owners.

Rough ideas: detect moisture in material. If soemthing 'wet' is detected on the bumper, halt. Just halt. It isn't worth it.

Otherwise, would need to have the ability to shampoo/wetvac, and that's something I don't think would work in a tiny device.

I would be curious to learn how many others in the community made similar moves and how it worked out.

I love you for saying price is too low. I agree that it is too low for our final form, but for a MVP?

Currently we have ~3800 influencers, which are a mix of Instagrammers, Youtubers, LinkedIn users, Facebookers, Twitter-heads and good old fashioned bloggers.

The reason I decided to do this startup is because I was getting paid $250k/yr as a stealth CMO and we were going heavy into influencer marketing -- but the game was somewhat rigged. Agencies only seemed to care about celebrity influence and ignored the power of peer influence, so my business partner and I delved in and determined that by focusing on building out a potential peer influence database we could actually create something that small businesses could easily use.

In terms of "right" influencers, that's a huge discussion that I could chat with you about for days; we do have the ability to filter on KW and network, but we want to do so much more, like use a bit of machine learning over time to determine the influencer's ability to drive traffic/conversions, etc.

Ping me when you launch; I'm eager to see. Getting a few million Instagram users and a few million Twitter users (and their emails) is not nontrivial I realize, so you've clearly put some time into it.