Recently, I was looking for reviews for stuff such as the Motorola L2 and the Nikon D40, and after a few seconds of Googling I quickly found ¸a site dedicated to offering visitors such reviews, that is Epinions. You might have seen my two recent articles where I mentioned that they were originally posted on Epininons, well here is what that is all about.

How it works is simple really, just like any other user-generated content site. Users write reviews for whatever they want, from Bluetooth headsets to diapers to furniture, and then other members and moderators come along and rate those reviews. After your review is rated at least “Somewhat Helpful”, it then becomes visible to the general, non-member visitors that just want a quick jab at some quality reviews. This is where Epinions becomes interesting. As it’s capital earning mechanism, it has links to merchants who carry the product being discussed, and of course for every click that these merchants get, Epininons gets a few cents richer, and to reenumerate it’s members, the site has decided to split the profit made from the PPC of an item with all the users who made a review for it.

This is a bit hard to understand specially explained by someone by me, so here is an example.

I review the Logitech G5, and it gets rated very helpful, it appears to the public. The public, which likes my review, buys the product by the ton, and Epinions makes 100$ of affiliate income. I haven’t informed myself too much on this but let just say that the return percentage is 20 % (0.20 * 100 =  20), and that 5 other users wrote a review, then we would split the profits equally, giving us (20 /5 =4)  4 dollars each. Now, these numbers are purely fictional, and getting 4 bucks of income might be somewhat long, but in no case would I say that it is impossible.

At first, I considered this just another occasion to participate in  something that would help the online community and improve my writing, but the money aspect to it makes it just way more interesting.

So check it out at Epinions.com, and see what it’s all about.