Epinions Review

URL: http://www.epinions.com/



                       (Important Update: As of March 2014, epinions is out of business!) 




NATURE OF WORK AND PAYMENT

Writers for epinions write product reviews for a very wide range of consumer goods. If it's something that has an existing listing on ebay or Amazon, you can probably write a review for it. If a product you want to review is not in epinions' database, you cannot review it immediately, but can submit a request for the product to be added.

Reviews have a length requirement if you want to earn money off of them. You can publish any review with a minimum of 20 words, but a minimum of 400 words is required to be eligible for payments.

Payments are based on page views. Epinions reviews are displayed at the epinions.com site and at shopping.com. Viewers of items at those sites get a quick preview of all the reviews for that item, and can click on each for more detail. When a site user clicks on your review, that counts as one view. The same user can click on multiple reviews of yours for different products, and each will count as a view. Views from other writers on epinions also count, but only one per month (so if they click on one of your reviews while logged in, you get a view from that, but none further from them for that month regardless of how many they click on.)

Epinions does not seem to want to tell you what their specific pay-per-view rate is, but it is always a teeny fraction of a cent per view. The rate appears to vary depending on the "helpfulness" ranking of the review (more on this later) and also your tenure/status with the site. After creating an account and scouring the site I can find no official numbers on earnings; the only hard numbers I've seen on earnings estimates are about .6 cents to 4.5 cents per thousand views. Any payment at all is conditional on the review remaining rated "Helpful" or better, however; if it dips to "Somewhat Helpful" or below, the review ceases to be eligible for ANY earnings whatsoever.

A minimum earnings balance of $5 is required to withdraw money. Being owned by ebay, not  surprisingly epinions also requires you be paid via Paypal (ebay also owns Paypal.)

Epinions rating guidelines. Not mentioned: 400 word minimum to actually make any money, "Somewhat Helpful" and below don't get paid, both users and category leads aren't actually held to this as a firm standard, and writing over 800 words + your participation in their personal follower / ratings booster network makes a HUGE difference in getting anywhere past Somewhat Helpful.

SITE HISTORY / LEGITIMACY

Epinions is one of the most tenured of the content mills, having been established in 1999. Shopping.com bought them out in 2003, and in turn ebay bought out shopping.com in 2005. Epinions has been owned by ebay ever since.

In terms of ripping you off as a content producer, you have very little to worry about. They will hold to their terms, provided you agree with the terms. Whether the terms themselves are a ripoff is a question we'll answer shortly.



INTERNATIONAL ACCESS

Epinions allows writers from outside the U.S., but requires that they file an IRS Form W8 with them, and also restricts them to a minimum of $100 in earnings before they are allowed to withdraw money. International writers are also subject to a U.S. withholding tax of 30%, but certain countries have treaties with the U.S. that reduce that tax for their citizens.

STARTING OUT

Users simply need a valid email address to start out. You are not required to submit any forms or financial information, but will have to submit your social security number or taxpayer ID if you earn more than $600 in a year (which is a very, very, VERY unlikely number for this site.)

Epinions has a fairly good search function that lets you look up the product you intend to review by name or other identifying numbers. As mentioned before, if the product is not listed, you must submit a request to add it and then wait for a response.

You can write as many reviews as you like with a new account; there are no restrictions or "levelling up" tiers to grind through. But, at some point in the next couple days after writing a review, a "Category Lead" (sort of like the forum moderator for each section) will give your review a rating. Additionally, a handful of "Advisors" (who are ostensibly epinions roving "quality control" agents) may also dogpile in and assign a rating to your review.

PROBLEMS WITH EPINIONS

In my view, epinions is nothing BUT problems.

First ofall, epinions is essentially an "on spec" site; you are HOPING to get paid rather than having a firm rate of pay established at the outset. "On spec" sites usually aren't worth the time, but the structure can actually work if you can write freely and still have a reasonable expectation of return - the lower return is counterbalanced by the ability to write what you want, when and how often you want, which leads to the generation of more paying content with residuals. Associated Content (before they were bought out and became Yahoo Voices) is a good example of an "on spec" site that actually could work out pretty well for you despite relatively low pay.

Epinions has a frankly crappy rate of pay based on what they ask in terms of time commitment, however. It's a 400 word minimum to earn money on a review. Even untrained writers can earn 1.5 cents per word at a variety of content mills, and a writer with even a modest amount of training/skill should be getting 2 cents minimum. So 400 words should net even a beginning, amateur author $6 to $8 up front. With epinions you'll be lucky to see 1/10 of that on a review, and it'll still take a period of months to develop.

That would be bad enough, but the rating system is too likely to screw you into doing all that writing and then receiving NO money whatsoever. First ofall, the profitability of your reviews is entirely subject to the whims of fickle internet users. As if that weren't bad enough, however, the "Advisors" and "Category Leads" can sink your review before anyone who is actually shopping for the item in question even sees it.

First of all, "Advisors" and "Category Leads" are fellow review writers on epinions who have earned their titles apparently through their extreme obsessive-compulsiveness in writing for the site. The fact that they're still writing reviews while rating the reviews of other competing authors strikes me as a conflict of interest, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say they hold themselves to some objective standard of assessing review quality. The trouble is, they seem to be obligated to give the once-over to EVERY new review that appears on their turf; of course, they can't possibly be personally familiar with all these products, but judging by their own reviews sheer WORDINESS seems to be the key factor in your rating. They often have these obsessive levels of detail and personal anecdotes about why they wanted or how they used the product that personally, as a shopper, I would find completely unnecessary and would seem like irritating padding. Mandating that you write this way means your "on spec" time is boosted to closer to 800-1000 words per review.

Overcoming a negative score or three by a hasty "advisor" wouldn't necessarily be a deal-breaking barrier by itself, however. If you wrote a shorter review that was genuinely helpful, the Hand of the Market would eventually correct this inequity in the form of grateful customers rating your review more highly, right? Nope. The REAL problem is that epinions also has a social networking component called the Web Of Trust, and all these "advisors" and "leads" have these sycophant follower networks that will barge into your review and give THE EXACT SAME RATING that their Dear Leader left. If Dear Leader decides to give you a "somewhat helpful" while rushing through their daily list of new reviews, it means 10 of their followers will come along and bury you with the same rating. All of this happens before any actual potential customer for the item in question even claps eyes on your review. This is before we even get into competing review writers on the same product who have an interest in knocking you down a peg.

tl;dr unless you want to play sycophant and be a part of regular circle-jerks led by OCD neckbeards and fat catty housewives with 14 kids, you're getting nowhere on epinions.

FINAL VERDICT: WASTE OF TIME

Is epinions right for you? If you're a beta submissive who likes to have their time wasted and make piles of money for other people while getting chicken feed tossed to you once in a while, then yes, epinions is for you. If you actually want to spend your time making money, then no. Even at a low level of experience, 1000 words should be netting you about 25 bucks. Being expected to regularly write that much for MAYBE a few pennies IF the Neckbeard High Council approves of you is just laughable.

Apparently back in the early 2000s, epinions paid a solid 1 to 3 cents per view. At that rate, it would have been worth it. Circa 2013 this site is a joke.