By Rachel Chalmers
Epinions.com Inc, a consumer-driven, word-of-mouth shopping guide based in Mountain View, California, has announced an affiliate program in order to give independent web sites access to its content. The new scheme works rather like Amazon.com’s affiliate program. Webmasters can syndicate Epinions content and customize it by selecting the specific topics that interest them. Epinions will pay cash for the traffic its affiliates generate, as well as for every user that signs up and contributes product reviews on the affiliate site. Those contributors are crucial to Epinions’ model. The company posts reviews written by its users, and allows other users to rank reviewers according to the usefulness of their reviews, thus creating what Epinions likes to call a web of trust. The theory is that reliable reviewers will move up in the ratings and bad reviewers will drop. It’s a little like Mozilla’s Open Directory Project, but specifically designed for shoppers.
Oddly enough, the model has become a cult hit among the writers of web logs – people who maintain lists of interesting web links and update them every day. Epinions allows web loggers, the vast majority of whom are amateurs, to be paid for their online writing. Indeed the relationship between Epinions and the web loggers has grown so close that prominent web logger Peter Merholz actually joined the company as its creative director. The affiliate program is one more way for the Epinions to reach out to the volunteer content creators. How the prospect of compensation will change the content they create is anyone’s guess.
