Hey SharedReviewers!
It’s been a while since I’ve updated the community on how we’re doing behind the scenes, so I figured there’s no better reason than the recent passing of our one year anniversary!
First, Some Background
We started our company back in January of 07 with a dream, and that dream was to increase wealth online. Now, when I say wealth I don’t mean money – money is a means of transferring wealth. I’m talking about providing something of value that people want, and that something is knowledge and experience. We believe that every single person has amassed experiences and insight that would bring significant value to others. Now, if only there was a fun mechanism with meaningful incentives for authors to share them.
What exactly is SharedReviews?
On the surface you may think that SharedReviews is just another product review site, but it goes much deeper than that. To us it’s designed to be a reflection of a mantra. That mantra is that product experiences, like scientific research, how-to articles, or any other knowledge that’s shared, helps others improve their lives. The opportunity for us was to create a community destination for consumers that allowed them to not only share their product experiences with ease, but also connect with each other in a meaningful way that helped them become more powerful and informed shoppers.
The Impressive Results
Since our launch in February of 2008, we’ve seen steady and impressive growth both in the number and engagement level of our members, as well as the diversity and breadth of product experiences published on the platform. Let me share some data to give you some insight into why we’re extremely happy with how things have progressed:
- Almost 300,000 unique visitors generating close to 800,000 page views across the site in Jan 09.
- Over 100,000 votes cast by community members each and every month.
- Over 35,000 product experiences published for all to learn from in more than 400 categories that cover everything from Batteries to Cars to Mortgages.
I believe the biggest reason we’ve made so much progress is the dedication and support of our community. Loyal members who believe in SR, saw the potential of what we’re trying to do, and acquired so many positive benefits in their lives by being members that they have continued to help grow our community through both the good and the difficult. For that we are eternally grateful, and it renews our belief in what we’re trying to do every single day that we sacrifice to see SharedReviews become the success we know it’s destined to be.
The Future
Where are we going from here? Our number one priority continues to be payments towards outstanding member balances. Once we are completely up to date, we are going to re-enable our revenue sharing program with a number of fun new twists, not to mention the release of some brand new social features that are guaranteed to make spending time on SharedReviews even more fun!
As a new revenue stream both for the company and top writers in our community, the Bounty Service is going to be a major focus for us going forward. In case you haven’t heard, a “Bounty” is an article request for customers to use on their own sites. Our ability to collect and leverage writer demographics such as experience, education, and interests allow us to target the best authors for every assignment that comes in. We’ve had so much success from the trials we’ve been running the last few months that we’ve hit our limit on how many we can process without finishing off our new website dedicated to managing it all. We are literally busting at the seams to fulfil orders, and being late on releasing the new Bounty site is one of the unfortunate results. We’re working on getting the site launched as soon as we can, and we’ll make an announcement before the end of the month with an exact launch date. We wanted to thank all of the authors who have applied to become writers for the bounty service, and we’ll let you know who qualifies as soon as the site goes live.
Tomorrow night we’re going to require a downtime of a few hours in order to release a pretty big upgrade to our backend that will speed up the site quite a bit. Within the next few days after that we’re going to release some changes to the create review page in order to facilitate more structured data collection dependent on the category chosen. We’ll announce more details about this on Saturday in the member forum.
We are continuing to make member payments twice a month, and you can expect the next payment to be processed on March 20th.
Thank you for Sharing!
Peter Ejtel
Founder
peter@sharedreviews.com