Member Feedback on Ciao Video Reviews Feature

...review feature, giving every Ciao member (well, every member with a digital camera or a good camera phone) the chance to direct and present their own mini-movies. Having watched about twenty of the one hundred or so reviews already published on the site at the time of writing, the results are very interesting. Certainly the format is much more informative than a conventional review - you can tell much more about a product such as a games machine ...
...of it in action than you can from reading any written review - and it helps combine the traditional consumer review benefits of Ciao with the videoshare functionality of sites like myspace and youtube.

I have not submitted any video reviews myself yet, but for £7 a pop it is a much faster and easier way to earn money from Ciao than slaving away at the keyboard for over half-an-hour for something that only hardcore review readers will ... more

Reading reviews on Ciao is one of my favourite things to do on the web (I expect many people who read this will agree with me on that!) You get to find out about a massive range of products, read some really interesting opinions and interact with the authors.

Now Ciao has brought the whole thing bang up-to-date with the new(ish) video review feature, giving every Ciao member (well, every member with a digital camera or a good camera phone) the chance to direct and present their own mini-movies. Having watched about twenty of the one hundred or so reviews already published on the site at the time of writing, the results are very interesting. Certainly the format is much more informative than a conventional review - you can tell much more about a product such as a games machine or a toy remote control helicopter by watching a video of it in action than you can from reading any written review - and it helps combine the traditional consumer review benefits of Ciao with the videoshare functionality of sites like myspace and youtube.

I have not submitted any video reviews myself yet, but for £7 a pop it is a much faster and easier way to earn money from Ciao than slaving away at the keyboard for over half-an-hour for something that only hardcore review readers will ever read and rate. For the first time it is actually possible to earn a pretty decent living creating reviews for Ciao - as long as you never run out of things to review and manage to submit at least one video review per hour. I could earn more money from one video review than I have for all six of my written reviews combined (this is number seven and I am nowhere near giving up the day job!). But alas I don't have a digital camera.

The biggest problem with the video review feature is that there are not enough reviews on the site and most of the 66 on there at the moment are by the same three or four people. This means that this function is at present largely going to waste. Ciao has clearly recognized this which is why they have offered such a big financial incentive. I would love to see a bigger variety of reviews, especially more funny reviews like the Red Bull review, but I suppose that will take time. Meantime, if anyone who reads this uploads a video review in the future let me know and I'll check it out. This brings me to the next disadvantage of video reviews. I will gladly check out your video reviews, but at present there is no function that will allow me to rate it as I can with written reviews. Hopefully this will be ironed out soon.  

...less