Curtis' thread got me thinking

What do you think is "fair" compensation for our work on Epinions?

What criteria would you use to determine who got paid more?

And how would you handle compensating the oddball talents like Rich and others who might not always deliver useful content but certainly add a little spice to the site? Or do you think that's necessary?

[mnehr]

I am probably going to loose everyone on my trust list for this answer.. but I think..
NOTHING..

At least with what Epinions has become...

Maybe Income Share only.. but honestly.. we always talk about all the BS reviews.. all the fluff.. and all of the reviews by people who have never touched the product (not even getting into the abuse..) .. How many of us think Epinions is truly useful for its intended purpose any more...

I am starting to look at Epinion's business model like an MLM company (multi level marketing.. ie pyramid.. ie Amway).. People do not use Epinions for the product, they use it only to write.. just like MLMs are not really in business to sell their product, they are in business to sell their business...

I only continue to write on Epinions because I feel it is a way to help me work on my writing skills and it is fun.. but as a business person, looking at the level of substance that comes out of most reviews (most, not all), I would consider the opportunity just to have the work put on line as payment enough...

Those who write the highest caliber reviews and are worried about the pennies should find outlets that will pay them more and that they would be with better company...



BUT... To not risk loosing everyone from leaving Epinions, and for my nice side to come out... I would suggest an Income Share only model with some sort of e-payment instead of cash.. Make some deals with various merchants for gift certificates in exchange for the rights to use quotes from reviews in advertising.

I also feel Epinions needs to reevaluate their entire business model...but that is a completely different rant....

Fair compensation?

Well, I would like to have my material accessible to the public in such a manner that it can be found without any real problems in searching for it. I would like the reviews to have a decent platform of presentation, reasonably free of bugs and available on pretty much a continuous basis. I would like Epinions to notify me of changes in policy in a straightforward and forthright manner without trying to get around what they are telling me with dilution or obfuscation.

Monetarily?

Well, I would like (if my articles are deemed to be worth anything and are of high quality) to be compensated on a fairly regular basis with a small amount of cash. Basically if my articles continue to be potentially useful then I would like to be paid for the fact that I provided the content. Ummmmmm... Not really talking about a lot (I was fairly happy with a few pennies a month for my articles that were somewhat outdated but were some of the better articles for a topic--outdated only in the sense that the movies had been out for months).

If there is a change in the amount given, I would rather they give me the information than hemming and hawing around it while I see other people gaming the system unmercilously. If people are earning cash, it really shouldn't be just the gamers and there should be more effort to compensate those that aren't just the gamers.


Basically all of the monetary stuff would be pretty much minimized if I felt that I was a part of something and that once the company started kicking the butt that I knew it would that I would then be on the ground floor earning more than newer people (sorta like the stock options idea). Unfortunately this sort of feeling has been basically eradicated with the current feeling of the company. The possibility of future gains is out of the window with the new TOS stuff that says that they are going to be able to kill future earnings for content after two years. Yes it might have been there before (I think it wasn't there when I initially signed up though) but Epinions has basically changed their tone with regards to it. Before the tone was that we could be earning money for years in the future but now the tone is that it sure looks like they are probably going to start enforcing the two-year mark. This seems to be a bit of a kick in the face for loyal users but no one else (only veterans have any sort of concept of two years and really I think that some of the vets have actually passed that point).


So basically honesty, loyalty, compensation, consideration, fair value for your valuable content, and a forum for your viewpoints. I don't think those are really unreasonable wants...

Ander

[Sordid-1]

I think Rich and the other oddball talents should be paid monthly salaries of no less than $100,000 each and the rest of you should split whatever is left over.

Actually, and I've advocated this idea before, I think the pay should be nil (no e-royalties, no income share) BUT they should claim no rights over intellectual property. Why?

#1 - when the income share and e-royalties come trickling in, it FEELS like a pittance, but in the grand scheme, I suppose a whole lot of pittances add up. Eliminating that cost would give Epinions more money to squander wherever they desired.

#2 - It would weed out a lot of the bad writers. I know that Nirav has publicly stated not to rate on the quality of writing, oh heavens no, rate on the helpfullness even if scribbled by a semi-literate buffoon. HOWEVER, Jiminy Christmas, I would be downright ashamed if I were involved with a business where some of this garbage free-flowed through my website like the results of a granola purge. It WOULD pay benefits if the writing were high caliber even if there were less of it. This quantity over quality attitude makes me think some of the decision-makers over at Ep Central have spent too much time with Sloucho's "Groin Puncher" machine only used it on their heads.

If there were no pay, the gamers would be gone, the abusers (and that's a term I hate to use) would be gone, the people who are here for no other reason than money would be out the door. What would be left? People who love to write. Granted, some of the Curtis Edmonds of the site would hit the road, too, but I have to stifle laughter anytime I read someone who treats this like a second job, who is in it for the "supplemental income". If anyone is here believing this is a ticket to financial security, they really need someone to draw them a map to their nearest McDonald's where they will make a hell of a lot more cash than through Epinions.

I would rather see this community filled solely with members who truly love to write, who love to write so much that they would do it for free, who endeavor to produce only the highest quality, most well-researched, well-written reviews because they take pride in their writing. But as the system stands, there are a goodly number of folks who would rather crank out the old review factory and pump a couple bland, off-the-cuff, poorly written reviews a day so they can get more income share (that's not to say everyone with a high output produces poor quality, Sloucho and Mangiotto come to mind as highly prolific individuals with a very high quality level.) Epinions has CREATED that environment, and in the grand scheme of their business, is it truly beneficial that they have a whomping, massive database filled with crap rather than a smaller body of content filled with high quality, well-written prose?

#3 - how wildly audacious for Eeps to think that in exchange for a couple bucks they should be able to maintain lifetime electronic rights to someone else's intellectual property. How much hubris does that show? What a kick in the balls. What that ensures is that the best writers will limit their Epinions posting only to their inferior pieces that they are pretty sure they have no chance of marketing elsewhere. And yeah, unique content. Lifetime ownership of a whole bunch of unique crap. I mean, Jeezum Crow (thanks for that term, repulsemonkey!), I made ** of income share last time, and (maybe) gave away deviant ramblings from my perverse mind for that? I'd rather have just posted the stuff out of love for free knowing that I could pull it whenever I felt like it and repost it elsewhere if I preferred. I've had a few thingies published elsewhere, and, rest assured, if I think I've produced something someone else might want to buy, it never sees the light of my profile page. I'd have no qualms, however, about posting MY VERY BEST if I knew I could remarket it with absolutely no chance of legal entanglements. And that's not to say that I'd have any ethical qualms about pulling MY writing and doing what I want with it anyway, revolve-o-TOS be damned.

I got off on a tangent there. However, to summarize my main point: me and Rich should get most of the money.

That is all.

[timdunn]

I'll chime in, even though I've been there for only two months. I don't expect to get rich off Epinions, and would rather see writing motivated by a sense of community, a want to contribute or a desire to improve one's own writing. That they pay us is good, but not my primary reason for being a member.

I'd gladly continue to write at Epinions so long as I continue to get the feedback. Of late, I've rated and ranted and reviewed almost all the products I feel qualified to so do, and have been beating away essay topics with a stick.

Anyone want to trade muses?:p

timdunn

[lernerj]

at the risk of sounding money-grubbing, or like one of the apparently hated people who is here in part for the money, i would disagree with these proposals. but i do think it might be a fine idea to eliminate page-hit eroyalties and pay only by IS--as long as the formula is much more fair and much more remunerative. it bothers me that people who have more time than i do to spend on the site can earn more simply because more members hit their reviews, since member reads are rarely for purposes of purchasing decisions. so, I'm for a better system of IS.

jennifer

[pluckyduck]

Pay?

I've still never cashed a single dime from Epinions. I stuck the checks away and let them get old and one of these days I'm going to write them for replacement checks.

Pretty clear it was never about money for me.

I sure would have liked for one person from Epinions ever to read anything I'd written. That would have been nice. (Do you have any idea how much free stuff they could have gotten from the writers if they had just been interested in us?)

Aside from that, what Sordid said.

Andrea
who must be taking the blue pills because she agreed with exactly 100% of Ken's post

[AuntieEmma[$]]

I'll also risk losing my WOT (in my case, the few people remaining):

I don't think the reviews are worth any money at all to Epinions at this point.

For the strictly consumer info aspect: I'm seeing more and more sites that are doing the Amazon-type thing of running consumer reviews without paying for them. They don't seem to need to pay people to get them to post their opinions -- lots of people are doing it just for the hell of it. It's true most of those reviews are just a few sentences long, but taken all together, they do provide useful information for consumers.

For the interactive aspect: You certainly don't need to pay people to get them to engage in an online community. We're all here at EA for free. Salon's community is now starting to charge people ten bucks a month to post.

For the exceptionally high-quality reviews: Now that's something they may have to pay for. But how badly do they really need high-quality reviews? I agree with everything Sordid-1 has written on this topic, except that I'm not so sure that it's a bad thing that Epinions prefers quantity over quality. That seems to me to be the nature of the beast. They're not a literary magazine. Their basic reason for existence is to get people to click through the site to buy new Palm Pilots or whatever. Coverage of a lot of different products is important for them. Brilliant writing, in this context, is not.

Actually, I think the whole Epinions model is unworkable. It was a great idea when they started, at the height of the dotcom mania, but I don't think it makes any sense now.

[rich2003dm]

I agree with Sordid completely. He and I should do a 50/50 split, and the rest of you get nothing. After all, we claimed it first!

All kidding aside, after a year here with about 44 reviews, I've managed to earn about ** bucks.

I don't do what I do for money. (I do it to punish the rest of you.) Writing the weird (and sometimes not so weird) stuff that I do is fun and recreation for me. I don't think of it as making a contribution to the site. I consider it beneficial to my mental health. If I make you smile, that's a bonus.

I would do it for nothing. It's the forum for doing it that I need.

I do, however, think that compensation is necessary to keep most quality writers on the site. In the past, compensation was set too high for everyone, and Epinions was in danger of floundering. I think that Epinions has to think of some fair, understandable and quantifiable way to identify and reward the best writers who do make real contributions.

What they're are doing now, is just not working.

Rich

[amykhar]

The timing for this thread is REALLY bad because I can't say what I want to say right now.

There was a time when I thought Epinions shouldn't pay. However, I see more and more writers leaving because a) they don't get personal recognition for their contribution and b) they are not compensated monetarily for their contribution.

Epinions simply does not have the staff necessary to reward writers with attaboys. Spread about by algorithm would be as meaningless as the funny hat really is today.

They have decided to reward us for our participation here with money instead. However, they aren't doing very well with that either.

We made several suggestions to staff about cutting out pay for editorials and reducing the eroyalities. We made those suggestions in good faith, believing that cutting costs would help save the site. However, we also made those suggestions based on the belief that Income Share would stabialize.

That has not happened. Income Share has dropped every single month. It is never distributed in a timely manner, and we have no way to control what we receive (ie exerting more effort to earn more).

I was fussed at today by somebody who told me that as a web developer I should understand the dot com economy. All I can say is that in the last year, there have been two significant drops in banner earnings for this site and then a plateau where earnings remained constant. (get ready for a bad IS next month guys, last month's banner revenues sucked)

In that same time frame, when advertising revenue leveled out, IS continued to drop. Granted, I have very limited data to work with, but I have to wonder if Epinions will not continue to decrease our earnings until some breaking point is reached.

I keep preaching that the people who are doing what Epinions sees as adding value to the site should be rewarded more than the abusers. I have yet to see that happen. I am still living in a Pollyanna world because I genuinely LIKE many of the people who run Epinions.

But, quite honestly, if it were not for my obligations because of this site and if it were not for some severe financial constraints in my life right now, I wouldn't be bothering with Epinions anymore. Given that this statement comes from one of the site's biggest supporters, if I feel this way, how many others do also and are just afraid to say something because they will seem money hungry?



Amy

[amykhar]

I just wanted to add that I now believe the people who are advocating not paying at all anymore envision that by the writers making the ultimate sacrifice, Epinions staff will finally have the resources necessary to pay attention to us and recognize the effort we put into the site.

They envision a epinions with no duplicate account holders, no flame wars, and no stupid politics.

I hate to say it, but I don't think EITHER would happen. Nirav isn't going to suddenly start reading tons of reviews and leaving comments thanking the writers.

And, the idiots won't leave. Consider this, IRC doesn't pay, message boards don't pay members, and other sites that allow public comments don't pay. Yet they all still have twerps craving attention and acting out. The abusers won't go away, and you won't get more attaboys. You'll just be writing your Epinions for free.

Amy

Originally posted by amykhar
I was fussed at today by somebody who told me that as a web developer I should understand the dot com economy. All I can say is that in the last year, there have been two significant drops in banner earnings for this site and then a plateau where earnings remained constant. (get ready for a bad IS next month guys, last month's banner revenues sucked)

In that same time frame, when advertising revenue leveled out, IS continued to drop. Granted, I have very limited data to work with, but I have to wonder if Epinions will not continue to decrease our earnings until some breaking point is reached.

You're comparing the finances of a bulletin board to something that is magnitudes larger. You don't have investors that you have to please. You don't have to show that your chances of ever making a profit are increasing. You don't have to worry about the bank running dry and having to convince somebody else to give you more cash.

For businesses (not privately run sites), there are many, many more considerations than whether banner ads are paying more or less this month. In addition to pay-outs to members and general operating expenses for continued service, they likely have to dig out of whatever hole they went into when they started the site. And I haven't even mentioned the soaring energy costs in California and what that might be doing to their budgets.

Personally, I agreed with the reduction in rates from 3 cents to 1 because it made it so that the click circle monkeys, rubber stampers, and trust sluts would have a harder time bleeding money from the site. I agreed with the elimination of pay for community center editorials because it made NO sense to pay for the kinds of flames and assorted garbage that was being passed off as comments. If I had my way, I'd go a step further and refuse to pay for hits that resulted in NH and SH ratings for much the same reason.

Did I assume that this meant that the remaining writers would get more money? For all we know, they DID get more money. Maybe it would have been even worse without those changes.

Does this mean doom for Epinions? Hard to say. _I_ don't have the books. I can't check their math and determine if those changes will change the projected "empty piggy bank" day. But there are huge expenses and the few pennies saved here and there from community center editorials likely wouldn't have put yours AND Curtis's IS back to the levels that you have come to expect.

[CurtisEdmonds]

If I ran the zoo:

1) I would have gotten rid of the penny-per-click for editorials categories a long time ago.

2) I would concentrate on getting the size of the database down to manageable levels, while maintaining the quality of the remaining part of the database. (i.e., I wouldn't have added ten thousand local auto repair shops, but would have made sure that new books and movies were in the database.)

3) I would treat writers like investors instead of peons.

4) I would try something, anything, to market the site.

5) I would try to get my best writers access to free movie passes, free books, etc.

6) I would share as much information about the IS system as humanly possible without running myself out of business.

7) I would raise the minimum check payout from $10 to, say, $50 to encourage people to write more and to cut down on check-sending-out costs. Alternatively, I would set up PayPal distribution.

8) I would shut Nirav up in his office and never, ever, ever let him come near a live chat so long as he lived. Alternatively, I would assign myself to be the Virtual Nirav and pretend to be a smarter version of His Niravness.

9) I would figure out how to reward the best writers instead of the first writers. The best IS I have gotten has been for the first review of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and for Harry Potter IV -- not my best work, in either case, but I got there first with the most, as MSP would say. Example: Mangiotto has gotten a ton of hits off his Battlefield Earth review and no IS to speak of; I wrote mine the week the movie came out and got a pretty good IS return even though I had way fewer hits.

10) I wouldn't pay anyone who didn't have at least 75% helpful ratings or better.

None of this, of course, answers your question; "what is fair"? There's no way to determine that; what's fair for you is not fair for me. (My definition of "fair" is $10 for movie reviews and $5 for book reviews, which barely pays my costs.)

The way you determine fair pricing is in the marketplace. Epinions is NOT a marketplace. Try going to your grocery store and saying, "I will pay ten cents for this box of cereal up front, and then a random amount paid at a random time on a monthly basis, oh, and don't cash the check for six weeks." Ridiculous.

[pluckyduck]

Just a clarification - I'm not really advocating that Epinions not pay people.

It seems as if the decreasing and decreasing amount they do pay feels like an insult to the long time contributors. Some of us have been "insulted" all along. I've never made jack crap, never even had that one winner Epinion. ( A number of you have; your stroller review or diet review or PDA review or whatever that ends up on the high paying list.) Some of my best work has made just a couple of dollars.

So, I adjusted myself a long time ago that if I were going to write for the site, I couldn't use money as a motivator. That was fine for a time, but how much have I written lately? If I were an outsider advising Epinions on their business (God forbid), I wouldn't suggest "no pay" as a way to save money. Where would the incentive be for people to contribute regularly? They have to (I guess) keep the product coming.

So, how would I change the pay system? If I were in charge (GOD FORBID), the first thing I'd do was put a lot of effort into recognizing people I wanted to keep happy in non-monetary ways. That's People Management 101. Stroke, stroke, stroke.

I'd have one person who was in charge of reading on the site. That's their only job, just read. (Yes, with all the money running a site like this costs, they can afford, if they want to, to assign one person to reading.) When the computer generated IS spits out, when the computer generated advisor system stuff spits out through whatever whacky formulas each of them have -- give the information to the person who reads.

Ask - "Does this look right?"

C'mon. Anyone who reads the site regularly knows what's going on. I remember one month, awhile back, one of the top money making opinions was a completely off-topic review. (I think it was supposed to be a book review or something, and somebody had just jammed a review of something else in there.) That kind of stuff makes Epinions look like they don't have a single clue what is going on on their site.

If it doesn't look right, fix it.

If there is $10,000 in income to be distributed, make damn sure that that $10,000 in income is used in the most effective way possible for Epinions. Reward the right people. Cut the computer and community bullshit.

I can't rely (solely) on my employees to tell me how much the another employee should make. And I sure as hell can't rely on a computer program for that either.

Andrea

[Sordid-1]

Auntie E,

I’m glad that we found so much common ground, but I disagree whole-heartedly with the “quantity over quality” argument. Using Amazon as an example does not work because they have a product (actually a ton of products) and the user reviews on Amazon is just a value-added bonus. With Epinions, the reviews ARE the product. Just like you wouldn’t want to buy Amazon’s product (books, for example) if they were all ratty-looking with torn pages and moustaches drawn on the leading ladies on the cover art, who wants to buy Epinions’ product if so much of it is the equivalent of a literary enema?

The quality is so much more important. If I were a consumer viewing the site, I would be judging it by the quality of the content, plain and simple. When I started reading from a category and saw that the majority of the pieces were saying the same dang thing and saying it poorly, I would perceive that they were written by people with no credibility who took no pride in their work and who I would not want to solicit for advice. And I’d leave. And I wouldn’t come back. If I were a venture capitalist, I’d want the crap cleaned out or not give up dollar one. If I were an advertiser, I wouldn’t want my name associated with it and would advertise somewhere with quality content.

As far as the benefits of quantity is concerned, sure, it would be great if there were a plethora of pertinent, current, well-populated product categories. But that really appears to be the aim and it is a dismal failure. Look, you can’t even access reviews for current books on the best seller list, but there are 867 opinions on McDonald’s restaraunts! I maintain about 865 of those are unnecessary. (Actually, I maintain that 867 of them are unnecessary, I don’t see where a consumer would need help making a decision on McDonalds, but I’ll give the benefit of the doubt here.) There are 464 opinions on “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”! Where is the sense in that?

From a customer’s standpoint AND from a user’s standpoint, I would so, so, so, so much rather see a small body of top-notch writing than an endless sea of dreck. I would actually expect most people to share that sentiment.

[Sordid-1]

Thanks to Pluckyduck’s unquestionably sensible approach and statement in support of my stances, I think Rich and I will be willing to share some of our massive windfall with her.

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
But the ones that Sordid gives you
Leave you bouncing off the wall.

Just ask Andrea, when she’s ten feet tall.

[hypotenuse]

Ok Ken. How much time did you borrow from the Rabbit?

We have an exclusive contract on your borrowed time, subject to change without notice, and are somewhat dismayed to see you spreading around your borrowingness.

Will this effect your ability to repay the time owed us here at EA?

Lynne

[pluckyduck]

Ken!

Thanks for a big laugh toward the end of a l-o-n-g work day

Andrea
who is currently only 5' 10"

[Prepoia[$]]

Gee, Ken, I don't think that Andrea hangs around with the right Alice


Sandy
Who thinks that both ken and andrea are too young to remember Alice being 10 feet tall

[AuntieEmma[$]]

[quote]Originally posted by Sordid-1
Auntie E,

I’m glad that we found so much common ground, but I disagree whole-heartedly with the “quantity over quality” argument. Using Amazon as an example does not work because they have a product (actually a ton of products) and the user reviews on Amazon is just a value-added bonus. With Epinions, the reviews ARE the product.

And this, oh Sordid one, is where we disagree.

I don't think the reviews are the product, on Epinions. I think the book reviews on Epinions and the reviews on Amazon are there for exactly the same purpose -- to entice people to buy books by giving them some information about which books they might like best. Amazon makes their money when someone orders a book (actually, I think they lose money, or at least they used to, every time they sell a book, but that's a whole other story), and Epinions makes their money as a commission when someone orders a book by clicking on an Amazon link on the Epinions site.

Epinions doesn't make much money from people reading reviews. You can read reviews all day on Epinions without sending any money their way. The only exception would be if they're getting money from banner impressions, but the rate that advertisers pay for banner impressions (if in fact anyone is still paying for that) is so low at this point that I think it's a drop in the bucket, especially for a site on the scale of Epinions which is now 40? 80? million dollars in the hole.

From a customer’s standpoint AND from a user’s standpoint, I would so, so, so, so much rather see a small body of top-notch writing than an endless sea of dreck. I would actually expect most people to share that sentiment.

Sure, that's what I would rather see too. But looking at it from the perspective of how much is top-notch writing worth to Epinions (as opposed to how much it's worth to me), I still think the answer is not much.

To go back to the Amazon example, I've used Amazon reviews a few times to make, to use Epinions' endlessly repeated phrase, "buying decisions." Usually, if I'm looking for a book for myself, I'd rather browse in the library or bookstore, but I've found the Amazon reviews useful when I'm looking for a gift for someone who's interested in a particular thing that I don't know anything about. So I can look on Amazon and see what other people who are interested in tennis, or whatever, have to say about the books on that subject, and it really does help. Very few of the reviews there are what I would call top-notch, but when you have twenty people saying that they wished they had read Book A when they were first starting out playing tennis and that they have a shelf full of tennis books and that Book A is the best, well that kind of thing has gotten me to reach for my credit card. And ka-ching, Amazon has made some money (or lost some money, as the case may be, but again that's another story. at least they've made a sale).

My point is that it doesn't matter, in this context, that the reviews are not of the highest quality, because that's not what is helping me to make my "buying decision."

And it's not a matter of my being indifferent to "top-notch" reviews, because I'm not. I've subscribed to the NY Times Sunday Book Review Section for many years now because I love to read well-written reviews, and I find that theirs often are "top-notch," almost always interesting.

The thing is though, I rarely make "buying decisions" based on those reviews (I tend not to buy new hardcovers). I just enjoy reading them. But the NYT is getting money from me because I pay to subscribe. If they were giving the Book Review section away for free, they would probably be losing money, even though they carry a lot of ads.

So the irony is I make more "buying decisions" based on the mediocre Amazon reviews than I do from the "top-notch" NYT reviews. And maybe I'd make some "buying decisions" on the basis of Epinions reviews as well, if they had as many and were as easy to find and browse as the ones on Amazon.

[hypotenuse]

Originally posted by Prepoia
Gee, Ken, I don't think that Andrea hangs around with the right Alice


Sandy
Who thinks that both ken and andrea are too young to remember Alice being 10 feet tall

Hey! So I'm a oldie but a goodie.

I do in fact remember that particular Alice. Grace Slick has got quite a voice on her. Jeez! STILL sends chills down my spine.

Lynne - who just spent 30 minutes the other day, chuckling through the tale of another Alice. One who lived above the church and sent innocent guests out in their vw mirco bus with their impliments of destruction to place an envelope under a pile of garbage...

:snicker:

PS - Yah, I know I'm off topic.