by Matthew Murphy

Created on: April 23, 2009

Ciao is an online shopping and price comparison website which also provides reviews on thousands of topics written by their members. Anyone can complete the simple sign up to become a member and contribute reviews. You receive payments through Pay Pal after you reach the $5 cashout level.

Review Topics

You can write a review on practically any topic, whether it be lotions, cars, hotels, or computers. Two categories that have not been started so far are restaurant and book reviews. You can request a new topic for review, which I have done twice, and it is either approved or rejected usually within 24 hours.

How You Earn money

Reviews earn money when they are read and rated by fellow Ciao members. Your work is either rated exceptional, very helpful, helpful, somewhat helpful, not helpful, or off topic. The higher the rating the more money you earn. Exceptional ratings make you eligible for payments from the Premium fund, a $2,000 sum of cash which distributed monthly among the best reviews.

Using Ciao

Lots of good reviewers from other sites like Ciao UK or Dooyoo have come over to Ciao and they post a majority of the decent content on the site.

When posting your own review be sure that you focus on your opinion of the product. A few specs are fine but that's not what consumers come to this site for; they are looking for reason why they should or should not buy a product. Also important is the length; the current 150 word minimum is just that- the minimum. Most reviews that are of any help to a consumer are 300-500 words or more. At the same time, a 5,000 word review may be skipped over due to how long it would take to read; so be sure to have a balance.

As with Dooyoo, on Ciao it is important to rate other people's reviews. After all, that is the only way Ciao members earn money- from other member's reads and rates.

Problems at Ciao

Ciao.com was launched in early 2008 and at first paid $1 per review you wrote in addition to the payments from reads and rates. They also paid $1 per member you invited. However within a year lots of people, primarily from Asia, started joining the site and abusing it by either posting copied reviews or short reviews in poor grammar, just giving a list of specs, or not giving any opinion at all on the product. Worse, cheaters rate each other with very high, undeserved ratings, thus forming clicking cartels. When you do give a bad review a low rating, you just might get a revenge rate. Also multiple accounts have been a problem. All of these

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>