Free Is No Longer Reward Enough, On Shoppero Users Earn Money

Just three months after launching their German product review site shoppero have today launched an English (beta) site. The thinking behind shoppero is simply to enable users to make money from their own user generated content.

The slogan “Recommend. Discover. Make Money.” marks the difference to most review sites: users get a share of the advertisement revenue and are encouraged to write about long tail content.

How it works?

The idea came when the founders observed that user generated content directly lead to an increase in a social networks success and more importantly its value e.g MySpace, YouTube and Last.FM and yet the users were not getting rewarded adequately for their time or contributions. i.e free is no longer reward enough!

At Shoppero everything’s about products and recommendations. Simply write about products you like or maybe not like, upload their pictures and tell people where to purchase them. The content you create is all yours and you’re free to delete or use them elsewhere at any time. We’d be happy about a link to the original shoppero article and so would you: It means you get readers and therefore make money.

How users earn money?

Shoppero enables its users to write product reviews which are centrally stored onto the platform and are promoted on their own site by implementing Adgets. A wizard, called Adget-Factory, generates an Adget in 4 easy steps in IAB compatible formats.

The resulting advertising revenues are then split between shoppero and the users — The users receiving 20% of the ad-revenues from the pages created by themselves and 60% of the ad-revenues generated by linking to the shoppero portal. User profile pages include information about how often reviews have been visited and how much money was earned. Money is paid through Paypal as soon as a threshold of 25 € is passed (other methods are not planned at the moment).

You also find all expected features around reviews; collecting lists, social networking with friends, rating and recommendations. Adding new products is made easy through bookmarklets, which parse information and try to make entering information easy for the user.

Assuming you surf the net and come across an interesting product that you’d like to write about, simply click on the Shoppero bookmarklet and we’ll scan the current page for images, a URL, its title and insert them in your recommendation post automatically. All you need to add is your opinion and that’s it!

Finally I am pleased to note that all product reviews are presented in hReview microformats and equally feeds are available for each product product.

This site reminds me very much of the UK review site We Love Local that has also realised they will need to pay users a nominal sum to get their time, attention and valuable contributions. What we are finally seeing is the trickle down effect of advertising monies to the content creators. e.g prosumers

Company index: Shoppero

The investors behind Shoppero are Dirk Ströer from Mediaventures GmbH, Jens Kunath and his venture capital company and CEO Nico Lumma.