One of the most important ways that SharedReviews differs from every other site is the fact that we’ve taken the bold step of allowing our community to determine revenue share amongst our members. Since any site that launches has its success determined by the people that help build their community, we felt it was natural to go beyond the a-typical revenue sharing system that safely rewards contributors only on their own submissions, and introduce something that empowers the community by allowing them to reward those they feel were the biggest factors in their own success.

Our success is determined by the quality of content that’s submitted to our community paired with the social interactions of our users, so it made complete sense for us to go in the one direction other sites have been fearful to tread, and that was to allow our members to determine each other’s monthly revenue earnings.

Are all consumers created equal?

What makes one of our community members a better judge than us, luck, or our advertisers? The premise of our site is that we are empowering consumers by democratizing their purchase experiences. This means that whatever your chosen vocation or stage in life, we all share the common habit of spending our hard earned dollars buying the cool products that help us prosper and improve our lives. No matter your background, we all have experiences as consumers, therefore anyone and everyone in our community qualifies as a judge on the merit, presentation, and authenticity of every product experience submitted to our platform.

Is it fair?

More fair than the luck of being dugg, or having your video go viral on Youtube? We think so… Imagine going into work tomorrow and finding out that every employee will be able to rate their co-worker’s monthly performance affecting their next paycheck. Do you think inter-office dynamics would improve? Do you think a results oriented culture that fosters effective and transparent communications will develop? If someone dodges the process or tries to manipulate the system, do you think employees being taken advantage of will allow it to continue without reporting the culprits?

There will be those who see our system as an opportunity to try and game the results. We are taking every precaution we can, and learning things every step throughout the process. Part and parcel to empowering our community with determining each other’s earnings is the empowerment of policing the process. With tools built into the environment that allow members to notify us directly of improper behavior or unwanted submissions, we believe that the good in our community will prevail resulting in a fair, open, and completely transparent process that benefits all in ways we can’t even imagine today.

Our early results

We launched our new voting based revenue sharing system the middle of last month and have only completed a partial month’s cycle ending February 29th. We’ve been working for the last week to refine the process that crunches the numbers, and are ready to send out the results and announce our top community performers later tonight. With only the two week trial period of our new crowd sourced revenue sharing system, we had in excess of 40,000 community votes cast on over 6,000 product reviews in what we felt was a big early success of the pioneering effort to empower the community in ways no other site has dared.

For all of our community members who are participating (and those that will in the future) we wanted to thank you for being the early pioneers in what we feel will be the only fair way to share revenue online. We’ll post the top 10 community performers later tonight, so stay tuned….