This is an interesting article that bolsters our plans to add additional revenue streams for our community based on content distribution partners. There is a growing market demand for user generated content in many advertising and ecommerce verticals:

Want to know how to make the power of Web 2.0 work for you? Consider adding consumer-generated content to your site. The easiest and most powerful way? Add customer reviews.

Whether they buy online or off, consumers researching shopping decisions online absolutely adore reviews written by their fellow shoppers.

In this article from Marketing Sherpa, they talk about a survey they did asking consumers what they thought of sites with user submitted product reviews. The results were very encouraging and add to the plethora of data that proves how integrating user reviews into your marketing strategies create dramatic results.

Source: MarketingSherpa and Prospectiv, Online Shopping and Email Relationships, January 2007 Methodology: A survey was fielded to members of the Eversave.com customer panel on Feb. 2 and closed on Feb. 5 after receiving 698 responses.

As you can see from the chart, the majority of consumers we surveyed prefer sites with peer-written product reviews: 58% “strongly” or “somewhat” prefer sites that include reviews, while only 14% don’t trust them.

Imagine if there was a marketplace of reviews you could leverage for modest fees that allowed you to fill up your site out of the gate. Now you can start to see that the typical advertising-only revenue streams associated with most other Social Networks is but the tip of the iceberg in terms of revenue you wil be able to share in with our community.