We released a number of small changes last night, but one of the biggest is the release of full RSS support for subscribing to new reviews on the site. You can now subscribe to new reviews by any of the following feeds on these pages:

1) Home Page: New reviews across the site
2) Search Result Page: New reviews that match your current search criteria
3) Review and Profile Pages: New reviews from that author

This release lays the ground work for a whole bunch of cool new apps such as a browser plug-in we’re working on with a partner of ours, and building out some widgets for blogs and other social networks to help you market your reviews outside of the community. There are already widgets you can use on popular blogging platforms that display rss feeds, so you can now use these to list your newest reviews right on your own sites! (Grab the RSS feed from your public profile page)

We’ll keep you posted on further progress, but make sure to give us feedback on the feeds themselves in the interim!

Monetizing social networks can be difficult. Users come there in order to interact with their friends, not in order to click on ads. A friend of mine has just started placing ads on Facebook and Google Adsense and is reporting a CTR of 0.1% for Facebook and 0.8% for Google Adsense. As a matter of fact, one of his ads ended up running through 15,000 impressions without a single click on Facebook. And he’s not alone with his experience.

While it’s a little early to tell (after all we’re just using a simple off-the shelf adsense account at the moment and we just started monetizing our site), it looks like we’re coming in well above the cited CTR.

Social networks may have their challenges, but when we came up with the idea for the SharedReviews site, we clearly had a focus on product reviews in mind in order to ensure commercial viability of our content. Since product reviews are an essential component of consumer research when deciding which product to buy it makes this type of content so much more valuable than your everyday generic social network.

Read all about it!

We have released what we feel is one of the most important social features we have launched to date. Welcome to SharedNews, where you can acquire instant information on what your friends are doing within the community. This will provide valuable insight into which of your friends are writing and updating their reviews. You will receive real-time notices on votes and comments on your own reviews. As well, you’ll have a plethora of new friend notices to see who they are becoming friends with, how their ShareScore grows or decreases and when they update their profile. Other system notices include Private Messages or when a review is sent back for some edits. When you go to check it out in the Community tab, make sure you update your status to let all your friends know what you think!

ShareScore Update

In the first three weeks since launch, ShareScore has had an amazing impact on the quality of activity within the community. Almost everyone is stepping up to the plate and taking community responsibility in voting for only the best reviews, helping to police bad content through the reporting tool, and helping new users get started as our community grows. Congratulations to our first members who have hit a 100% ShareScore, earning the right to place more votes than anyone else in the community. Everyone keep up the great work!

Email Notifications

We’ve added a new email notification for votes received on a review, and provided new daily digest options for both vote and comment notifications. Now you can be sure that not only will your votes be displayed on the author’s SharedNews feed, but they will also receive an email notification making them aware of that all important vote you cast for their review! Remember, posting “Voted” in the comments of a review not only can negatively affect your ShareScore, but it lowers the quality of the content and makes it harder for us to monetize all of your reviews.

Community Progress

We are working everyday to negotiate with new advertising partners, and explore new and innovative ways to monetize the valuable product experiences all of you have been sharing. Very soon, we hope to grow revenue to the point where we will be able to go above and beyond our minimum $10,000 payouts to the community each monthly cycle. The best way all of you can help us achieve our community goals is to continue to invite as many new members as you can through the invitation tools in the Friends tab of the Community page, and utilize the sharing tools (Sharing tab beside Comments at the bottom of a review) in order to publicize all of the great content you come across within the community.

Development of additional social features such as Groups and Applications for other social networks continues, so please keep your feedback coming in on how we can help you grow your community and earnings in new and better ways.

Congratulations to everyone who participated in the second month of our new voting based revenue sharing system!

March Cycle Community Totals:

1) Total Community Reviews that received votes: 8010
2) Total Votes cast by the community: 98594
3) Community share of revenue this cycle: $10,000.00

Our Top 10 SharedReviewers:

First Place: donnabc

Review Revenue:

1) Published Reviews: 83
2) Reviews that received Votes: 72
3) Reviews that earned Revenue: 59
4) Review Revenue Earned: $172.54

Voting Revenue:

1) Votes Cast: 1199
2) Votes that earned Revenue: 1043
3) Vote Revenue Earned: $62.84

Total March earnings: $235.38

Second Place: Sarahlovesmickey

Review Revenue:

1) Published Reviews: 164
2) Reviews that received Votes: 125
3) Reviews that earned Revenue: 71
4) Review Revenue Earned: $126.19

Voting Revenue:

1) Votes Cast: 1047
2) Votes that earned Revenue: 1012
3) Vote Revenue Earned: $56.29

Total March earnings: $182.48

Third Place: kateri27

Review Revenue:

1) Published Reviews: 109
2) Reviews that received Votes: 88
3) Reviews that earned Revenue: 56
4) Review Revenue Earned: $112.32

Voting Revenue:

1) Votes Cast: 1078
2) Votes that earned Revenue: 1060
3) Vote Revenue Earned: $56.24

Total March earnings: $168.56

Fourth Place: uaezarb

Review Revenue:

1) Published Reviews: 126
2) Reviews that received Votes: 85
3) Reviews that earned Revenue: 64
4) Review Revenue Earned: $111.08

Voting Revenue:

1) Votes Cast: 1077
2) Votes that earned Revenue: 1071
3) Vote Revenue Earned: $54.94

Total March earnings: $166.02

Fifth Place: karlawmcdonald

Review Revenue:

1) Published Reviews: 82
2) Reviews that received Votes: 72
3) Reviews that earned Revenue: 40
4) Review Revenue Earned: $85.96

Voting Revenue:

1) Votes Cast: 1167
2) Votes that earned Revenue: 973
3) Vote Revenue Earned: $61.04

Total March earnings: $147.00

Sixth Place: Alice

Review Revenue:

1) Published Reviews: 87
2) Reviews that received Votes: 84
3) Reviews that earned Revenue: 49
4) Review Revenue Earned: $78.94

Voting Revenue:

1) Votes Cast: 1098
2) Votes that earned Revenue: 985
3) Vote Revenue Earned: $61.18

Total March earnings: $140.12

Seventh Place: Tink

Review Revenue:

1) Published Reviews: 100
2) Reviews that received Votes: 93
3) Reviews that earned Revenue: 55
4) Review Revenue Earned: $77.28

Voting Revenue:

1) Votes Cast: 1090
2) Votes that earned Revenue: 1010
3) Vote Revenue Earned: $56.06

Total March earnings: $133.34

Eighth Place: dsnygrl

Review Revenue:

1) Published Reviews: 57
2) Reviews that received Votes: 41
3) Reviews that earned Revenue: 30
4) Review Revenue Earned: $73.24

Voting Revenue:

1) Votes Cast: 1111
2) Votes that earned Revenue: 1091
3) Vote Revenue Earned: $60.05

Total March earnings: $133.29

Ninth Place: geri

Review Revenue:

1) Published Reviews: 162
2) Reviews that received Votes: 122
3) Reviews that earned Revenue: 65
4) Review Revenue Earned: $74.58

Voting Revenue:

1) Votes Cast: 1068
2) Votes that earned Revenue: 775
3) Vote Revenue Earned: $56.79

Total March earnings: $131.37

Tenth Place: Debbie831

Review Revenue:

1) Published Reviews: 94
2) Reviews that received Votes: 86
3) Reviews that earned Revenue: 50
4) Review Revenue Earned: $75.85

Voting Revenue:

1) Votes Cast: 1091
2) Votes that earned Revenue: 1063
3) Vote Revenue Earned: $55.50

Total March earnings: $131.35

Congratulations on a very exciting and successful March monthly cycle! With close to 100,000 votes cast during the month, we are excited to see the platform mature as we enter the 3rd monthly cycle since our full release. We are working hard to expand our monetization strategies and we are committing a monthly minimum of $10,000 that will be allocated to the community each cycle until we start to earn in excess of $20,000 a month in total collected net revenue. In order for us to get to that point and beyond, it will be important for each one of you to help us build our traffic and grow the community as quickly as possible. This means that you should be sure to use the “Share It” tab on each of your reviews that you are really proud of, or reviews you find that you feel stand out. Also, make sure you utilize the new bulk invitation tool on the Friends Tab of the Community Dashboard in order to grow your personal friend’s network providing an even wider voting pool for your old and new reviews alike. Remember, the larger your friends network, the greater your advantage is in the new voting based revenue sharing system!

The $10,000 payment for March will be broken out in the same structure as the February payments, with the important exception that revenue per category will be split between the top 10 reviews in a category, not just the top 5. We will be posting the specific breakdown on percentages by review position later today in the forum.

ShareScore

We’ve addressed some community concerns by releasing a very important new feature in the April Cycle: ShareScore. This is a new system that will measure some of your activities within the community and assign bonuses and negatives to those actions based on how much they contribute to the overall goals of the community, which is to have the best community and the highest quality reviews available anywhere online.

Reputation Score will be the NEW tie breaker for all reviews that tie for a revenue earning position, starting with the April Cycle. Also, we have designed your Reputation Score to determine how many votes you will be allowed to cast per category. Everyone starts with a Reputation Score of 50%; members with a score between 25% to 74% will be able to cast only 2 votes per subcategory, with scores above or below this range increasing or decreasing the allowed votes per subcategory in real-time. Here is the breakdown:

100%: 4 votes per category
75% - 99%: 3 votes per category
25%-74%: 2 votes per category
1%-24%: 1 vote per category
0%: 0 Votes

For more information please read this forum post here.

We are excited to see our community grow, mature, and prosper as we continue our efforts to round out the SharedReviews community. Some exciting new features to look forward to over the coming weeks includes SharedNews, which will be a page where you can track all of the community activity involving your friends. As well, look forward to new vote-received email notifications, and daily / weekly digest options on all email notifications very soon.

We will be processing the February Paypal payment run for all accounts that have over $10 in owed earnings this Monday April 7th, 2008. As well, the breakdown of the March cycle earnings will also be processed on the Monday.