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.

Throngs of techies converged on Austin last week for South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi), an annual event focused primarily on Internet technologies. While the conference covers a wide array of interests, there was one topic that seemed to keep popping up. During panels, in the halls and at the after parties, crowdsourcing was a hot topic.

What struck me as interesting though, was the highly varied opinions of this new idea. It seems that many people view crowdsourcing as a way to get free labor. “Have your community do the work for you,” said one exec who shall go unnamed (but you know who you are).

What I saw from many angles was a fundamental misunderstanding of the functionality and opportunity of the crowdsourcing movement. The objective, as we’ve executed at SharedReviews, is to create a symbiotic relationship. Leveraging your reviews as a community creates an immense wealth of information and a distinct opportunity from which to profit, but as it is with any healthy community, that profit is shared.

Peter’s post last week February’s top SharedReviewers showed clear examples healthy crowdsourcing. Last month our top reviewers averaged 75 written reviews on top of an average of 58 votes each. For their efforts, they were rewarded with an average of $189.80 — each. It’s because SharedReviews functions on the belief that if a company treats its fans kindly, then those people will remains fans for a long time to come.

Congratulations to everyone who participated in the first month of our new voting based revenue sharing system. We think the feedback from the community combined with the surprising number of votes in such a short period of time highlights a clear success for our first steps with this new revenue sharing approach. The output was so impressive that we decided to pay out an additional one-time “Vote Bonus” of $0.05 for every vote cast during the February cycle.

February Cycle Community Totals:

1) Total Community Reviews that received votes: 6240
2) Total Votes cast by the community: 40118
3) Community share of revenue this cycle: $5000.00
4) Special Bonus Voting Revenue: $2005.90

Our Top 10 SharedReviewers:

First Place: Tink

Review Revenue:

1) Published Reviews: 91
2) Reviews that received Votes: 89
3) Reviews that earned Revenue: 47
4) Review Revenue Earned: $75.50

Voting Revenue:

1) Votes Cast: 1155
2) Votes that earned Revenue: 999
3) Vote Revenue Earned: $83.34
4) Voting Bonus Revenue: $57.75

Total February earnings: $216.59

Second Place: uaezarb

Review Revenue:

1) Published Reviews: 100
2) Reviews that received Votes: 69
3) Reviews that earned Revenue: 38
4) Review Revenue Earned: $76.13

Voting Revenue:

1) Votes Cast: 1146
2) Votes that earned Revenue: 1006
3) Vote Revenue Earned: $80.49
4) Voting Bonus Revenue: $57.30

Total February earnings: $213.92

Third Place: kateri27

Review Revenue:

1) Published Reviews: 98
2) Reviews that received Votes: 64
3) Reviews that earned Revenue: 39
4) Review Revenue Earned: $63.60

Voting Revenue:

1) Votes Cast: 1146
2) Votes that earned Revenue: 952
3) Vote Revenue Earned: $77.00
4) Voting Bonus Revenue: $57.30

Total February earnings: $197.90

Fourth Place: Alice

Review Revenue:

1) Published Reviews: 85
2) Reviews that received Votes: 85
3) Reviews that earned Revenue: 34
4) Review Revenue Earned: $59.52

Voting Revenue:

1) Votes Cast: 1156
2) Votes that earned Revenue: 844
3) Vote Revenue Earned: $74.60
4) Voting Bonus Revenue: $57.80

Total February earnings: $191.92

Fifth Place: Munky

Review Revenue:

1) Published Reviews: 42
2) Reviews that received Votes: 34
3) Reviews that earned Revenue: 20
4) Review Revenue Earned: $36.97

Voting Revenue:

1) Votes Cast: 1150
2) Votes that earned Revenue: 1130
3) Vote Revenue Earned: $90.04
4) Voting Bonus Revenue: $57.50

Total February earnings: $184.51

Sixth Place: Debbie831

Review Revenue:

1) Published Reviews: 83
2) Reviews that received Votes: 64
3) Reviews that earned Revenue: 21
4) Review Revenue Earned: $36.65

Voting Revenue:

1) Votes Cast: 1148
2) Votes that earned Revenue: 1099
3) Vote Revenue Earned: $89.45
4) Voting Bonus Revenue: $57.40

Total February earnings: $183.50

Seventh Place: DeDee

Review Revenue:

1) Published Reviews: 26
2) Reviews that received Votes: 26
3) Reviews that earned Revenue: 26
4) Review Revenue Earned: $49.81

Voting Revenue:

1) Votes Cast: 1130
2) Votes that earned Revenue: 893
3) Vote Revenue Earned: $74.22
4) Voting Bonus Revenue: $56.50

Total February earnings: $180.53

Eighth Place: Sarahlovesmickey

Review Revenue:

1) Published Reviews: 145
2) Reviews that received Votes: 77
3) Reviews that earned Revenue: 31
4) Review Revenue Earned: $45.11

Voting Revenue:

1) Votes Cast: 1150
2) Votes that earned Revenue: 912
3) Vote Revenue Earned: $75.95
4) Voting Bonus Revenue: $57.50

Total February earnings: $178.56

Ninth Place: dsnygrl

Review Revenue:

1) Published Reviews: 37
2) Reviews that received Votes: 26
3) Reviews that earned Revenue: 15
4) Review Revenue Earned: $30.39

Voting Revenue:

1) Votes Cast: 1132
2) Votes that earned Revenue: 1074
3) Vote Revenue Earned: $90.21
4) Voting Bonus Revenue: $56.60

Total February earnings: $177.20

Tenth Place: Tony

Review Revenue:

1) Published Reviews: 80
2) Reviews that received Votes: 46
3) Reviews that earned Revenue: 22
4) Review Revenue Earned: $29.45

Voting Revenue:

1) Votes Cast: 1152
2) Votes that earned Revenue: 1079
3) Vote Revenue Earned: $86.32
4) Voting Bonus Revenue: $57.60

Total February earnings: $173.37

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….