Epinions Turns 10

Back when I first started using the World Wide Web--1996 or 1997--there was only one way to publish one's content: build a "website", or send to a friend who had a website. This involved purchasing a domain name, or at least staking out a directory on Crosswinds or Geocities or Angelfire, finding a host server, and coding HTML pages, usually from scratch since the WYSIWYG editors of the day did strange things with s and tables. I had a silly vanity page--do teenagers write any other kind?--up on Geocities, to which I posted a few essays about politics and philosophy. Were I not a teenager, the return on time invested would have been much too low.

Around that time, web-based bulletin boards first started to appear. These allowed users to post content to the Web, but in a Usenet-like discussion format, more suitable for debates than for articles. The potential for Web-based authoring of Web content was made clear, and various software platforms began to emerge. Nowadays much of the content we read on the Web--this article, Wikipedia, articles on The Examiner or About.com, most 'blogs--is produced in this fashion.

The 5 June 1998 launch of the Open Directory Project (ODP), then known as GnuHoo, marked a Web publishing milestone; the ODP was the first website built nearly entirely from user-contributed content. Site policies have since changed due to the rise of "black-hat" search engine optimization, but back then, almost anyone could become an editor of a small category and quickly move up to gain access to major portions of the site. The ODP eclipsed Yahoo, the primary professionally-edited Web directory at that time, in April 2000.

The ODP was followed by several 1999 launches of sites which in some way or another allowed the posting of more article-like content to the Web. Two of the more familiar names are Blogger and Livejournal, which made 'blogging simple, taking care of the back-end for the user. 1999 was a year of major innovations in Web usability; it's difficult to choose a standout, but if I had to pick one it would be Epinions.com.

Launched on 9 September 2009, Epinions is a consumer reviews and price comparison website which pays its contributors a share of site revenue. Anyone may contribute; reviews earn based on a "secret formula" based on the number of visits to a review and click-throughs from reviews of related products. In the site's early days reviews also earned a set per-visit "eroyalty", which was phased out as dot-com money dried up and as abuse of the system became more common. Like most economic exchanges, the system is mutually beneficial. It's difficult for Web writers to build a site from scratch, let alone to generate traffic and earn income from their works; websites in turn need but often have difficulty finding quality content. (The ODP, with its editor shortage and giant backlog, is actually a prominent example. It pays to pay!) Wikipedia may be able to run on free content and a pay-it-forward spirit alone, but perhaps due to the nature of its content it is the rare exception to the rule.

Epinions may or may not have been the first website paying users for contributed content, but if it is not, it is the most prominent early example by far. The paid user-contributed content model has since been adopted elsewhere on the Web, including by general-purpose giants Helium.com and Associated Content and numerous smaller specialty websites such as political commentary host Nolan Chart LLC. Although they are not user-contribution based sites, websites like Examiner.com which pay a dispersed crew of writers a sum based on the traffic and revenue generated by their content are in the same spirit.

Epinions was also one of the early pioneers of formalized reputation and content rating systems. Users rate contributed reviews, and the order in which they are displayed--or, rarely, whether or not a review is displayed at all--depends on the rating. The weight given to a user's rating, in turn, is dependent on the user's level of "trust" in the user community; users can formally trust or block each other, with blocking contributing a sort of negative trust. Trust itself is weighted, also by a "secret formula" of sorts. To improve the quality of its content, early on Epinions recognized some of its best contributors as "advisors" and adjusted the weight of their ratings and trust accordingly.

This community-based quality management isn't the only way to improve the quality of a website built of openly contributed content--Associated Content does it by maintaining a small editorial staff and paying up-front for better articles--but it has come to work well and its influence can be felt on quite a few other websites. It cannot perform scientific quality testing, but Epinions otherwise compares favorably to Consumer Reports and most of its reviews are easily of sufficient quality for newspapers or magazines.

Both payment for user-contributed content and social management of content quality seem old to us now, but when introduced, they were major innovations. On this tenth anniversary of its launch, I, a fairly regular contributor to and user of the site, salute Epinions for making the Web more useful to shoppers and writers alike, and most importantly still, for its contribution to the culture of the Web.