Opinion portal
Opinion portals are primarily used to exchange experiences and in most cases are among the so-called “ Paid4 providers”. In an opinion portal, after prior registration, you can generally give your opinion on various products, services, events, travel destinations and hotels, which are then usually available to interested Internet users free of charge.
principle
An opinion portal is primarily used to exchange test and experience reports about products and to make them accessible to the public and to help other people make a purchase decision . After registering in an opinion portal , after prior registration, similar to an Internet forum, you will receive a profile that you can fill individually with data about yourself. The test reports that you have written yourself are also displayed in this profile. The products that can be rated in the respective opinion portal are usually divided into upper and sub-categories and can be searched for using an internal search. The product in turn represents a category of its own, in which the test reports that were written by other members are also displayed. The test reports can be rated by other members , which affects the remuneration of the report. In general, the better the report is rated by the members, the higher the compensation. Often a community is formed in the opinion portals in which the members can communicate with one another.
In recent years, many of the operators of opinion portals have also integrated a price comparison system that is always supposed to find the lowest price for a product from certain Internet shops.
Merit
In most opinion portals you receive a fee for the reports you write. This remuneration depends on the corresponding basic remuneration of the product, which the provider specifies individually for each product, and on the "quality" of the report and the number of readers. The “quality” of the report is made up of the evaluations that the report receives and is determined by the other portal members who have evaluated this report. The better the “quality”, the better the report will be rewarded. The remuneration for most providers is limited to 0.5–4 cents per review click.
A decisive shortcoming is that not all readings (including external readings), but only the readings of the members are remunerated - for example, 3000 interested parties may have read an article, but due to the relative unknownness of the author in the community , the post has only received 50 readings by members. Assuming a basic remuneration of one cent, the author receives just 50 cents. However, external readings are even easier to manipulate than internal readings. While within the community the clicking of posts, which is obviously not linked to actual reading, can often be seen in the statistics of the members who clicked, an individual who is not registered can click thousands of external "readings" in a short time or through relevant programs (so-called clickbots) click.
Additional earnings can still result from the so-called "premium payments". One provider offers premiums between EUR 0.50 and EUR 20 for "particularly high-quality" reports. The probability of benefiting from the few 10 and 20 euro bonuses is extremely low. With one provider, for every 10,000 to 11,000 reports written, there are just 75 10-euro bonuses and only ten 20-euro bonuses, which are internally known as "diamonds".
criticism
Lately, internal warfare and self-imposed competitive pressure have resulted in detailed reports, so-called "yoghurt reports", being written on comparatively uninteresting products, which members of the portals rate each other with high quality, regardless of their actual informative value. Typically, very detailed and long reports are also rated higher by members, although there is no correlation between the length of a report and its actual usability. Other reports on much more important products such as motor vehicles or electronic equipment, in which new and inexperienced portal users give comparatively few warnings with very high utility value or recommend a purchase, are often provided with negative comments from community members. “Click circles”, that is, mutual support of reports from “friendly” users , which are generally prohibited by the portals, are all too obviously in existence, which minimizes the value of many reports.
Furthermore, product providers professionally advertise their own products. These reports will not be marked as advertising. It is typical that the goods are highly praised for their properties. Marketing firms specialize in producing such reports, which are deliberately made with small grammatical or spelling mistakes to create the impression that it is a report from an unprofessional end user. Recommended protection is not to rely on just a few reports for products and, above all, to be careful about reports that are too positive.
Experience fakes
For some members, the focus is not on passing on experiences, but primarily on the remuneration offered. These members then mainly write “testimonials” on highly rewarded products. Usually that's three or four cents per reading and per click. These so-called "experience fakes" (invention of imaginary experiences for a product) are difficult to distinguish from honest reports. It is a good help for the reader to take a closer look at the profile of the author and his previous reports. If the author has almost only the highest-paid products to offer in his report directory, then caution is advisable. Likewise, if, for example, reports are made on twenty different printers, telephones or digital cameras - realistically, consumers usually cannot gain that much experience.