Chezza rambles about Dooyoo's position in the online advertising marketplace (dooyoo.co.uk in general)

Member Name: chezza99

Product:	dooyoo.co.uk in general
Date:	11/04/09 (196 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: We get to spout off & show off, Dooyoo consolidates its role as real-time consumer experience forum

Disadvantages: DOOYOO ANNOUNCES PLANS TO DOUBLE PRODUCT REVIEWER REWARD VALUES

I'm a Dooyoo baby. I only have 11 reviews to my name (make that 12, with this) and 1 crown, hurrah! When I tripped over Dooyoo, 6 months ago, I had no idea it was a commercial review site - I must have found it through a search on some "issue" and been google-led to Speakers' Corner (You know who you are!!) Anyway, I posted my very cross views about Amazon's employee conditions and was trashed! Erk.

Running off to (belatedly) read whatever contributor policies I could find - they were sparse - I discovered that Dooyoo makes its money from advertisements which, naturally, will gain value from editorial repetition. So, in the commercial scheme of things, my Amazon piece did no harm at all. I mentioned the company name 5 times, I think.

I have noticed that Dooyoo reviews take a maximum of 3 days to show up in the top 10 Google results for any brand or product name ... I dunno what contribution listed brands make towards the site's revenues, but I reckon it's probably worthwhile :)

Online marketing is part of my job. You guessed? Gosh!

Interestingly, I think it's part of a long-term strategy that net geeks, like yours truly, have been advocating for ages. It boils down to the old-fashioned adage "Content is King". In Web terms this is old-fashioned, even though it's only 10 years old! It's already been discredited and revived 3 or 4 times.

The same aphorism was used by newspaper editors 150 years ago, when papers existed purely as ad sheets. They'd started off as small-circulation newssheets, distributing government news and informed opinions that most people wouldn't have known about, were it not for their well-thumbed, passed-along copies of the Press.

Then somebody - his name was drilled into my mind as a trainee ad rep, but escapes me now - pointed out to the publishers that they could make money by selling ads! Whoopee! Until then, they'd been dependent on handouts from socially-minded benefactors. Now they could get businesses to PAY to be in the newspaper - and all their budget worries, and dependencies, were over. Break out the port, chaps, we've cracked it!

Then the papers became thicker ... and full of ads, like your free-ad paper nowadays. Only, this was The Times. They figured out, fairly sharpish, no-one was going to buy a paper full of ads. Plus, the advertisers wouldn't pay to be in a paper that nobody bought (because there was no news in it).

So, sometime about 100 years ago, the publisher of The Times invented the slogan "content is king". Put enough, good enough, news there, people will want to read it. Readers are a market. Sell the readers to the advertisers and, bingo, you have a viable media proposition.

See any parallels here? The whole process took nearly 200 years in the Press - but they did have to invent mass media in the first place ;) Given that this is the 21st century, and things happen that much faster (plus, we no longer have to invent the mass media concept: a small hiccup out of the way) - I find it quite funny that the same lessons are learned, over again, each time quicker.

The more you search, and the cleverer search engines become - they can already distinguish real content from dross - the more important the quality of what was written becomes. This isn't at all hard for a search engine; they were built as text readers and had 'logical text' filters from the start. It's much easier, for an engine programmer, to add "filter-out" rules than "filter-in" ones.

So, from Dooyoo's perspective, it will benefit them to have a LOT of *logical text* written about listed products. Hence why they're now rewarding frequency of reviews above popularity. But mindless reviews will rate lower than thoughtful ones, because search engines are that clever nowadays :)
Hence the ratings system.

Plus, a really good review will pull in more readers from all over - due to the quoted Google text - therefore, Dooyoo gets more money. Hence the crown system (though I think it's faulty as is; I won't get even more boring over why!)

Anyway. I see why Dooyoo is doing what it does, though I feel some of the fresher players in this, wider, market are doing it better.

My personal reasons why I enjoy Dooyoo are more visceral, and all about Dooyoo's community aspect - I enjoy the exchange of ideas; the comments, and I enjoy having my views challenged from time to time. Hell, I like forums!

Please don't feel you have to rate this: it's just a bit of a ramble!
No-rate is fine :)

Summary: Count the keywords for Dooyoo consumer experience product review panel self-selected! Hmm?!