I should probably come up with a pun here..... (dooyoo.co.uk in general)

Member Name: theanarchistkid

Product:	dooyoo.co.uk in general
Date:	26/02/01 (67 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Earn money!

Disadvantages: Takes time!

Having had a quick look through other reviews in this category I am utterly disgusted to see the wide array of horrible puns. I must admit that I used to try and incorporate the word 'Dooyoo' into a lot of my older opinions but then I discovered that everyone was doing it so I rapdidly stopped doing it.

The basic premise of Dooyoo is that it's an online reviewing community. It's very similar to other such schemes and is a very useful community for looking up information. 'Community' is the key word here because it is now more than just a website. When it first started there were few people on it and it was easier to earn money. Origanlly they used to have massive rates of pay, something like 75p per opinion. Obviously this couldn't last for long so they had to drop it down to 25p. Even this was very generous so eventually it's now been dropped down to 10p.

The community spirit is what Dooyoo thrives on. Features such as the Circle of Friends allows Dooyoo members to build up friendship groups of people whom they trust. This is a very good feature because you will generally only trust people if you are wanting to read more of their opinions. This means that you can build up a group of people that will read your opinions so eventually you will make more money. It's not just about people reading your opinions and getting money though, it's also about you read other people's opinions.

You don't get paid for reading other people's opinions because there is no company in the world that would be able to sustain that kind of payout. Instead, the primary reward for it that you get is the knowledge that you're helping to imrpove the Dooyoo service and community. If you read someone else's review they might come and read one of yours, or add you to their circle of friends so it does actually pay money to read reviews, although not directly.

The Dooyoo website is generally quite grea
t. At the very beginning it had no facility to search for members which was a real shame because you could spend hours looking for one of your friends from 'real life'. Fortunately this has now been changed so if you do reccommend a friend joins, you can easily find them once they've joined and add them to your circle of friends. The site search also allows you to search for specific items which saves you having to trawl through loads of reviews trying to find a topic which you feel you can write about.

The front page of the website contains a lot of vital information to Dooyoo members. For a start this is where the list of all the categories that you can write in are. Sometimes it's fun just to randomly look through all the categories and try to find a topic that you are confident writing about. The front page now also has banner adverts on it which is presumably where Dooyoo gets a lot of its resources from. Whilst everyone would prefer not to have adverts, I'm sure that without them, Dooyoo would struggle to pay people so I would wholely suggest that you should click on them if they interest you at all.

The Dooyoo Hall of Fame is a 'competition' where the best members of Dooyoo are nominated to appear on the front page of the site. Even though I've been a member of Dooyoo for some time I still haven't been in the Hall of Fame, so if you're reading this and you're impressed, PLEASE nominate me! If you do get into the Hall of Fame you receive and extra 1000 Dooyoo miles and I assume that more people will read you opinions seeing as your ugly mug is plastered on the front page of the website. Generally Hall of Famers are people that have read a lot of opinions and written some very good ones.

Very good opinions on Dooyoo receive crowns. These are little awards given to 'Premium Opinions' and you get paid 1000 Dooyoo miles for it. To get a crown you do have to write very good opinions so i
t's no good spending about 5 minutes whizzing up a short little review. On average I would say that my reviews take me an hour to write because I try to make them as in depth as I possibly can. Spelling mistakes and grammatical errors throughout the document will make it look less impressive to readers so it may be worth spell checking it in a word processor first.

There is a section on the Dooyoo front page where the latest opinions crop up. This is a very good feature and I know of a lot of people that just hover around the front page refreshing their browser all the time, waiting for new opinions. The advantages of doing this is that if you read one of these opinions you can be more or less certain that the author is still online and they will hopefully come and read one of yours. Also, when you're writing opinions yourself it is nice to see your opinion up in lights on the main Dooyoo page. One problem with this feature is that occasionally it breaks so you get one review stuck on there all the time. I remember a while ago that someone put a review on there and it broke and the review got read about 200 times over one weekend. The review wasn't actually very good yet the author got a load of money out of it. However, if the thing breaks and my review is stuck on the front page, I won't be complaining. :-)

Throughout this opinion I have referred to Dooyoo Miles quite a few times. Dooyoo miles are essentially the currency of Dooyoo. 1000 miles is equal to £1 and when you want to redeem your Dooyoo miles you have to give the figure that you want in Dooyoo miles. Redeeming your Dooyoo miles has never been easier because now all you have to do is follow a wizard like process and it's all done automatically. Previously you had to send an email to the right person but now it's much improved and much simpler.

Dooyoo also offers something called Dooyoo Shopping which I am yet to try out. From what I have seen so far it l
ooks like they just link to other companies that provide products but the way in which they do this is very clever. It looks like they've signed up for an affiliate programme so when you buy something from one of these companies using the link from Dooyoo, Dooyoo gets a small fraction of the money. If this is the case, I would suggest that if you are ever buying from Amazon or similar companies, follow the link from Dooyoo and try and earn Dooyoo a little bit of extra money.

Overall, Dooyoo is a very good idea and although not entirely original it does carry out its plans very well. There's nothing more enjoyable than seeing one of your opinions that you've spent ages writing get crowned and earn you some nice money. In the end though, it's not about the money, it's more to do with building up a large community and turning Dooyoo into the ultimate consumer resource.

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