Here comes Dooyoo, Ciao watch out!!! (dooyoo.co.uk in general)

Member Name: chrisbrn

Product:	dooyoo.co.uk in general
Date:	21/06/01 (38 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Pays the same for each article, and more per read., Can spend your money earn't in more ways, Get more reads than on Ciao.

Disadvantages: Premium fund has a lower payment than Ciao, but this is made up of better payment from reads., Not as easy to navigate round the site.

I have been a member of Dooyoo for about a week now, and you earn more money than on Ciao (well thats my opinion). I started using this site due to the write ups already made by other Ciao members. However, Dooyoo seems to lack that personal touch that you gain from Ciao, and it is not as easy to move from one article to another.

Registration though is very similar to Ciao as you select a name and password, and then once logged in you can make your profile. There's an option to add your own picture immediately - no waiting for it to appear, simply upload either a photo of yourself or even a cartoon, in fact anything! You can then familiarise yourself with the site. Below is a guide to Dooyoo as Dooyoo is slightly more confusing in layout:


The site itself has apparently been revamped and it looks good, but seems to be packed to bursting with features. The site itself will take a bit of time to work out in the long run, but easy when you get to know. Unlike Ciao having headings for each and every topic, Dooyoo does not. If you look up cars, then you get the latest car reviews. To get the views per make and model, you have to do a search. This is where you are confronted with three tabs on the home page:

Tab 1 - Opinions

This gives you a full rundown of all the categories you can write in. These are very similar to Ciao, with the exception of a food and drink category, which is great for us food addicts and alcholics (lol) and I’m sure would go down a storm on Ciao too.

Here you also get a drop down menu where you can read the newest opinions in each select category or across the siteto the left of the site. It gives you 75 of the newest mixture. Plus you will find a *good-verses-bad* feature on a pair of ops on one topic as a comparison guide for the buyer, as well as a top 5 section. At present this page gives you the top 5 DVD players, but this frequently changes to various other products, and is agai
n useful for purchase decisions.


Tab 2 - Power Search:

Very useful indeed. This lets you search for items that you are not sure of the correct name or even just by text. It's pretty impressive and you can even alter the accuracy from 10% to 100%, to enable you to hunt out anything. I still use this quite a bit as I am still new to this site, and it is well worth using whether you are new to the site or not.


Tab 3 - Dooyoo Community

Here you will find plenty to keep you going - from e-cards to SMS messages, member links for the Hall of Fame (which I have not had experience in yet, so I cannot comment on) and the Premier opinions. To get a Premier opinion (or Crown) it needs to be very well written (sort of like this opinion). The opinion then has a crown icon placed next to it and the Dooyoo equivalent of an extra £1 added to your account. It's not quite the Premium Fund, but it is a start! Also, you can now nominate opinions for this whereas before the Dooyoo team awarded them. Although this amount is £1, you do find that you get more reads than Ciao, which makes up for this reduction.

A message board has been introduced, whereby you will be able to leave messages about products and get answers for each of the messages that you leave. However this, you will find is found for every article that you read and goes straight to the person that wrote the article or opinion.

There are also links to any competitions currently on the go, as well as all the sponsors links and banners if you are feeling bored enough to look at them. There are not that many of them, and some are actually worth clicking on!

Speaker's Corner is another excellent category found here, and again one Ciao would benefit from. It covers the relevant issues in all topics from politics like the single currency and the monerchery to the environment like green house gasses and global warming through to health of the
uk within the NHS. Here you can have your say, and say everything to get off your chest. You will more than likely get more reads from the dooyoo site than the regional or national newspapers!

So what about the writing of opinions?

Dooyoo offer similar benefits to Ciao - you get 10p for every opinion written (except this has now been stopped due to the volume of members dooyoo now has), but you get 5p not 2p for every member read. This is good, but boy do you need it!

Dooyoo work in "Dooyoo miles", and you need to earn 50,000 (which works out to be £50) before you can claim it in cash. I dont know how prompt they are as I have only just joined myself, but with my Dooyoo miles, I will donate all to charity (on the 07/01/02, £5 was donated to RSPCA, NSPCC, and Imperial Cancer Research). I am doing this as this site is just for filling my time and I do not want to gain anything out of it.

However, if you don’t want money you can spend it in smaller amounts on vouchers. These start at £20 (20,000 miles equivalent) for Amazon and Blackstar, while for high street shopping vouchers to use at the likes of Boots, or HMV it's £20 (20,000 miles equivalent) but with a transaction cost included (varies with type of transaction).

Then again, you could always buy a Dooyoo t-shirt to amaze your friends with for only 10,000 miles. New to the Dooyoo site, you can also obtain hats and if you are very active - CONDOMS!!!

Now the opinions themselves:

You now get a choice of two. A "short opinion", which will earn you nothing, simply involves answering the set of questions and adding a short conclusion. The more popular one, is a longer opinion like those found at Ciao. These will gain you 100 miles (10p) for writing it and a further 50 miles (5p) for each time a person reads it.

You get a similar option to Ciao's "circle of trust", but on Doyoo this is not limited
to a set number. You can also give a thumbs up or thumbs down to products you review - giving your readers a handy reference to the product's standard.

By logging in to your profile you will see how many opinions you have written and how many reads they have had plus the page also tells you how many reads you have made, the ratings that you have given and the amount of comments made..

To see who hass rated your opinions, you need to click on a link on your opinion, which I dont mind as I dont use it that much. It is the ratings and the amount of reads along with the quality of your opinion that counts. It also tells you how many of each rating in total you have from very useful to not useful. Your account balance is visible on your profile at all times in Dooyoo miles.

To evaluate this site, Dooyoo has excellent features but it still lacks the personal touch that Ciao seems to have, however you seem (well I think) that you gain more reads. Ciao is easier to navigate round the site than Dooyoo, but then if you wish just to stick to reads from certain people, then you can set Dooyoo to notify you as and when that person has written another opinion. This is quite handy if you have a lot of friends on the site!

Worth it for a little extra income of course, so really if you can spare the time on both then go for it. So far, as previously stated, I have made more money for each article compared to Ciao. Well worth a try if you want extra cash!!

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