Just like Dooyoo but they pay a fiver per opinion! (smartstudents.co.uk)

Member Name: rob_writer

Product:	smartstudents.co.uk
Date:	21/03/02 (52 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Pay lots

Disadvantages: Crap site

Despite the popularity of Dooyoo and Ciao there have been very few new sites of a similar type. One of the few to have sprung up is smartstudents.co.uk, but can it live up to Dooyoo?

Their biggest plus point is that they pay a whopping £5 per opinion! That's right, for every opinion you write you receive £5. There's no payment for reads, but I think you'll still agree that's way in excess of anything Dooyoo will pay you. Can you get 166 reads per opinion? Or a crown and 116 reads? I know I don't! And even better, Smartstudents do pay, I've received two cheques. Their policy to pay everyone at once at the end of every month which isn't actually made clear on the site, but the staff are very friendly and are happy to answer any questions you may have.

On the payment side they leave Dooyoo for dead, I actually fail to see how they can afford it. Unfortunately for them, the rest of the site is awful.

I don't just mean poorly designed, or a little bland, or awkward to navigate - I mean that the site is AWFUL. It looks amateur. Infact it is amateur. It's background is a bright yellow, it uses what look like pictures from standard clip-art. The whole thing feels homemade, like something I would make, and let me tell you; my web pages are amongst the worst in the world.

Still, not wanting to judge a book (website) by it's cover (style) can what's inside redeem it?

As the name of the site suggests, it's geared towards students, and is not primarily a reviews site as Dooyoo is. It has sections on CDs, movies, books and musicals. These contain top 10 charts as well as reviews of various cds, books etc. Lots of info here, but guess what - it's all rather amateur! The games section is similar, containing game reviews for a number of systems. The reviews themselves are OK, but their layout is rather plain.

There's a news and weather section, which unsurprisingly contains
the news and weather, as well as TV listings. The problem with this bit is that all they have is links to other sites, or scrolling news headlines from Reuters which you then have to click to go to the Reuters site to read the whole article. Weather and TV listings are the same. Overall a rather poor section of the site.

There are a few competitions on the site, as well as a few web based games to play, some of which are actually quite fun.

The travel section is one of the better on the site, as it loses that yellow background contains a selection of solid information, links to useful sites and peoples first hand accounts of travelling.

The chat rooms are always empty, in addition you are given a smartstudents email address, but when it's so inferior to most others free web based mail systems, there's not a lot of point in using it. There's also a fun section, sort of like an online magazine, which mostly contains funny photo's. There's also a section to send logos to your phone, although you either have to send them money or dial a £1 per minute number. Rip off springs to mind.

The site gets it's content from it users, hence it pays them £5 per review. It specifies at least 150 words, which is probably the easiest fiver you'll ever make.

How long they will last is anyone's guess, how they manage to afford to pay this is anyone's guess, how they found someone this bad is anyone's guess, but I know that they send me money so I can't complain that much!

Summary: