just another ciao.co.uk review (ciao.co.uk)

Member Name: spidercallum

Product:	ciao.co.uk
Date:	31/07/08 (108 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: now i know about dooyoo, there aren't really any

Disadvantages: poor pay, hard to navigate layout, pointless community points

Well here's my review along with the other 291 about the well known Ciao.co.uk, otherwise known as the 'dark side'.

Ciao.co.uk is very much like dooyoo, you write reviews, and you get paid for them.

As i'm sure the majority of you know, you get paid the equivalent of 50p (500 dooyooMiles) for just posting a premium review (150words+) here on dooyoo.co.uk - this is probably the main reason I prefer writing reviews for dooyoo than I do on Ciao, as you don't get paid anything for posting your content on their site.

When your review is read here on dooyoo, you get 15 dooyooMiles, which is equivalent to 1.5p. On Ciao, you again, get paid nothing when your review is read, however you do get paid when someone rates your review (must be a positive rating). You get paid differently for all different reviews. When you're writing your review, you'll most probably (on most products), notice a pound sign/symbol pop up, or maybe even 2 or 3. These pound signs mean you'll get paid every time someone rates the review. For 0.5p per rating, you're review must have one pound sign, for 1p, two pound signs, and for 2p, three pound signs. Of course, to get this money, people actually have to rate it, which is doesn't happen quite as it does here on dooyoo, simply because, in my honest opinion, i don't think the community is as friendly and helpful as they are here.

Here's an example, I signed up for Ciao back in January time (2008), I posted a review on a printer I bought, just because I found it through the site, and no one had reviewed it. I completely forgot about the site, and a couple of weeks ago (mid July), found it again and realised I wrote a review sometime ago. I had just over £5 in my account, but I did do some surveys back at the very beginning of the year which i'll be coming on to in a minute. My printer now, on Ciao, has about 1500 views, but only about 15 ratings, which is about 7.5p worth! When I found dooyoo, I posted it straight away and got 50p immediately, and quite a lot since then, which was less then a week ago! So, if you like writing reviews but want to earn money from it, you're much better off here.

Now, for the surveys. Back when I first joint, you could complete surveys and you'd be credited to your main Ciao account, which is how I got £5 to withdraw. Now, there's a separate website for the surveys, and the money is credit to a different account. You can sometimes get some good surveys, like the other day I got an invitation to a 15 minute survey worth £5 - but I was late and they didn't need any more completed! Other than the odd good one, most of the others are worth 10 pence and take a long, boring 20 to 25 minutes to complete! Rubbish money!

There is also a community point system - the more you post, read and rate, the most community points you get. All these community points do is change the colour of the dot next to your screen name, so people know how much effort you put in to the community - problem is, they're are so many colours, I never know what are the experienced ones and what are the new members. A complete waste of time, really.

I find the layout of the site confusing sometimes, having to go through so many pages just to get to one thing. Here at dooyoo it's a lot, lot easier to navigate, and you'll know everything there is to know within 30minutes or less of using it!

I'm now a frequent member of dooyoo, and really really enjoy using this site. At first I thought it'd be like Ciao, and didn't think I'd enjoy it much, but I was very wrong! The community is much nicer here, and help you out with anything you need to know. You get paid more, and I find the reviews easier to read due to the layout of the site. I will, however, occasionally go back to Ciao just to copy and paste some of my reviews over, just because that only takes 10 or so minutes a week to do, and even if it's not much, i'll still get paid and in the end it will feel like free money being paid into my bank account!

Summary: worth copy and pasting your reviews over for the occasional payout, but dooyoo is a lot better!