Supposedly it's "the voice of the consumer". (Complete update) (ciao.co.uk)

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	ciao.co.uk
Date:	12/02/02 (132 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Money is paid directly into your bank account, good website (technically)

Disadvantages: Snidey members, the community, no contract from Ciao staff, Premium fund

Ciao is a European-based consumer review site in the same mould as Dooyoo.co.uk or Epinions.com where, in theory, you can post consumer-based reviews based on your own experiences. The UK site has been around for many years now and has undergone numerous changes. During the early part of 2005, Ciao was taken over by Greenfield, an American survey company. Since then, Ciao has suffered from technical issues, customer care issues and a general downturn in member satisfaction.

It's likely that the biggest selling point of Ciao (or any other site of this type) is the rewards for participation. Payment on Ciao can get quite complicated when considering the rewards for posting consumer reviews. First of all, each different product will have a different reward level. This ranges from 0 pence per read, 0.5 pence per read, 1 pence per read and 2 pence per read, depending on various factors such a non-member hits, number of existing reviews etc. A member who posts the first review in a category will gain from double the reward for each rating for the first month before returning to normal levels. These levels are readjusted at the beginning of each month. Ciao only pays for 'Helpful', 'Very Helpful' or 'Exceptional' ratings, though, so 'Somewhat Helpful', 'Unhelpful' or 'Off Topic' ratings will not result in a payment.

Each month, Ciao publishes a list of twenty "diamond" reviews as part of its "Premium Fund" scheme. This scheme pays out £1000 each month to authors of consumer reviews. Each "diamond" is worth £10 or £15. Fifteen of the former and five of the latter are given out each month. The system for allocating the Premium Fund is shrouded in secrecy, so no one can tell what exactly is required. Many people believe that certain categories can yield diamonds more than others (Travel, Electronics etc.) with others convinced that not all reviews are rewarded based on quality, that sometimes they are used as sweeteners if a member has been a target of abuse or has stated dissatisfaction with the site or that if you write a review that's quite long (over 1500 words, for example) then you'll hugely improve your chances of a diamond. There is no evidence to prove or disprove these claims. The rest of the Premium Fund is, according to Ciao, automatically allocated to members; however, unless you've only written one consumer-based review, you will not know what's been rewarded with the fund.

Another source of income from Ciao is through taking part in its survey scheme. By signing up to Ciao, your account can also be used to take part in surveys which can add money to your Ciao account. Payment for these varies. Ciao claim that you can earn up to £5 for a survey, but these are few and far between. Payment for surveys tends to range from a few pence up to a couple of pounds. It usually takes a few weeks for the payment for each completed survey to filter into your Ciao account.

Over the past few months, the standard of Ciao's surveys has been extremely poor. It's all too frequent to run into technical issues, meaning that surveys cannot be completed. Sometimes, the screening questions can be overly long, meaning you could be more than halfway through a survey (many of which take around 15 to 20 minutes to complete) before being kicked off. When working correctly, the surveys can be a good was of adding money to your Ciao account, but recent experience of Ciao Surveys has meant that I doubt I will be taking any further survey offers.

The final method of increasing your Ciao account is to refer friends and relatives to join. Over the course of the first few months, you can expect to earn 50% of anything your referrals earn. If you've referred a few people who end up being active around the site, this could end up being a goodly amount.

Once you have at least £5 accumulated in your account, you can withdraw this to your bank account, though you have to be with a UK (or Ireland) based bank to be able to get the cash. Even if you do not have a UK-based bank account, you can still take part in the site, though you will not get paid and your earnings will remain in your account. Again, there have been problems with money transfers to bank accounts. Some people have been waiting a lot longer than Ciao's estimate of five weeks for a payout. It's not unheard of for a member to be waiting for months. My last experience of "cashing out" was a positive one with the money arriving in my account exactly three weeks from the time I had requested it which is below average for the site.

I think the site itself has improved greatly over the four years that I've been a member. When I first joined, it seemed to be constantly riddled with technical issues (I remember members not being able to log in due to a supposed conflict with their anti-virus software) and the site was not as well designed as others around that time. Today, however, as far as the site itself is concerned, I think that it is probably the most appealing compared to its main rival, Dooyoo. The design is clean and crisp, the navigation is logical and easy and the site speed is generally fast and although I am now surfing using broadband, I've never had any major speed issues with dial-up. There are some issues with obtrusive banner adverts and popups, but I have remedied that by using Mozilla Firefox as my browser at home with the "Adblock" extension that cuts out most adverts around Ciao. One issue I have with the site is that on certain categories, there isn't a "Suggest new product" link and adding to these categories is complicated. It wouldn't take much to correct this and I can't understand why it's still an issue (Ciao have been aware of this issue for a while now).

There are some great features, such as each member's Personal Homepage (which I think is under-used by the majority of the membership) and some bad features like the Private Guestbook and the ability to delete messages from your own public guestbook which has lead to the site being skewed in terms of 'positive' communication. Often, relevant information is taken away from a review to the guestbooks, meaning that any consumers passing by do not get the full benefit of a review. The link with eBay could be a great way of getting extra traffic to your auctions, but I've never really been a big seller so have yet to try this out.

For a lot of people, the community element to Ciao is a huge selling point. I disagree with this sentiment, mainly because I do not think that Ciao's current "community" is particularly healthy and the aims of this community are not parallel with Ciao's aims as a business. The focus of Ciao's community has veered away to the point that, unofficially at least, Ciao has become more of a social site than is healthy. There are a lot of people on Ciao whose primary goal is to make friends using any means possible. This means that reviews can be littered with Ciao-related references and, increasingly, over-rated in terms of usefulness. People find it hard to take criticism of their work or any kind of challenge to their point of view. As was stated above, the updated guestbook systems have meant that any kind of negative contact is either done away from prying eyes or deleted from the public guestbooks once read. This has led to what is known as a "fluffy" community where people are encouraged to only say nice things and people who refuse to comply with this unofficial way of doing things are ostracised. Rather worryingly, the "community" members tend to be read much more than other members and this is irrespective of the quality of the work being posted on the site. That can mean that excellent reviews are often not rewarded and that popular writers (as opposed to good writers) get more recognition and that can have an effect on how reliable Ciao is as an information resource.

Additionally, there is a non-consumer section of the site, known as the Ciao Café. This has become a dumping ground for stuff that is seen to have no consumer value such as creative writing, member advice on various topics and a wide range of other things. Ciao seem to have given up on any sort of editorial control in this part of the site, so it's not unexpected to see completely useless topics such as "Snow - good or bad?", "Who is my favourite Ciao member?" and "Life, It's The Name Of The Game". It's a shame because, with a little more focus and control from both Ciao and the members, I feel that the Café area could be much more than a place where people post very poor pieces of creative writing or poorly created "challenges" and actually be a real asset to the site as a whole.

I've always found Ciao, as an entity, to be quite weird. "The Ciao Team" often signs correspondence, though sometimes the Ciao staff member will 'sign' their name giving a more personal feeling to contact. Members of "The Ciao Team" seem to change quite regularly so consistency is hard to maintain. Depending on who is manning specific roles at Ciao HQ or what you are contacting Ciao about, you might find completely different levels of service. For example, in the past few months, any time that I had a problem with a survey, my emails were given a response usually with 24 hours and the issues with the survey were dealt with. However, emailing Ciao with feedback, suggestions and concerns regarding the site and you might be hard-pushed to get a reply at all. My last "conversation" with "The Ciao Team" lasted all of three emails, but that took over six months for resolution. Communication, it seems, is one-way traffic as far as Ciao is concerned. Members have also noted that some members are seemingly given more time than others. One member might have their queries regularly dealt with within a few hours whereas other members are lucky if they even get a reply.

A few members, including myself, suggest that Ciao spends far too much time dealing with trivial matters and pandering to those who make the reports. Ciao's time could be better spent dealing with serious enquiries only and using the other time to reply to general member's queries thus freeing up time to deal with the site in general. The lack of consistent communication to all members, rather than a specific few, seems to be the members' biggest gripe at the moment, even more so than the technical issues.

From a non-member perspective, getting information out of Ciao is a lot harder than it should be. The "community" has been very active in forcing their styles and thoughts upon other members, which means it's rare to find someone who simply writes their own experiences and thoughts anymore. The "community" has been instrumental in people writing 1000 plus words on the simplest of items which has the effect of effectively reducing the usefulness for non-members and turning Ciao into a club where you have to really be a member to be able to extract useful information from the reviews. It's simply impossible to get the information you desire when you have to wade through four or five reviews, each at 1500 words long and each of which pretty much repeat what the others have said.

I'm afraid that given Ciao's current form, coupled with the alternatives out there, that I'd be hard pushed to recommend Ciao to anyone as their primary website for writing reviews and surveys. Global Test Market (as an example) offers surveys that always work technically and you always get "paid", even if you fail the screening questions (usually 3 'points' for your time, compared to 50 for a full survey). Dooyoo, as a review-writing site, offers better rewards for writing that are far more transparent and it has less of this false community feel to it, which gives the reviews themselves, and their ratings, more value. My suggestion would be to try and have another site as your 'primary' site and use Ciao as a secondary site where you can cross post work and do whatever surveys you might qualify for.

Sooner or later this is probably going to change. Websites/internet businesses and their owners tend to move quickly to adapt to markets and changing trends, so it's possible that the issues I currently have with Ciao can be addressed and indeed that most problems are only a "minor" hiccup due to the Greenfield takeover. It's not all Ciao's fault, though. I've mentioned the community taking focus away from the reviews and if Ciao were to become stricter in dealing with the community, the members could regain some confidence in the site that, in turn, would have the knock-on effect of improving the Ciao experience for everyone. At the moment, their strategy is to sit back and hope that everything fixes itself, community-wise.

Summary: Alternative opinion site where the "community" calls the tunes to the detrimment of the site.