Screwing you lovers best mate? (ciao.co.uk)

Member Name: michaird

Product:	ciao.co.uk
Date:	20/10/02 (118 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good community spirit, A little less staid than Dooyoo

Disadvantages: Not knowing what you get premiun fund payments for, The cafe new ops list in the cafe section

Well, it's a Saturday night I'm poor bored and there's naff all on the telly. What can a girl do? Well this girls decided to spread the word of the enemy to Dooyoo, not that there's really a lot of point as most of you are sleeping with the enemy already. Aren't you, you dirty, dirty people?

I would write about something more consumer focused and useful but all the things I want to do aren't on here and we still cant get categories added, bummer huh? Also the new ops list hardly moves on dooyoo anymore, the enemy site is like the Marie Celeste as everyone's buggered of to a meet at Alton Towers and the churners have taken over the asylum.

Oh, what was I talking about?

Ahh yes, the enemy. Or to put it more accurately, Ciao.

I'm not going to say much about the basic premise of Ciao because if your on Dooyoo you should know already, and although this isn't the Dooyoo V's category I am going to make comparisons as I don't think you can do it properly without them.

Ciao, as you may or may not know, is an opinion site very much like Dooyoo. With a different colour scheme and a different pay structure there's very little difference to be had between them. Many berate Ciao for its poor pay structure while others praise it for its superior community spirit.

You know what? Both camps are wrong,

I was first a member of Dooyoo; I joined back in February with the intention of making some extra cash. I soon learned, as we all do, that's there's very little cash for a lot of hard work to be had in the opinionating game. However, I enjoyed it and it gave me a hobby that, with a little poetic licence, looks good on a C.V. I trundled along for a few months until one dull June night Dooyoo was optimising its system for far longer than I was willing to wait for and after racking my brains on how you actually spell Ciao I went for a nose.

I was surprised to s
ee a number of familiar faces and some entirely new ones. I came across people I thought were new but they were really just Dooyooers using different names (naughty people) I discovered that you came post the same op on both sites so I thought "Hmmm, maybe it wont be as much extra work as I thought" and joined up.

Ciao is split into two sections. The product area where all the consumer opinions are and the café area where you can write about whatever you like. The Café area has its own front page, with its own newest ops list. This works somewhat differently to the main ops list with only two ops from a topic being listed at any one time. For example, if you write an op in the anything beginning with E category and the two people wrote in F and L straight after you, your op would slip of the list almost immediately. However, sometimes your op can stay up there for up to a week (one of mine did).

As I said before, many people praise Ciao for having a superior community feel. I don't actually think that's true though. Ciao's community feel is more apparent, the management positively encourages it and the integrated guestbooks grease the wheels a little. Prominence is given to all efforts made by the members to help the community on the community page, like member get togethers and newsletters.

Ciao also has a system of community points, these provide a status guide based on how you participate in the site. You get points for reading and commenting on ops and you get points for being reading. I am currently a red dot (junior management). I'm working toward orange (middle management) then you have bronze (senior management) Silver (board member, only a few of these about) and a gold dot (chief executive, none of these yet). A white dot is the office junior and you should encourage and help these lot, a few treat the office juniors as the tea boy and aren't very nice but most people are very nice and make sure th
ey don't have to eat their lunch on their own.

Dooyoo on the other hand have made it perfectly clear that they don't want to encourage the community spirit of the site and its down to the members themselves to foster it through the likes of Tooyoo and Chuckleweb. Overall, although it's approached from different directions. I think the communities of Dooyoo and Ciao are pretty much equal.

The pay structure is rather radically different too. Ciao only pay for ops in certain categories, beauty, food, white goods, entertainment and such like. Then they only pay you 1p per read. This tends to put people off, especially those who like to write in books, music or film categories. Ciao do however have a premium fund of £1100 per month that they dole out to good opinions, similar to crowns but also very, very different.

Some of the £1100 is paid to what Ciao believes are the creme de la creme of ops, thirty per month getting up to £15 pounds each and a nice shiny diamond symbol. The rest is shared out amongst the rest of the great unwashed as a lump sum payment.

The big problem about the premium funs is, if you don't get a diamond you have no way of knowing what you get paid for. All ops in the product section are eligible so I've worked it out that I either get 50p for each qualifying op or larger payments for just a few of them. It is rumoured that the wards are actually made through a kind of statistical analysis so I would imagine the 50p each option is more likely. Therefore, if you submit at least one good qualifying op in a month you can be almost certain of a premium fund payment.

All in all, since February on Dooyoo I have made £52 and since June on Ciao I've made £67. £15 of that was a diamond so if you take that away I had made exactly the same amount of money on both sites. (Wow, I didn't even make those figures up either)

One thing Ciao does do miles better than Dooyoo is communi
cation. As with Dooyoo, Ciao is undergoing a bit of a facelift. The difference is they're doing it a bit at a time and they're announcing each change on the community pages around a week before it actually happens. Result? Hardly anyone moans about it, nobody leaves the site in a huff. Oh, and the changes seem to work too. They seemed to have learned from the mass exodus of people that occured when they change the pay structure some time ago.

One thing they don't have is a Katie. Ciao have the 'Ciao Team' we don't know who they are but they seem to do the job so we don't really care. On the one hand it's impersonal yet on the other hand members aren't affected by changes in staff. So, silver lining there.

What don't they do as well? Well, the contributions could be considered as a little more 'low brow' than Dooyoo with products being the focus rather than books, films and music. There are however some excellent writers on Ciao who cover these areas that don't write on Dooyoo and certain people are really pushing to improve the book section over there.

You will however find yourself wading through a hoard of opinions that you may not be the slightest bit interested in. How do you avoid these? Easy, use the opinion archive. The archive found on the community page, lists out every single opinion written on Ciao write back to day one. It shows the title and the topic, but not the writer, list in order of how useful its has been rating. So, to avoid an uninspiring new ops list, just take a look at the archive.

You do however get a little more creative licence. the Ciao cafe give you the chance to write about whatever the hell you like. I wrote about a thong wearing mouse emperor mouse once, can you do that on Dooyoo? (well I did but it wasnt rated well, not that I really care)

All in all Ciao is just like Dooyoo. It has the same star writers that always seem to get the pr
izes, the same spasmodic problems with churners (although a three op per day limit has been introduce to help curb this) and it offers a great way to spend a little surfing time.

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