Ciao, Survey and Review Site (ciao.co.uk)

Member Name: Scooobydooo

Product:	ciao.co.uk
Date:	02/03/04 (175 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: quick to load, suggest products, lots of reads

Disadvantages: lack of payouts, not everything pays

Well I took the time out to write an opinion on a couple of sites and thought I would bring you Ciao.

I am not really into the Dooyoo Versus Ciao cenario as I write on both. Personally I think there is space for both of the sites to operate so I will not make comparisons against Ciao and Dooyoo which is only fair as this never happened in my Dooyoo Opinion.

What is Ciao?
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Ciao is another survey site and also a review site where you get paid for completing on line surveys and also by writing reviews about products. You get paid for completing surveys and reviews.


How do you register?
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This is simple , when you first go to Ciao.co.uk you will see at the top right hand sign REGISTER. you then complete some details and they ask you do you want to do the surveys as well, if you do, you tick it. Finally you submit and they will send you an email to the one you have just registered with and then you follow the link to complete registration, you can also do a tour now with Ciao.

The Site in General
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When you first go into Ciao, it is rather confusing and it is advisable to spend the first couple of days reading and rating on the site and getting to know what the site is about. After a couple of days you start to find your way around and although you can start to earn money straight away from reads and writing your reviews, it is better to have a bit of knowledge first off.

So you first start at the home page and it says Welcome Username in the centre and the predominant colour of the site is now white and a pale blue. On the top right hand side of the screen where it was asking you to register is now my account, where you can access your details. More
about that later.

Also in the middle of the home page is where the search facility is to access your products. Again on the first page is New Reviews, Featured Members and also New Authors and Most Read Authors which all change on a daily base. I am not really keen on the Most Read Authours Part and even though I am regularly on it, it is not one of the better features on Ciao.

Reading and Rating
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There are a couple of ways of reading and rating on Ciao and one of the accesses to the review is via the front page where you can access the newest reviews. Another way is to go to the Archive Dates on Ciao Cafe which is like a calendar and every day at 11pm the day ends and you can see all the reviews that have been written for the day. This is what I use and start to read and rate from 11pm and then I can see everyones review.

You can also have alerts so people who you trust have written an opinion via Ciao you recieve and email saying Username has written an opinion. There is also a facility so that when someone reads or rates your work or enters you into their cot, you also recieve and email from that as well.

So what is the Cot, Cot is abbreviated for Circle of Trust and is a group of friends who your trust. As time goes on and people trust you, they will add you to their cot and you get 80 points a time added to your community scoring when someone adds you to theirs.

So Community points have to be earned and are the bases of coloured dots on Ciao. You start off as a white dot and then progress up to the gold dot. You get nothing for been a certain coloured dot and many people do not like the dots as it breeds unhealthy competition when people are just aiming for the next colour. At first it is easy to ke
ep changing colours then you have to earn another 50,000 to change and so on.

So you are now looking at someones opinion and are reading through it, what are the options for you to rate it. Well there are a few, Off Topic, Somewhat Helpful, Helpful, Very Helpful and Exceptional. If you rate someone Exceptional or Off Topic, the computer prompts you to ask you for the reasons for doing that. If someone rates you unhelpful or off topic then you will have community points deducted. If you rate someone exceptional they are put forwards for a premium award. More later. By reading and rating and writing your community points go up.

The Rewards
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There are different ways how you can earn money at Ciao, one is by having their banner on your website or recommending people to join Ciao, if they respond via the link you are paid a certain figure and on the first couple of months of them writing.

The main one is when you write a product, you will see a pound sign to the right of the product name, 1/2p is one pound sign, 1p is two pound signs and 2p is three pounds signs per read. If you are the first person to write about that product then it is doubled.

If someone reads your work and rates it to Exceptional then you go forward to the Premium Fund. The Premium fund is a fund that is handed out to Ciao members by Ciao. It is like a secret balloting of Ciao and awards can be like £20 or more a month and the top 30 get a diamond at the side of the name. Then the amounts go down and last month for instance I got awarded 19.50 for an opinion but as it was not a Diamond Opinion I have not got a clue for which opinion it was for. A lot of people do not like the Premium Fund as it seems that the same people tend to be included month in and out and Re
views in Ciao Cafe are not taken into Consideration which is a shame as this is where some of the best work is written. Also I feel it is a waste of time giving Ciao Cafe E ratings as it does not achieve anything. I would like to see a fairer system where if people rated E then you would be set a certain amount rather like Dooyoo.

They run monthly competions on the site and by writing in a certain category, you can leave a message in one of the guides guestbooks and you will be submitted in the prize draw.

Withdrawing Money
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With Ciao, you only have to reach £5 and they will submit it into your bank account. When I request money, I always do it towards the end of the month and payments normally hit the bank from the 10th of the following month. However saying this I have waited since December 14th for a payment and this only reached my bank account on Monday. There are no administration fees, what you earn is what you get.

My Account
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From my account which is access from the home page, you can find details about your account, account setting is if you change any information like email address or password. This can be done from there. If you have member alerts or any type of alerts you can temporarily suspend them from there.

The next tab along is personal homepage where you can have any information along that you want people to know about, you can personalise this information using the tools in there.

Also their is an account details that tell you all about the money that you have in your account what is paid in and out and the survey money appears here.

The next one is Reviews where you can access all the reviews that you have written and then the following one is the Statistics where you can access all the comments y
ou have made and the comments that people have left on your works which is good as you can see all the comments and not have to keep going in and out of individual reviews to see the latest comment, here also you can see what points you have done and how many reads and rates you have got and given. The next section is favourites where you can put certain categories that you are interested in. This is not one that I use.

The next one is Cot, You can see who trusts you and who you trust. You can remove people here from your cot at anytime you want to. The next one along is the Guestbook. This seems to have been causing problems at the moment and people can leave unsolicited messages in. There is a private guestbook you write in also, Does having a guestbook make it more of a community, well at the moment I am still undecided but if there are any questions then the benefit is that people can write in your guestbook and not on the review.

The final tab is the Market Place which is if you sell stuff on ebay you have it linked to Ciao. This has just been started up and is in its early stages.

Ciao Cafe
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This is the members are where you can write about topics that are not products and also about helping people, writing stories, you do not get paid anything for this and this is a great shame as someone could do excellent writing here and this is where Ciao tends to let its people down. This is the place where challenges happen and are posted. It is the equivalent to Speakers Corner on Dooyoo.


Surveys
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If you are invited for a survey, you will get an email and these do tend to fill up pretty quickly. You will click on the link and this will directly take you to the survey. You are asked a few screening questions and if you carry on you will be paid anything up to £2.
50 in a couple of weeks. This will not appear on your account until then. Again I think Ciao should try and link this up with your account regarding the reference number as this lead to a lot of people last year saying they had not been paid for surveys. If you do not get past the screening questions, then you are paid a minimum of 10p into your account. I have heard of people been paid £10 for surveys however I get them few and far between although a friend who does surveys only seems to get loads, think she has had around 15 of them since December. I have had 2.

Well I think that is about it on Ciao, so what are its positive side and negative sides. The pages download fairly fast and you can write up to 3 opinions a day. Not all the products listed pay and also Ciao Cafe does not pay. I would like to see all this abolished and a set amount to each review. That would be a fairer way.

You can save your work in draft form and then post it and you can load pictures about the product that you are writing about, plus you can have your own picture there. You can suggest new products and these can take up to 5 days.

Ciao has had its fair share of bugs and it seems as though, we all seem to be infected by them in one way or another. Is there a community spirit on there, well to a certain extent but in all communties there are spats.

When I have contacted Ciao regarding payments and such things, they seem to have taken a long time to have sorted it. Regarding the December payment, I must have emailed them around 10 times saying it has not gone in, eventually it did but was a bit disappointed with the time span and now I find myself spending more and more time over here.

I do enjoy Ciao and have made some friends, but at the end of the day it is only another website that keeps me occupied. It is a ch
ance to make a bit more money.

If you want to give it a go then visit. Ciao.Co,Uk

Karen :0)

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