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Video Review of Video Reviews Site ExpoTV
Last night I attended a meetup in NYC where ExpoTV was demonstrated. ExpoTV is a product review site that uses videos exclusively. Product reviews have been hot since the Internet began and tying together video and reviews makes sense and could be a huge winner if done correctly.
ExpoTV pays $5 for each accepted video review plus 1 cent for each view of the video. I am not sure but I will assume that if they syndicate the video you also make the 1 cent. Someone asked about how much they are making on each video and that it has to be much higher than $5 but the founders declined to answer. ExpoTV syndicates their reviews on Buy.com and Smarter.com.
Here is my concern which I raised last night. They noted that the syndication sites can select what type of reviews they syndicate including an option for positive/negative reviews. This is a big no-no in my book. I am hoping that someone from ExpoTV can clarify this but if they allow say Buy.com to select only positive reviews for say a mp3 player, how will the customer know that they are only viewing positive reviews? This could make any product look better than it is and provides for a horrible customer experience. As I said, I very much hope this is not the case.
With that said, here is my video review of video review site ExpoTV:
Hi Allen,
Thanks for feedback on ExpoTV and wanted to address your question about our syndication strategy. We feel that because video is a new medium for most retailers and comparison shopping engines, they haven’t yet been able to build into their sites the sorting functionality about the content being positive or negative.
They link to and promote ExpoTV to allow users a more robust experience and to find more video product reviews. Until they build the capability to sort through the videos, having a lot of them without any ability to skim through them is tough on users. So for now, we let them display what they want.
As the retailers build more functionality around videos on their sites, we agree it’s a much better user experience (and written reviews have proven it’s more effective) to offer all opinions and we will be encouraging them to do so.
That’s why we feel strongly about letting people submit positive and negative videos about products on ExpoTV.com and compensate our video creators for both types of videos. Hope this helps to address your question.
Best,
Thi Luu
SVP, Web Operations