Internet Retailer Article

Nice article today about Viewpoints in Internet Retailer. 

Site shines light on product reviews and reviewers

With what are now nearly 700 categories of review, the recently launched Viewpoints.com is aiming to be the most comprehensive “citizen review” resource on the Internet, CEO Matt Moog tells Internet Retailer.

Moog, the former CEO of Q Interactive, originally known as CoolSavings, acknowledges that many retailers now support customer product reviews and ratings on their own sites. Moog differentiates Viewpoint.com from such retailer-hosted reviews as a stand-alone destination and one that shines as much light on the reviewer as the review does on the products.

Download internetretailer.com - Daily News for Friday, June 15, 2007.pdf

“Our center of gravity is the reviewers and their profiles, where on other sites the center of gravity might be the product itself,” Moog says. Specifically, each reviewer on Viewpoints has their own profile page, including their interests and information on what else they have reviewed. Reviewers are asked to create “I am” tags identifying their interests and traits – such as “spa diva,” for example, or “cruise addict.” The searchable tags allow site visitors to filter reviews and to find reviewers with interests similar to their own.

“Our belief is the more you know about reviewers the more credible and authentic their review,” Moog says. As a consequence, he contends, Viewpoints is driving highly qualified traffic to retail sites. Next to the product reviews, Viewpoints posts product-specific links to retailers to allow purchases of the reviewed product.

Viewpoints also gives reviewers the ability to talk to each other, and allows users to give feedback to reviewers on their reviews. “All of those things make the reviewer experience more social for reviewers,” says Moog. That social aspect also helps keep reviewers interested in contributing, Moog adds.

Future incentives such as sweepstakes, promotions and payment for prolific reviewers are also part of the strategy to keep reviews coming in. Moog says some reviewers already established as top reviewers on the web as measured by contributions to other review sites and their own blogs will be paid for their work as journalists, but that their compensation will be for their contribution and not for any specific review

Viewpoints’ advertising-based business model includes the sale of targeted advertising around the reviews themselves, but Moog says advertisers won’t be allowed to influence or compensate reviewers.