Video Content at Rock Bottom Prices, Also For the Enterprise.

Posted on July 19, 2006
Filed Under Companies, Commercial Trends |

I missed the audio-visual side of this when the announcement came about ShopWiki’s first round of funding ($6.2 million). Pity because it holds a lot of lessons for content producers and companies looking to improve knowledge collection and sharing.


In late June, ShopWiki debuted a video wiki feature that enables users to post video reviews on the site. “You can shoot a video of yourself doing a review, upload it, and we’ll pay you for it,” said Mr. Ryan. Users get paid $50 for a review, but that’s conditioned on whether ShopWiki finds the content acceptable for the site. Mr. Ryan said ShopWiki wants video reviews of products that benefit from visual demonstrations, such as bicycles, RIM BlackBerry devices, fishing rods, and refrigerators, as opposed to a book review.

RED HERRING | ShopWiki Scores $6.2 Million

It’s easy to overlook shopwiki or disregard it as a stunt but surely in time a good deal of what we need to find out is going to be done this way - not that we’ll get six million dollars to build shopping comparison sites but that content whether it’s related to purchasing or to corporate knowlwedge collection will have to harness user content but also drive innovation in that process.

Shopwiki provides some enlightenment. On Shopwiki users can write reviews, or post video guides for the $50 fee (that’s limited to the first 500 reviews they post right now), or they can post things like gift buying ideas.

I find the look and feel of the site quite poor. No doubt it will improve. The $50 fee for a review is also an interesting innovation that comapnies can learn from for their own Wikis. Running at around five minutes a video that’s only $25,000 for 2,500 minutes or nearly 40 hours of a-v content.

The many projects out there driven by users passion are potentially very niche (I’m thinking of Yellow Arrow and Hotelchatter), not by their subject matter - these two are both travel sites - but because of what it takes people to devote their time and energy to projects that don’t earn.

You can already see this type of thing though spinning into regular broadcast content - a bit like those home video projects. In the UK, UKTV Food’s Food Uncut already uses viewer video reviews of restaurants.

There are obvious enterprise applications too. Dave Snowden of Cynefin , a former IBM knowledge management pioneer who goes around collecting thousands of stories from people in organisations in order to deduce novel innovations, could well be the man to encourage videos from the copier repair team.

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