dooyoo

» see dooyoo.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The paid-review internet never took hold in Turkey. What we had instead was donanimhaber and frmtr, where you wrote up your own hardware for nothing and got paid in standing, which mostly meant a longer signature block under your posts listing everything in your case. Somebody in Berlin or Manchester writing four hundred words about a washing machine and collecting actual points for it was a different economy, running at the same time, about ten degrees of longitude away.

dooyoo AG was founded in october 1999 in Berlin and the site opened that december, with Felix Frohn-Bernau as chief executive and five other founders alongside him. It launched into the exact center of the German new economy moment, and the plan was European from the start. Within a few years there were dooyoo operations in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy, Spain and France as well as Germany.

The product was a marketplace for opinions about products, which sounds thin and was not. Members wrote long reviews of things they owned and other members read them, and unlike the shop-page review box that eventually killed the whole category, these were essays. About two million of them, covering roughly 1.5 million products, from a membership that reached around 850,000.

~ the case file ~

~ the money part ~

The currency was dooyooMeilen, dooyoo miles, and the schedule was public. A premium review at the top level earned 600 miles for existing plus 20 more every time somebody read it; lower tiers paid 300 and 15, or 100 and 10. A report the editors judged excellent got a crown and 2,000 extra miles. You cashed out through Webmiles or took Amazon.de vouchers, which is a detail worth sitting with, since you were being paid by one shopping site in credit at another.

Venture money made this possible and then stopped. dooyoo raised more than thirty million euros across three rounds and staffed up to 170 people. Two years after founding the concept had not developed the way anyone had projected, and the company was cut down in stages. By the time LeGuide.com Group bought it in june 2008 it had 24 employees, 3.6 million euros of annual revenue and an operating result of 800,000 euros, which is a perfectly decent small business and roughly a fiftieth of the ambition it had been financed for.

~ what went wrong ~

Pay per read and the writing changes. Not immediately and not everywhere, but the incentive is exactly the wrong shape: you are rewarded for volume and readability, not for having used the thing. By the later years the guidance told contributors that owning the product would be beneficial but was not required, which is the moment the format stops meaning anything. Members noticed and said so out loud, that the reviews had been genuine once and the site had become a shopping portal.

Meanwhile every retailer on earth added a review box to its own product pages and got the same content for free, from people who had definitely bought the item, with the purchase verified. A business that pays for opinions cannot compete with a business that gets them as a side effect of selling you something.

~ what replaced it ~

LeGuide bought dooyoo in 2008 and Ciao a few years later, so the two great European review communities ended up under the same French comparison-shopping owner. It ran them quietly for a while and then took both offline at the beginning of 2018, with almost nothing said about why. Ciao had stopped paying its writers on 1 december 2017, and dooyoo went the same way a couple of months after.

The idea did not die, it just moved somewhere it did not have to pay. Amazon reviews are dooyoo's format with the payment removed and the incentive problem left fully intact, which is why the fake-review industry now exists at industrial scale. dooyoo at least printed its rate card.

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