Epinions

» see epinions.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

in 1999 i was fifteen, on a 33.6k modem in ankara, reading donanimhaber for hardware opinions in turkish. honestly. epinions was an english-language US consumer-review economy operating in a parallel universe to mine. i did not know the site existed until much later, when its name surfaced in retrospectives about the web 1.0 review experiment that yelp eventually replaced.

the site went live in september '99 in mountain view (close enough). five cofounders pooled eight million dollars from benchmark and august capital. nirav tolia was the public face. naval ravikant was a cofounder who left early and is now mostly remembered for angellist. the model was unusual for the time. you wrote a review of a product and other members rated your review. the site paid you a share of advertising revenue scaled by your reputation. the dot-com phrase for this was income share.

for a few years it worked at a real scale. by january '03 the site claimed around 5.8 million users. the angle that made it different from a forum was traceability. reviews were tied to recurring authors with rating histories. you could follow a reviewer who consistently rated cameras carefully. you could see which other contributors a reviewer trusted.

dealtime acquired epinions in 2003 and then renamed itself shopping.com. ebay bought shopping.com for 634 million in august '05. epinions became a sub-property inside a comparison-shopping engine inside ebay. the income-share payments to contributors got quietly walked back over the following years.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it actually ended ~

ebay disabled new member registration and the login function on march 25, '14. existing reviews stayed visible at the urls they had been at. the contributors could no longer log in to edit anything. a former-cofounder lawsuit had already been settled in december '05 for undisclosed terms (the four departing cofounders had alleged the company hid material facts about its finances from them).

the slow part of the death ran from '14 to '18. the reviews kept getting indexed by google for queries about specific products. the traffic kept slowly draining as the reviews aged out and the product world moved on. in may '18 ebay redirected the whole epinions.com domain to shopping.com. the review archive was not preserved on the live web.

~ what remains ~

yelp launched in october '04 with no payment to reviewers and a similar reputation-graph idea, and ended up absorbing the local-business review economy. tripadvisor did the same on the travel side, and amazon's own product reviews became the default surface for everything else. the free-labor model won against the paid-labor model epinions had pioneered. the lesson the industry took from this was that paying users to review consumer products was not a viable margin business.

the income-share idea that nirav tolia pitched as a serious business in '99 came back later as creator-fund payouts on youtube and tiktok. the unit economics work better for video than they did for written product reviews. epinions had been at the wrong moment for the idea.

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