SharedReviews.com – Aggregating Independent Content, Sharing the Proceeds

SharedReviews.com looks like a great way to bring together a community of content and share ad revenue across the members of that community.

Through a process outlined on their “how” page, they plan to gather product and service reviews written by consumers and independent bloggers, organize those reviews in a taxonomy and give the community 50% of the ad revenue generated by their reviews. Reviewers can review anything they wish and in whatever format they wish. Reviews are rated by members of the community and the revenue is distributed based on those ratings.

The beta period begins next month, so for now I can only guess how this will pan out. It seems to be immune to some of the conflicts of interest that some other paid blogging services have, which should help readers trust the content. Meanwhile, it provides a way for bloggers with low page rank and low readership to be found and get ad revenue sooner. For me, the most interesting part of the SharedReviews promise is what they call “Review 2.0”. Each review will be wrapped with details about the reviewer – what that author has reviewed recently and a bunch of profile information meant to help readers understand the context of the review. Given a choice, I’m more likely to trust a fellow comic book fan’s review of Spider-Man 3, for instance.

It remains to be seen if pro and semi-pro bloggers will upload their reviews and now-popular unboxing videos to SharedReviews, as the economics might not work out, but it could mean even greater exposure for those sites, especially if the content is linked to the author’s blog. Either way, there are plenty of non-pro bloggers and non-bloggers who may find this site a comfortable way to share their views.

Update: TechCrunch has a screenshot of a sample review page.