Building Web Reputation Systems- P11:Today’s Web is the product of over a billion hands and minds. Around the clock and around the globe, people are pumping out contributions small and large: full-length features on Vimeo, video shorts on YouTube, comments on Blogger, discussions on Yahoo! Groups, and tagged-and-titled bookmarks. User-generated content and robust crowd participation have become the hallmarks of Web . | incentive model depends on the goals you set for your application. One possible rule of thumb if users are going to pass money directly to other people they don t know consider adding karma to help establish trust. There are two main subcategories of commercial incentives Direct revenue incentives Extracting commercial value better yet cash directly from the user as soon as possible Branding incentives Creating indirect value by promotion revenue will follow later Direct revenue incentives. A direct revenue incentive is at work whenever someone forks over money for access to a content contributor s work and the payment ends up sometimes via an intermediary or two in the contributor s hands. The mechanism for payment can be a subscription a short-term contract a transaction for goods or services on-content advertising like Google s AdSense or even a PayPal-based tip jar. When real money is involved people take trust seriously and reputation systems play a critical role in establishing trust. By far the most well-known and studied reputation system for online direct revenue business is eBay s buyer and seller feedback karma reputation model. Without a way for strangers to gauge the trustworthiness of the other party in a transaction no online auction market could exist. When you re considering reputation systems for an application with a direct revenue incentive step back and make sure that you might not be better off with either an altruistic or an egocentric incentive. Despite what you may have learned in school money is not always the best motivator and for consumers it s a pretty big barrier to entry. The ill-fated Google Answers failed because it was based on a user-to-user direct revenue incentive model in which competing sites such as WikiAnswers provided similar results for free financed ironically by using Google AdSense to monetize answer pages indexed by you guessed it Google . The Zero Price Effect Free Is Disproportionately Better Than Cheap In .
