TrustedOpinion snares investors’ trust, $1.3 million
TrustedOpinion, a relatively obscure site that combines social networking with reviews on movies, restaurants, and nightclubs, has raised $1.3 million from undisclosed investors.
The Palo Alto, Calif., company says it has over 350,000 registered members, adding over 3,000 new members per day, but neither Compete nor Quantcast has reliable figures to back that up. In fact, TrustedOpinion hardly registers on the two analytics companies’ radars.
We wrote about the service, which works by weighting reviews from within your social circle higher than reviews from strangers, at the end of July. We believed the company’s model was dubious then and remains dubious now: Movie reviews are dominated by Amazon, and Flixster, and nightclub and restaurant reviews are handled by Zagat, Yelp and Citysearch. Combining all three and relying on a social network backbone to make adjustments to the review score seems a shaky way to add value, and it’s hard to see a viable competitive advantage.
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About the Author, Dan Kaplan
Once upon a time, Dan considered himself a magazine journalist with dreams of "The New Yorker" and a couple of well-reviewed but only mildly successful books. Then one day, life, as it is known to do, decided it was time for rebirth. Like so many things before it, this rebirth was conceived on a mostly-empty plane to Reno. Now, instead of magazine writing, Dan would plunge into the world of New Media and write for Matt Marshall's blog.
It's funny how it goes.