Thanks to everyone who is visiting YouReview and adding or editing their businesss info. We are amazed by the number of people who visit each day and edit items. This wiki for products and businesses would not exist without all of you.

Remember, you can go to your YouReview user settings and set a Google Adsense code snippet or Amazon affiliate link and get paid when people click your ad. Just login and go to Account Settings.

We have seen an increase in traffic to YouReview as more and more people add their own businesses and write reviews and leave comments. This has been encouraging. YouReview was created to be the free wiki on the Internet where anyone could go and easily find what they are looking for, write reviews and put their OWN ads on their review. Slowly but surely we are getting there :)

So we have had YouReview up for about eight months now. When we first released the site, we saw pretty flat traffic for a few months. Then in September of 2011, we saw a steady increase of Google traffic. This happened for about three weeks and then suddenly the Google traffic totally dropped back to the initial levels. We are not sure why this happened. Maybe it was because Google gives new sites an initial boost and then drops them back to where they were. Now we get about 200 visitors a day, which obviously is a lot lower than we hope.

Here's our traffic graph:

The bump there is last September. You can see that we are VERY slowly gaining traffic, but it is very slow going. It's expensive to host a web server with all this data and to organize it and make it editable and searchable. We are trying some things like adwords campaigns to try and get more traffic, but Google is such a black box that it makes it hard to know why things happen.

We'll keep at it and hope our site will grow into the WIkipedia of reviews :)

Last night I spent a few hours rolling out some new software to help with paging through results. I think we got a net win overall as we were getting timeouts after 30 seconds on some pages.

Some things to look forward to:

- Anonymous voting: We are going to let users vote anonymously without even logging in, hopefully we can find a balance between making this secure and preventing people from getting unlimited votes

- Anonymous edits: Some people just don't want to make an account so we are going to let people edit items anonymously and we will then review their edits and approve / reject them

Thanks for visiting!

There's a few pieces of information that make a review stand out and provide real value to those reading it. For instance, when reviewing a restaurant you could say:

"The food is great and the price was not too bad. I'd definitely go back."

However, when someone is trying to decide if they should go to a restaraunt, there's a simple list of facts they'd like to know. Here they are:

• What is the environment like? (Is it fast-food, casual, fine-dining, dim-lights)
• Is it a restaraunt kids can play at - or even should be at?
• Is the food of low, medium, or high quality?
• Is the price of the food reasonable given the quality of the food?
• Is the service timely and are the waiters friendly and cheerful?
• Does the restaraunt force you to pay tips in large groups - or force tips as a general rule?
• Are the wait times long - and when are they long?
• Do they have a low calorie menu option?

When you think in terms of answering specific questions, your review stands out. This means you'll get voted to the top of the review list, which means you have a chance for the advertising on your account to show. A high-quality review will answer the specific questions of those wanting answers. In this case, I talked about restaraunts, but the concept can be applied to businesses, dentists, you name it.

Happy reviewing!