Marcelo Calbucci

There was a time on the Internet that big brands and companies would only use carefully writing, editorially reviewed text, and photos would come from professionals’ photographers as a request from the marketing department. Then it came the age of user generated content (UGC). Reviews were written by visitors of a website on TripAdvisor; Wikipedia allowed “anyone” to edit entries on their encyclopedia; Then Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, Yelp and every other UGC-site popped up.

So, you were given two options if wanted to build a business for people to do research a topic -- like a Hotel search: 1) you could use the marketing material sent by the hotel itself (like Expedia, Orbitz, etc.) or 2) you can ask users to review and rate items (like TripAdvisor).

Pre-package marketing materials were good, because were consistent, in a format consumable by your business and was free. The downside is that you can’t differentiate between facts and marketing-speak, or purposefully omissions (“what do you mean you didn’t know the Airport was just 2 blocks away?”).

UGC is great to generate lots of unstructured data, like reviews, ratings, pictures, etc. But it has some perils like lack of uniformity, rating mismatch (Is a ‘4.5’ for you the same thing as ‘4.5’ for me?), angry reactions, web-mob attacks, “ballot-stuffing”, etc.

Here comes Oyster.com. A site who asked the question: why can’t we generate a radically large amount of information about a hotel ourselves? In my view, they’ve grabbed what’s best from both words -- editorial and UGC. They generate an enormous amount of reviews, photos and data for each hotel, just like UGC, but they keep full control of the content, making it friendlier to the visitors.

Just for comparison sake, I look at the “Encore at Wynn Las Vegas” and compared Oyster with TripAdvior and Orbitz:

	Orbitz	TripAdvisor	Oyster
Editorial Pictures	28	19 (from Expedia)	200
User Pictures	0	640	0
Editorial review:	591 wors	84 words	2,095 words
UGC Reviews & Ratings	631	768	1

Oyster has about 324 times less traffic and it’s almost a decade younger than TripAdvisor. So that would explain a lot of difference in UGC. But they are just getting started and they have time to build their brand and traffic.

Why there should be more business following Oyster model?

So far I’ve only stated the facts. We need Oyster-like business to give us what we can’t get today. I’m not talking about more businesses creating in-depth hotel reviews. I’m talking about businesses which can provide lots of information, carefully controlled, about a topic or industry. Think about Real Estate, Cars, Electronics, Appliances, Computers, Etc. You find either site that aggregate content from others (which are usually using marketing materials provided by the manufacturer/owner/agent/publisher), or you have the free for all reviews and ratings which don’t mean much, as in “what a 3.73 rating really means for *my* experience?”

Maybe I’m an outsider. Maybe I’m one of the few people who love to see maps of the vicinity and point-of-interests when booking a hotel. Maybe I’m the only one who cares about the Wi-Fi quality and speed on my room and I’d like to filter all hotels who have a kids pool in Orlando and I’d like to actually see a picture of the pool to make sure it’s not an inflatable pool the Hotel put there just to score a checkbox on Orbitz. Probably I’m not the only one.

And just like picking the perfect hotel for the perfect vacation, I want to pick the perfect TV, the perfect LCD monitor, camcorder, house, car dealer, car, restaurant to celebrate my anniversary, camping ground, and all other things on my life. I like to see pictures of every corner; I like to see floor plans, diagrams, and maps. I like a virtual video tour (3D in the future). I like every single data point about the menu, the A/V inputs, and I’d like reviewed by a person who “gets it”.

More Oyster please.

[Disclosure: I’m not a shareholder on Oyster, but Eytan Seidman – one of the co-founders – and I worked together at Microsoft. Go Eytan!]