Paul Mabray of Vintank published a second blog post this afternoon questioning the origin of some of Snooth.com’s data. Mabray says there have been rumors of data being used from CellarTracker without permission to power Snooth and that from an analysis, “it looks like Snooth is scraping data, reorganizing it as their own, and using it to grow their business.”
Snooth was started in 2007 and is a site where users can “compare prices and shop from over 10,000 wine merchants worldwide as well as review the wine and their buying experience to help others in the future.” The company bills itself as “the world's largest and most comprehensive online wine destination, featuring millions of reviews and hundreds of thousands of wines.”
I sent an email to Snooth founder Philip James after the first post and he replied that he'd be writing a response.
I spoke with Eric LeVine, the founder of Cellartracker. "If that’s the case, I’ll probably have to follow up legally,” he said. “At the end of the day, the data on my site is my site’s data and my user’s data.”
“There are plenty of people in the industry that I partner with,” LeVine said. “I don’t have any agreement with the Snooth.”
Cellartracker is a cellar management system started in April 2004 and has about 130,000 users that, according to founder LeVine, have collectively generated just over 1.7 million wine reviews.
Cellartracker’s database includes about a million wines, reflecting what people have tasted or have in their collections. Registered users catalog their collections and post tasting notes. They’ve consumed more than 22.3 million bottles of about one million different wines.
Roughly 2,000 wine reviews, or tasting notes, are generated via Cellartracker every day, and Cellartracker has content partnerships, including channels with bloggers and professional wine critics involving another 300,000 professional reviews that are integrated into the cellar management system but shown only to subscribers of the various publications.
For more on this, also see the responses to the first post.
Please spread the word about what looks as if it is egregious misappropriation of CellarTracker.com's tasting notes and other data by Snooth.com. If it's true, Snooth should be shunned by all.
