In early 2015, the Belfast Telegraph sent reporter Kim Kelly undercover to visit Northern Ireland’s “worst” hotel—according to its on online reputation. Kelly reported that although some TripAdvisor reviews had called it a “hell hole” and “dustbin,” she was pleasantly surprised with the “clean and compact” rooms.
This story is indicative of how important online reviews have become and the skepticism many have toward them. In a 2014 survey of Americans by the market research firm YouGov, 90 percent of respondents said that checking online reviews was an important part of shopping. An equal percentage believed that such reviews are sometimes manipulated—for motives not difficult to discern.
Online Reviews Translate to Big Bucks
As I document in my new book “Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters, and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web”, online reviews affect merchants’ bottom lines. Multiple studies have shown that good reviews permit merchants to charge higher prices, increase restaurant bookings, and sales of books, hotel rooms, and video games. Accordingly, review platforms are worth millions. TripAdvisor 2011’s IPO was valued at over U.S.$3 billion. In 2013, Amazon purchased Goodreads, the book review and discussion site, for $150 million. Google had its own review acquisition spree, including Zagat in 2011 and Frommer’s Travel in 2012.
Beyond consumers, merchants, and review platforms, there’s another actor keen on benefiting from online reviews: illicit manipulators. From overseas “sweatshops“ (that earn pennies per post) to the “boutique” reputation services for the rich, there is a vast market for online deceit. By finding patterns in posts (such as the ratio of positive to negative words) and activity (such as a negative review quickly followed by a positive one), studies estimate that 10–30 percent of reviews are fake. Similarly, Yelp discloses that about a quarter of its reviews are “filtered“ as unreliable—they are not easily seen and are excluded from services’ average number of stars.
