Online reviews are a fundamental part of the online experience, and it’s hard to imagine a time when we bought things without first consulting the ‘crowd’ for advice.  Of course, whilst the reviews are useful for us, the consumer, they are incredibly valuable for the platforms themselves.  They provide both invaluable content and also an enhanced user experience.

With reviews so valuable, should we be compensated for providing them?  That was the question posed by a recent study, and the answer appears to be no.  Indeed, when sites do offer to compensate users for providing reviews, not only do the number of reviews fall, but this drop is especially pronounced among the most influential.

Paid for content

The authors examine an online shopping platform in China whereby a policy of paying users for reviews was introduced.  The remuneration, which amounted to 25 cents per review, coincided with a decline in reviews of over 30% in the month after it was introduced.

So why did this happen?  This kind of issue has been explored previously, and the general feeling is that when we’re not paid, we feel like we’re contributing purely for the love of doing so.  In other words, it’s an intrinsically motivated act.  When money enters the equation however, it switches to more extrinsic motivators, and if we feel the compensation isn’t commensurate to the value we feel we’re offering, we don’t contribute.

The authors propose another theory, albeit one that is framed in intrinsic vs extrinsic ways.  They suggest that the drop in reviews is to do with the honesty of their feedback.  When we’re intrinsically motivated, our motivation is to help others, but when we’re extrinsically motivated, it could be interpreted as having less honorable intentions.

As such, there would be a particular drop-off in reviews from those with strong social networks on the site, as they would primarily be concerned with helping their peers rather than profiting.

The hypothesis was tested by comparing the change in behavior among those with strong social networks on the site with their less social peers.  Among those with strong networks, the introduction of remuneration for reviews resulted in a drop of 85%.  By contrast, the introduction resulted in an increase in reviews by those with little to no network.

Suffice to say, because those with strong networks tended to be the ones who posted the most reviews, this resulted in a fall in the number of reviews posted of about 30%.

“Nobody wants to be seen as a paid shill for brands, so the users with more friends and followers, who were likely more influential and wrote more originally, are the ones who stop writing. A real double-whammy,” the authors say.

“Our results support the approach of industry leaders like Yelp or Amazon, who do not compensate for reviews. In fact, they tap into the intrinsic motive for social recognition through status badges for frequent contributors,” said McIntyre. “There may be still ‘under the radar’ ways to pay only the less socially active users for their reviews, but such targeting can be risky as the heavy reviewers may perceive it to be unfair and therefore stop writing reviews, if and when they learn about it.”