How Reviews Became Their Own Business

In today’s day and age, the right words from the right person can do your business a whole world of good. Much like the wrong words from the wrong person could torpedo your prospects. In this digital age, online reviews have become a cornerstone of customer decision-making, replacing the old word-of-mouth recommendations. 

Whether it’s a review someone is reading to select a restaurant for dinner, investing in a product, or signing up for an online game, online reviews shape consumers and their habits. 

The go-to reviews sites are usually Yelp, Google, and Trust Pilot, as they are quite rightly seen as the kingmakers when it comes to online reviews but there are a whole host of other review platforms out there that are helping to make and break businesses.

In this article, we explore how reviews have become, in their own right, a business of their own.

The Business of Hosting Reviews

In the modern market, money is needed to be spent hosting and curating reviews. Websites dedicated to product and service reviews attract huge numbers of unique visitors which in turn attracts advertisers, affiliate marketers, and potential partnership opportunities.

How do all of these things work, though, and how, most importantly, do they generate large profits?

Advertisers: Readers are the key to making money, whether that be online or in the world of print media. If you are an advertiser, you aren’t going to part with large sums of money to advertise your product on a website that has low traffic. 

Review sites, by their nature, attract large numbers of visitors, and what’s more than that, visitors who are in need of a product and are ready to spend money. Advertising with a well-run review site is, therefore, a no-brainer for most companies and well worth investing in.

Affiliate Marketers: Affiliate marketing is particularly successful in competitive industries, such as online gambling; this is where websites advertise what a business offers in various ways, through videos, blogs, product links, and most importantly, reviews. Affiliate marketing only works if the reviews and information provided are genuine and they are giving potential players something of value, such as finding the best bonuses offered by operators, writes Casino.org, it has also proved to be an extremely cost-effective marketing strategy for the operators themselves as they only pay for the traffic they receive. 

If you’re new to the term, the best way to describe affiliate marketing is in non-digital terms. For example, if you were to go into a bicycle store and ask the salesperson about the best place to buy a chain for your bike, they would likely recommend a company that they were affiliated with. For every successful recommendation, they would receive a small kickback from the chain company.

This principle is the same online, just slightly more streamlined.

Partnerships: These are essentially a step up from affiliate marketing and involve more explicit partnerships, whereby a company will get exclusivity to advertising and may be recommended as a trusted brand partner in detailed reviews.

Reviews as a Business Model

To put things into perspective, let’s take an online casino review site and a local newspaper site as an example. To run the latter you need a highly trained team of writers, editors, advertisers, and many, many more bespoke staff members. On top of that, you need expensive licenses, expensive equipment, and expensive office space.

If everything goes as well as it possibly can, the very best you could hope for would be around 20% of the local population heading to your website on a daily basis, which in the grand scheme of things, would be a paltry figure.

So, ultimately, your earning potential through advertising, affiliate marketing, and partnerships would be severely hamstrung by relatively low traffic numbers. Review sites, however, suffer from none of those geographical limitations and what’s more, don’t have anywhere near the same costs and obligations as a local newspaper.

In essence, then, a review site has a much, much higher target audience than a local newspaper with much, much lower costs. It’s easy to see then why this is such a tempting business model for savvy entrepreneurs.

(Review sites have higher traffic than local newspaper sites and much lower costs.)

The Dark Side of Online Reviews

Your local newspaper can’t just start writing factually incorrect stories. There are laws prohibiting them from doing so. They also have a moral obligation not to partner up with questionable companies or organizations and will be severely penalized if they financially mislead their readers.

The same obligations and penalties don’t really exist for online review sites. This does mean that some of the reviews you may come across have been forged in some sort of manner. It is however fairly simple to spot when reviews have been tampered with. Regardless of how good a product or service may be there will always be negative reviews being made as we all have different preferences or experiences. So, make sure that the reviews you are looking into, feature both, as nothing looks more suspicious than 100% 5-star reviews. 

The future of this industry in many countries relies on the introduction and successful implementation of governance laws. If this doesn’t come to pass, we could see disreputable review sites ruining it for trusted ones as they seek to milk the review cash cow for all that its worth.

Source