Inside the Business of Online Reviews For Hire

Rick Zeman writes "Consumer reviews are powerful because, unlike old-style advertising and marketing, they offer the illusion of truth. They purport to be testimonials of real people, even though some are bought and sold just like everything else on the commercial Internet. Yet it is all but impossible to tell when reviews were written by the marketers or retailers (or by the authors themselves under pseudonyms), by customers (who might get a deal from a merchant for giving a good score) or by a hired third-party service. The New York Times tells of the rise and fall of the founder of one such hired third party service who had has been so successful planting paid fake reviews that he no longer trusts any online review. He should know. Because of him and his kind, it's estimated that one third of online reviews are fake."

Comments

this is what died with internet mass popularity

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the 1980's, if you read a review on the internet (usenet at the time, there was no web yet), you could be sure it was from a "real person", and was a real opinion, not a paid shill or something written by a marketer. You could be sure the resulting discussion was being engaged in by real people as well.

That culture has been lost from the entire internet, and it is increasingly hard to sort out what's real from what's not. Some of them are obvious, but the better shills are increasingly sophisticated. This is one of the many prices paid for the eternal september. It was overrun by the marketeers and the ad men, who ruined the commons for the rest of us.

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