Tripadvisor’s market cap is $4.9 billion right now; Yelp is at about $2.9 billion.

Tripadvisor’s market cap is $4.9 billion right now; Yelp is at about $2.9 billion. So if Amazon were to somehow spin its reviews off as a standalone business, would it be worth billions!?

But then how many reviews on sites like Amazon and elsewhere are actually fakes, posted by unscrupulous vendors in order to boost their own ratings or else drag down the competition?

A recent study ‘The Market for Fake Reviews’ say they found about 20 “fake review related Facebook groups,” each with an average of 16,000 members, and hundreds of posts a day in which sellers offered around $6 per fake review. According to a NYT report on the above study, the researchers found that Amazon eventually deleted roughly one-third of the bogus reviews.

A couple of years ago, a British man who'd made a living writing five-star reviews on TripAdvisor ran an experiment. He created a fake listing for a restaurant that didn't exist on the site, and used the dark arts of fake-review-generating he'd learned to boost its reputation.

Eventually, it was the top rated in all of London on Tripadvisor. People called for reservations and were disappointed when they couldn't get in (because again, it didn't exist).

I’ve been shopping online since the early days of eBay and has been depending mostly on the reviews. And since we are now in 2021 and still in the pandemic, most of you are now online shoppers.

So is the world of reviews ready for an innovation? If so what do you think it would be like - maybe an independent third party app for verified reviews?