Beware the reviews

In recent years, tired of Madison Avenue hard selling tactics, people have been searching for alternate avenues to asses products and services, For some time they put their faith in Consumer Review magazine till so many sprouted that it was clear that many of them were really marketting company ploys. So they shifted to peer review by ordinary people- Craigs List, Angies List became all the the thing. Thus slowly reviews by ordinary people became an essential mechanism for selling almost anything online; they are now used for resorts, dermatologists, neighborhood restaurants, high-fashion boutiques, churches, parks, astrologers and healers — not to mention products like garbage pails, tweezers, spa slippers and cases for tablet computers. In many situations, these reviews are supplanting the marketing department, the press agent, advertisements, word of mouth and the professional critique. 

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. But are they?

Mr. Biu Liu, a data-mining expert at the University of Illinois, Chicago,  estimates that about one-third of all consumer reviews on the Internet are fake. 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 Federal Trade Commission has issued guidelines stating that all online endorsements need to make clear when there is a financial relationship, but enforcement has been minimal.

But not just any kind of review will do. They have to be somewhere between enthusiastic and ecstatic. “The wheels of online commerce run on positive reviews,” said , whose 2008 research showed that 60 percent of the millions of product reviews on Amazon are five stars and an additional 20 percent are four stars. “But almost no one wants to write five-star reviews, so many of them have to be created.”

Recognizing the opportunity, in the fall of 2010, Mr. Rutherford started a Web site, GettingBookReviews.com, to extend that to selling books. At first, he advertised that he would review a book for $99. But some clients wanted a chorus proclaiming their excellence. So, for $499, Mr. Rutherford would do 20 online reviews. A few people needed a whole orchestra. For $999, he would do 50.There were immediate complaints in online forums that the service was violating the sacred arm’s-length relationship between reviewer and author. But there were also orders, a lot of them. Before he knew it, he was taking in $28,000 a month.

The tale of GettingBookReviews.com, which commissioned 4,531 reviews in its brief existence, is a story of a vast but hidden corner of the Internet, where Potemkin villages bursting with ardor arise overnight. At the same time, it shows how the book world is being transformed by the surging popularity of electronic self-publishing. For decades a largely stagnant industry controlled from New York, book publishing is fragmenting and changing at high speed. Twenty percent of Amazon’s top-selling e-books are self-published. But they do not get to the top without adulation, lots and lots of it.

Traditional journalism jobs may be dwindling, but the Internet offers many new possibilities for writers. It has been a boom in what used to be called vanity publishers, which can efficiently produce physical copies that look just as good as anything from the traditional New York houses. But an even bigger factor is the explosion in electronic publishing. It used to take the same time to produce a book that it does to produce a baby. Now it takes about as long as boiling an egg. In 2006, before Amazon supercharged electronic publishing with the Kindle, 51,237 self-published titles appeared as physical books, according to the data company Bowker. Last year, Bowker estimates that more than 300,000 self-published titles were issued in either print or digital form.

Mr. Rutherford’s insight was that reviews had lost their traditional function. They were no longer there to evaluate the book or even to describe it but simply to vouch for its credibility, the way doctors put their diplomas on examination room walls. A reader hears about a book because an author is promoting it, and then checks it out on Amazon. The reader sees favorable reviews and is reassured that he is not wasting his time. But in essence, they were blurbs, the little puffs on the backs of books in the old days, when all books were physical objects and sold in stores. No one took blurbs very seriously, but books looked naked without them.  Also in theory, at least, good reviews are proof that a writer is finding his or her way, establishing an audience and has something worthwhile to say. 

So if you relied on book reviews to guide you to the latest new writer, be warned, that five star review may just be a review that has been paid for by the author. And who are these reviewers- you would be surprised to learn that Bill Clinton is one of them!

And what of the future? The theory is that in the long term, the (real) bad reviews will then drive out the (fake) good reviews. And then you can really believe the reviews that you read.

But this seems to underestimate the powerful motivations that writers have to rack up good reviews — and the ways they have to manipulate them until a better system comes along.