Why I don’t think anyone actually reads Yelp reviews
I was looking through Yelp's own statistics and something doesn't add up.
Yelp says it has roughly 8.4 million businesses listed and 330 million reviews. That's an average of about 39.3 reviews per business.
They also report around 2.4–2.5 million visitors per day, with the average visitor spending just 2 minutes and 7 seconds on the site.
Here's where it gets interesting.
Yelp has also stated that users spend about 2.5 times more time looking at photos than reading reviews.
If the average session is 127 seconds and photos get 2.5x the attention of reviews, that suggests only a small fraction of a user's visit is actually spent reading written reviews.
Let's be generous and assume users spend 35–40 seconds reading reviews during a visit.
If the average business page has around 39 reviews, that works out to roughly 1 second per review if someone were to look through them all.
Obviously people aren't reading every review. Most likely they're scanning star ratings, looking at a few photos, glancing at the first review or two, and making a decision.
Which brings me to the part I can't stop thinking about.
Based on Yelp's own numbers, it doesn't seem mathematically possible for the average visitor to spend meaningful time reading reviews.
The platform contains hundreds of millions of reviews, yet the average visit lasts just over two minutes, and Yelp says users spend far more time looking at photos than reading review text.
If that's true, then what is the actual purpose of all these reviews?
Consumers appear to be making decisions based on star ratings and photos. The written reviews seem to be the least-consumed part of the experience.
Yet businesses are constantly told they need more reviews. Customers are encouraged to write longer reviews. Elite reviewers write essays. Reviewers are rewarded for producing more content.
For whose benefit?
Because if consumers aren't spending much time reading reviews, then the primary value of those reviews may not be helping customers at all.
Instead, the reviews may function as an endless stream of user-generated content. Every review adds more text, more keywords, more location references, more service descriptions, more food descriptions, and more searchable content attached to a business page.
The reviewer thinks they're helping future customers make a better decision.
But based on Yelp's own usage statistics, the average customer may never spend enough time on the site to read more than a tiny fraction of what's written.
The customer looks at the stars.
The customer looks at the photos.
The customer decides.
Meanwhile, reviewers spend their time creating detailed descriptions filled with the exact words and phrases that search engines love: menu items, neighborhoods, services, products, amenities, experiences, and local keywords.
At some point, you have to ask whether Yelp is really a review platform or whether it's a search-engine content machine powered by unpaid contributors.
The irony is that the people investing the most time in reviews may not be the people reading them.
They're the people writing them. 🤣