Considering todays' situation of the online review industry, BWOMM aims to resolve the following (from our view most essential) problems to provide a fair online review platform based on the Blockchain.
1. Established review portals offer no monetary incentives to write a review
Users benefit from the reviews and experiences of other honest and diligent users, who are believing in the network. However, there is no monetary incentive to write a qualitative, honest and proven review as this is too time-consuming for the most of us. For this reason, it often becomes clear that users tend to write short and unhelpful reviews.
2. Unstoppable fake reviews (credibility problem)
Opinion spamming due to online fake reviews, especially with new products or services is widespread, since it is easy for professional fake users to register under a variety of names and generate fake content without fearing legal consequences. Different researcher estimates fake reviews to be around 15 – 30% (Mukherjee et al., 2013; Sussin & Thompson, 2012; Luca & Zervas, 2013; Belton, 2015; Hipp, 2017) within the online review industry. Nowadays, it goes so far, that organized opinion spammer like https://fivestar-marketing.net/ are publicly suppling fake 5-star reviews on different social media and review websites.
3. Dependency of review websites
Review websites are commercial companies with the aim to maximize earnings for their shareholders. The earnings on these portals are generated through web traffic dependent click-based, display-based and subscription-based advertisings (B2B premium memberships). To generate high web traffic and revenues a high number of reviews is needed which in turn leads to a high ranking on all search engines. Review websites therefore, may not have a clear incentive to implement an expensive, rigorous and complex sign-in and verification process, as this will rise the costs, reduce user growth and the overall number of reviews (Roddy, 2017).
4. One-Dimensionality of reviews
On review websites, every review counts equally within the overall ranking. Consequently, a qualitative and detailed contribution to the community with several pictures as proof and an unhelpful review consisting the minimum allowed number of words are equally weighted within the very important hotel and restaurant ranking calculation.
In summary, it is clear that users provide the main contribution within review portals. However, they do not earn any monetary reward. Instead, the users and the vendors (restaurants and hotels) to be appraised on review websites are exposed to fake reviews and influenced by adverts etc.