Impact of Mobility and Timing on User-Generated Content

Online reviews of services and products are increasingly posted via mobile devices rather than a website. Our research shows that opinions posted via mobile devices are more timely, shorter, more “to the point” and more negative than web reviews. Moreover, more positive reviews are on average shorter than negative reviews. We arrived at these conclusions by analyzing all reviews posted in 2012 on a leading online review platform for travel products relating to the 25 largest U.S. markets (n=293,945). From this data we extracted matched samples of all reviews posted via mobile devices (30,540) and via the web interface (38,248) for the same product on the same day. Reviewers gave both an overall rating for the provider and for the service on a scale of 1 (extremely poor) to 5 (extremely good).