If you want to keep your Web site relevant and trafficking, you might want to consider making room for user ratings. A new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project says over a quarter of American Netizens have rated products, services, people, and even Web sites themselves with online rating systems.
“At its best, the use of reputation systems builds community, adds knowledge to groups, and elevates the accountability of the institutions and people who are being rated,” said report authors Paul Hitlin and Lee Rainie. “Online reputation systems can enable people in making decisions about which users to trust, or to compare their opinions to others.’”
The sites most familiarly using such reputation systems, as Pew and others call the online ratings mechanisms, are sites like auction kings eBay, consumer review site Epinions.com, e-tailer Amazon, search kings Google, and Internet movie resource Internet Movie Database, where visitors can rate films and see ratings based on various demographic categories.
The likeliest Netizens to use online rating systems, Hitlin and Raine’s findings showed, were those in age ranges 18-27 (30 percent), followed closely by those in age range 28-39 (28 percent) and the younger among the aging Baby Boomers, ages 40-49 (23 percent). Men were just a little more likely than women to use online ratings systems (29 percent over 22 percent), while the range among ethnic groups was a little tighter, with white Netizens at 25 percent, black Netizens at 22 percent, and Hispanic Netizens at 27 percent.
Perhaps not surprisingly, too, the more the education the more likely is a Netizen to use an online ratings system, with college educated at 30 percent, some college education at 29 percent, followed by high school graduates at 20 percent, and less than high school level at 17 percent.
Hitlin and Rainie also suggested those who do rate products, services, and Web sites themselves online are also more likely to be skeptical about just any old claim or product.
“Thirty-nine percent of those who believe that search engines are not fair and unbiased have participated in an online rating system as compared to 28 percent of those who do believe search engines are fair,” they said. “Additionally, those who are “very confident” in their own internet searching abilities are more likely to have posted a rating compared to those who are either “not too confident” or “not at all confident” in their own abilities, 35 percent to 11 percent.
