Optimal Length of Funny, Useful and Cool Yelp Reviews
seemingli 22 November 2015
Are Yelp reviews funny, useful and cool?
Of all Yelp reviews in 2010-2014,
21% were voted funny
48% were voted useful
27% were voted cool
See the scatterplot of all reviews with % voted funny, useful and cool by the length of review on the right?
Wouldn't it be nice if all Yelp reviews were funny, useful and cool?
In this study, we seek to find the optimal length of review for it to be voted funny, useful and cool. We also looked at the optimal length over the years and across cities to see if there were different trends.
We hope that by knowing the optimal length, reviewers would post more funny, useful and cool reviews and there will be less boring and useless reviews.
Methodology
For simplicity and ease of use, we will use the mean length of the top 150K reviews (about 10% of all reviews) which had the highest aggregated rank of funny, useful and cool votesas the optimal length for this study.
We will perform hypothesis testing on the mean length to see if the optimal length were significantly different over the years and across cities. The comparisons by year will be with the previous year while the comparison by city will be with Las Vegas which has the highest number of reviews in the Top 150K reviews.
Results
The optimal length of funny, useful and cool reviews were around 180.
From the hypothesis tests done, we concluded that optimal length across years were not significantly different but the optimal length varied across cities (see chart on the right).
