Getting on the Map: The Impact of Online Listings on Business Performance

We evaluate the extent to which small businesses maintain an online presence and estimate the impact of digital representation on business performance. Looking at a review platform, we find that roughly 18% of bars and restaurants in our sample do not have a listing as of the end of 2017, even though creating one is free. We then estimate the effect of adding a new listing using tax records on revenues combined with temporal variation in listing activity as well as a natural experiment that added over a thousand businesses to the platform via a data acquisition. The results suggest that new listings increase revenues in the range of 5%–10%; however, these effects vary substantially across establishments. Establishments that struggle to develop a reputation (e.g., nonchains or those in tourist areas) and those with a higher quality of product (e.g., larger restaurants or those with good reviews) experience larger increases after being listed.

This paper was accepted by Duncan Simester, marketing.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.04716.