57.5%
The top 1% of comments capture 57.5% of all upvotes.
The audience has already done the ranking. The handful of comments at the top of a thread are the ones a niche voted into headline status.
Original research · Updated August 2026Voice of customer statistics
Voice of customer statistics
from 10.8 million real comments.
Every number on this page comes from one first-party dataset: 10,858,279 customer comments scraped from Reddit, Amazon, YouTube, and Trustpilot through Adlicio. Nothing is recycled from other stats roundups. The full analysis lives in the study, and every stat here is free to cite with a link.
Attention and visibility
From a 211,456-comment sample of Reddit threads. Upvotes are not spread around; they pile onto a few comments per thread.
82.9%
The top 10% of comments earn 82.9% of upvotes.
The remaining 90% of comments share 17.1% between them.
46.5%
46.5% of Reddit comments earn one upvote or fewer.
Nearly half of everything written in a thread goes effectively unread.
~4
A 400-comment thread typically holds about 4 comments with headline-level approval.
For anyone mining comments for ad angles, sorting by score is not a shortcut. It is the method.
Questions and pre-purchase intent
Share of comments that contain a question, by platform. The question rate marks where a platform sits in the funnel.
17.8%
17.8% of Reddit comments contain a question.
Nearly one in five. What worked for you, is it worth it, does it help with X. That is pre-purchase language.
12.1%
12.1% of YouTube comments contain a question.
4.7%
4.7% of Amazon reviews contain a question.
2.0%
2.0% of Trustpilot reviews contain a question.
9x
Reddit's question rate runs 9x Trustpilot's.
Reddit is where people talk before they buy. Review sites are where they report back after. Mine Reddit for the objections an ad has to answer, and reviews for the answers an ad can quote.
Testimonials and story length
Share of comments over 500 characters, the length where a comment becomes a story with a problem, a doubt, a purchase, and a result.
23.4%
23.4% of Amazon reviews are story-length (500+ characters).
Nearly a quarter of Amazon reviews are full before-and-after narratives.
22.5%
22.5% of Trustpilot reviews run 500+ characters.
12.5%
12.5% of Reddit comments reach story length; only 5.8% of YouTube comments do.
463
The average Amazon review is 463 characters, nearly 3x the average YouTube comment (158).
Reddit comments average 265 characters, Trustpilot 253.
6x
Amazon reviewers name a time-to-result 6x more often than Reddit commenters (1.71% vs 0.30%).
Phrases like “within days” or “after a month”. If you need testimonial material with a timeline, it already exists in reviews.
Audience self-segmentation
1 in 19
1 in 19 Reddit comments contains an “as a ...” self-label (5.19%).
As a nurse, as a new dad, as someone with ADHD. Commenters segment themselves unprompted. Collected across a niche, these labels become the call-out lines that out-target any interest stack.
Trust, skepticism, and regret
Rates of trust-related language by platform, from a 481,028-comment sample. Case-insensitive phrase matching, so every rate is a floor.
8.46%
8.46% of Trustpilot reviews contain skepticism language (“scam”, “legit”, “too good to be true”).
16x
Trustpilot's scam-doubt rate runs 16x Reddit's (8.46% vs 0.52%).
Trustpilot is the risk conversation, and the single best source for the trust objections a funnel must answer.
9.91%
9.91% of Trustpilot reviews contain regret or refund language.
28x
Refund language appears 28x more often on Trustpilot than on Reddit (9.91% vs 0.35%).
2.09%
2.09% of Amazon reviews mention returns, refunds, or regret.
5.08%
5.08% of Trustpilot reviews mention a trusted person, like a doctor or a spouse.
Versus 2.84% of Amazon reviews and 1.93% of Reddit comments.
Recommendations and social proof
11.71%
11.71% of Amazon reviews contain recommendation language.
Nearly one in eight reviewers volunteers an endorsement nobody asked for.
6.97%
6.97% of Trustpilot reviews recommend the product, vs 2.57% of Reddit comments.
4x
Amazon reviews tell a failed-alternatives story (“I've tried everything”) 4x more often than Reddit comments (1.77% vs 0.45%).
2.99%
2.99% of Trustpilot reviews mention alternatives that failed first, the highest rate of any platform.
Replies and objection handling
49.3%
49.3% of Reddit comments are replies, not top-level comments.
A thread is a negotiation. Someone raises a doubt, someone else resolves it with their experience. Those replies are objection-handling copy written by a customer with no stake in the sale.
The corpus behind the numbers
10.86M
10,858,279 customer comments collected between January 15 and August 19, 2026.
137,375
137,375 individual scrapes of threads, product pages, and review feeds, each hand-picked by an ad operator researching a real niche.
6,389
6,389 distinct subreddits are represented in the corpus.
6
Six major sources: Reddit (9.4M comments), YouTube (433k), Amazon (93k), Trustpilot (42k), TikTok (4.6k), and app stores (2.4k), plus smaller surfaces.
Cite these statistics
Every statistic on this page is free to use in articles, newsletters, decks, and social posts. The only condition is a link to this page or to the full study as the source.
Writing about voice of customer, reviews, or community marketing and need a cut we haven't published, like a specific niche, platform, or comparison? Email [email protected] and we'll run it against the corpus, usually within a day.
Methodology
The corpus is 10,858,279 comments from 137,375 scrapes run by Adlicio users between January 15 and August 19, 2026, spanning 6,389 subreddits plus YouTube, Amazon, Trustpilot, Steam, Facebook, and other public comment surfaces. Platform-level language analyses ran on a 5% random sample (481,028 comments); the upvote-concentration analysis ran on a separate 2% random sample of Reddit threads (211,456 comments).
Language markers are case-insensitive phrase matches, which undercounts each category, so the true rates are floors, not ceilings. The threads were hand-picked by ad operators researching buying conversations, so the corpus over-represents commercial niches relative to the internet at large. For studying how buyers talk, that is the point. No individual comments are quoted anywhere; all figures are aggregates. The full write-up with interpretation is in the 10.8 million comment study, and the method behind the data collection is on the voice of customer research page.
The corpus grows daily as users run the Reddit, Amazon, and YouTube scrapers, so these numbers get a yearly refresh at this URL.
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