Does any of this actually work?

Researchers matched Yelp ratings against the revenue restaurants actually reported to the Washington State Department of Revenue, for Seattle, between 2003 and 2009. One extra star was worth 5 to 9 percent more revenue.

The part that matters for you: that effect showed up for independent restaurants and not for chains. A national name already has a reputation. A place on Locust Street is still building one, which is exactly why moving it is worth something.

18,294 restaurants took part. 7,209 of them were picked at random and given three months of free advertising on a review platform, and the rest were not. That random split is what makes this evidence rather than a correlation somebody noticed afterwards.

The ones given visibility saw a 7 to 19 percent rise across measures of people intending to visit, and 5 percent more reviews. The gains were uneven, and independent restaurants were among those that gained most.

Asked what they had actually done after seeing a restaurant on TikTok, across everyone surveyed:

Among millennials, that first number is 53 percent. Worth being straight about this one: it is a marketing agency’s survey, not a university study. It does name its method, 1,139 US TikTok users with a margin of error of 3.06 percent, which is more than most numbers in this industry can say for themselves.

A Google senior vice president said on stage that when 18 to 24 year olds are looking for somewhere to have lunch, roughly 40 percent of them go to TikTok or Instagram rather than Google Maps or Search.

This gets quoted everywhere as “nobody uses Google any more”, which is not what was said and is not true. The original claim was narrow and specific, about finding somewhere to eat. That happens to be the only claim we need, and it comes from the company that loses by admitting it.

A review pulling together 251 separate studies found that recommendations from creators outperformed posts from the business itself, and outperformed celebrities.

It also found that follower count does not reliably predict results. Someone with a few thousand local followers is not the weaker bet. That is the whole reason Vecino is built around people who live in your town rather than the biggest account that will answer.

There is no study showing that paying a local creator forty dollars returns a particular amount. Nobody has run that experiment. Anyone who tells you otherwise is quoting a survey where marketing departments were asked to estimate their own results, which is people grading their own homework.

What the research above does establish is narrower, and we think it is enough to be worth an hour of your time. For an independent restaurant specifically, reputation and visibility move real revenue. And people act on a recommendation from a person more than on an advert from a business.

Vecino is a bet that joining those two things up is worth doing. It is a bet, and we would rather say so than pretend a study exists.