Strain Ratings: The Business Behind Those Five Stars

Somebody picking a strain is usually looking at two numbers: a star rating and a list of reported effects. Both come from the same handful of platforms, and both sit on a page that was paid for by the shop selling the product.

That is not an accusation of fraud. It is a description of a business model, and it is published in the companies' own financial statements. Understanding it is the difference between reading those stars correctly and reading them as a recommendation.

The cannabis review platform business, in its own numbers

The two largest platforms are public companies that file accounts, which means the revenue model is a matter of record. WM Technology, the parent of Weedmaps, reported that full-year 2025 revenue totaled $174.7 million, down from $184.5 million in 2024. Of that, featured and deal listings brought in $106.1 million, while its software subscriptions accounted for $53.3 million.

Read those two lines together and the business becomes clear:

• Roughly 61 percent of the company's revenue in 2025 came from featured and deal listings, which is advertising placement on the marketplace.
• Software subscriptions, the part a dispensary buys to run its own operations, made up under a third.
• Average monthly revenue per paying client was $2,804 in the fourth quarter, down 7.8 percent year on year.
• The number of paying clients fell over the same period, to 5,120.

Leafly's split runs the other way but leads to the same place. In its annual filings the company states that revenue from its retail partners accounted for approximately 86.3 percent of revenue in 2024, with brands making up the rest. The shops being listed are paying for almost the entire operation.

Weedmaps paid placement and what it buys

The word to look for in the filings is placement. WM Technology's annual report describes its featured listings product as premium placement ad solutions in high visibility locations on the Weedmaps marketplace, intended to amplify clients' businesses and maximize their listing and deal presence. It also describes banner ads that can be tied to keyword searches, and earlier filings list nearby listings, which lets a retailer appear in results for an area it is not actually in.

Leafly describes a tiered arrangement. Standard subscribers get a listing. Pro subscribers can additionally buy featured listings, display ads, promoted deal offerings and sponsored content. The company notes that in competitive local markets those ad units generate additional revenue as retailers compete to acquire shoppers.

None of that is hidden and none of it is unusual for a marketplace. What it means practically is that position on the page is a purchased asset, and position is what most people actually read. Very few shoppers scroll past the visible results to compare ratings across a whole city.

Dispensary listing fees

Nobody publishes a rate card, but the platforms publish average revenue per account, which is better evidence anyway because it is audited. Leafly reported that in the third quarter of 2024 retailer ARPA increased 8% to $695 a month, while ending retail accounts declined 20 percent year over year to 3,554. Weedmaps, as above, averaged $2,804 a month per paying client at the end of 2025. So a dispensary is paying somewhere between roughly $8,000 and $34,000 a year to appear well on a platform where a customer is reading strain reviews. That is the commercial weight sitting behind the page.

It is worth noting what those numbers have been doing. Weedmaps' revenue per client fell almost 8 percent in a year and its client count shrank. Leafly's paying retailer base dropped a fifth in twelve months, and the company left the Nasdaq in January 2025 after failing to meet a listing requirement, moving to over-the-counter trading. A platform under that kind of commercial pressure has every incentive to sell more placement, not less.

Are strain reviews real

Mostly yes, in the sense that real people wrote them. Leafly strain reviews in particular have been used as a serious research dataset, which is a better endorsement than any marketing claim. The harder question is what they can actually tell you.

A 2020 paper in the Journal of Cannabis Research analyzed 887 cultivars using a sample of more than 100,000 user reviews published on Leafly, combining them with laboratory data on cannabinoid and terpene content. That is a genuine scientific use of crowd-sourced cannabis reporting.

The same paper carries the caveat that matters most: biases can appear in crowdsourced data when a large proportion of the reports comes from a small group of users. A rating is an average of whoever chose to write, not of whoever bought.

Take a cross like Sour Strawberry, a Strawberry Kush and Sour Diesel hybrid that comes out sativa-leaning at around 27 percent THC. Ratings for a name like that are gathered from flower grown by dozens of different people, in different conditions, cured to different standards, and sold under one label. The average is being taken across a much wider range of products than the number suggests.

Underneath that sits a deeper problem with what is being rated. The largest chemical survey of American commercial cannabis, covering nearly 90,000 samples, found that commercial labels do not consistently align with the observed chemical diversity, and described the marketing of indica as sedating and sativa as energizing as specious given the underlying chemistry. A five-star average for a name is an average across products that are not necessarily the same thing.

The unexamined day is a wasted opportunity. Reflect on what you did, what you learned, and how you can improve.

John Dewey

What the FTC rule does and does not ban

In October 2024 a federal rule on consumer reviews came into force, and it is stricter than most people assume. Paying incentives for five-star reviews on a third-party platform is prohibited even when the reviewer discloses the incentive. The Federal Trade Commission's guidance states that such conduct violates Section 465.4 of the rule. Buying sentiment is banned outright, disclosure or not. So is posting reviews written by company insiders without disclosing the relationship, and so is using threats to get a negative review taken down.

Organizing reviews is not suppressing reviews under the rule, the same guidance says. Deciding what order things appear in is legal. That is the gap the whole listing industry operates in, entirely lawfully. The rule governs the reviews. It does not govern which shop you see first.

The Commission has started enforcing it, sending warning letters to ten companies in December 2025 over practices under the rule, with civil penalties running to tens of thousands of dollars per violation.

Reading a rating properly

A star average is a useful signal about one thing: whether a batch of that name, sold by those shops, disappointed a self-selected group of people who bothered to write about it. That is real information. It is just much narrower than it looks. Three things are worth doing with it:

• Read the written reviews instead of the average, because the text tells you why somebody scored it that way.
• Check whether the effects people describe are consistent or scattered. Scattered usually means the name is covering several different products.
• Treat position on the page as advertising, because that is what the companies' own accounts say it is.

Our own catalog descriptions deserve exactly the same skepticism. When we write that something like Blue Sunset Sherbert is sweet and calm, that is a breeder describing what the line does in our conditions, which is a starting point and not a promise about the jar in front of you.

The way to settle it is to grow or buy the same thing twice and write down what happened both times. That produces something no rating can: evidence from the only sample that matters, which is the one you have.

What the stars are measuring

The platforms are advertising businesses funded by the retailers they list, and they say so in their accounts. Weedmaps takes most of its revenue from paid placement. Leafly takes most of its revenue from the shops it ranks. Neither sells star ratings, and there is no evidence that they do, but both sell the position those ratings sit in.

So the stars are real and the ordering is commercial, and those are two different systems on one page. Knowing which is which costs nothing and changes what you buy. Barney's Farm has been developing premium cannabis genetics since the 1980s, with over 40 Cannabis Cup wins. Explore our full seed catalog and find strains bred for every climate and skill level.