PayPal Stories Archive

What are people paying for?

 

Here at Venmo, part of paying your friends and family back through our app is sharing the experience through payment notes. We decided to take a look at these notes across our user base and see what people are up to.

So what does this all mean?

  • The larger the word, the more it was used in payments notes. The most frequently used words describe payments for household bills like rent, and social activities like splitting a bill at a restaurant.
  • The smaller, less frequent, words in the cloud tend to fall into the same overall categories of bills and social activities; but these less frequent words describe payments at a greater level of detail. For example, ‘bill’ is used very frequently and therefore is very large, but the many words describing those bills – including internet, cable, electricity, among others – are smaller.
  • While food is an overarching category, the diverse tastes of the Venmo community are reflected in the many different types food and beverages that appear in the word cloud.
  • People often use words that describe when the event related to a payment took place including months, holidays and special events.
  • The emotive words used in payment notes tend to be very positive - love, sweet, delicious, best, etc.

Hopefully, next time we run this report, ‘awesome’ will be a little bit bigger.

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