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Trust is a powerful asset that shapes customer loyalty, supplier relations, employee retention and regulator perceptions. And its impact is growing. According to PwC’s 2025 Trust and Safety Survey, introducing a new trust and safety feature had a measurable impact on consumer behavior: 72% of those surveyed said they’d be more likely to engage, 68% would consider purchasing a new product or service, 61% would explore add-ons, and 59% would be open to related merchandise. For business leaders, that’s a clear signal — building trust doesn’t just mitigate risk — it also fuels outcomes.
Clearly, trust-building investments can add significant value. Yet today’s finance organizations and cross-functional leadership teams are scrutinizing these investments, looking for evidence of measurable outcomes like increased revenue, reduced costs, a larger customer base and higher retention rates. Attributing these results to specific trust investments can be challenging — and T&S teams under pressure to make one-to-one correlations often focus on reactive rather than proactive, long-term strategies.
It’s time for a smarter playbook — one that effectively measures and demonstrates the return on T&S-related investments.
Calculating and measuring trust and safety ROI
One method for calculating the benefits of T&S investments is to assess how initiatives influence stakeholder behaviors and ultimately lead to positive outcomes. Data-driven financial models, like PwC’s Return on Trust and Safety Investment Framework, can help illustrate the cascading effects from T&S capabilities to business outcomes.
Here are six key steps that T&S organizations can take to operationalize and customize an ROI framework — and measure the results:
- Identify your business outcomes: Start with the end in mind and first define the outcomes you intend to measure. Think of these as the fundamental goals that can drive your business forward and align with leadership priorities. Include only those outcomes that T&S can realistically influence, such as increased advertising revenue, reduced compliance costs and lower customer acquisition costs.
- Decode stakeholder groups and behaviors: Identify which stakeholder groups — internal and external — T&S initiatives influence along with the behaviors you intend to encourage. Map these behaviors to their intended outcomes. For example, T&S initiatives that affect a user’s willingness to engage on a platform and an advertiser’s willingness to advertise can drive increased advertising revenue.
- Select T&S capabilities to test: Determine which T&S capabilities across the T&S life cycle you want to test for impact against key outcomes. This could include capabilities such as defining policies, planning for T&S products, defining enforcement operations, enabling feedback, and enabling compliance and reporting.
- Establish a T&S baseline: Before measuring the expected impact of new investments, establish a baseline of current stakeholder behaviors and outcomes. This baseline provides a point of comparison for future changes. A well-defined baseline allows T&S teams to measure returns more accurately.
- Assess expected investment benefits: Estimate the projected changes in stakeholder behaviors resulting from each proposed investment. While user behavior can vary, several methods can help create informed projections, including using historical data from previous T&S investments, stakeholder research that assesses how T&S investments could shift behaviors, and case studies or benchmarks from peers that demonstrate the impact of similar investments.
- Quantify investment returns: Finally, combine your baseline data with projection data to estimate expected returns. This process can drive the ability to measure the actual impact of T&S initiatives on business outcomes. These return calculations can then be used in discussions with finance and leadership, helping justify why certain investments should be made and setting clear targets for what these investments should deliver.
Real-world industry benefits
Increasingly, online platforms are aiming to prove how T&S initiatives can positively impact the bottom line. Companies like Reddit, Airbnb and Microsoft’s Minecraft have publicly attributed portions of their financial success to robust T&S programs, showcasing how prioritizing trust can lead to measurable business benefits.
“Reddit’s turnaround proves that content moderation is not an empty buzzword or a partisan plot. It’s a business necessity, a prerequisite for growth... In Reddit’s case, it’s no exaggeration to say content moderation saved the company.”
Kevin Roose,New York TimesFor example, Reddit1 updated its content policies to explicitly prohibit hate speech and harassment, increased support for volunteer moderators and banned subreddits that consistently violated its policies. These actions led to improved brand safety and helped contribute to a successful IPO in March of 2024.
“We believe that our revenue growth depends upon . . . our ability to build and strengthen trust and safety on our platform and among members of our community.”
Source:Airbnb. (2024, February 16). Form 10-K. Retrieved from EDGARAirbnb implemented verification processes for hosts and guests, established secure payment methods, and launched the Trust and Safety Advisory Coalition in 2022. Airbnb believes these measures help form a cornerstone of the broader Airbnb growth strategy and serve as a key component of customer retention.
Minecraft, an interactive multiplayer game developed and published by Mojang Studios (a Microsoft subsidiary), developed key security features such as in-game player interaction controls, screening of Minecraft Marketplace partners, player reporting tools that leverage community standards across Minecraft and Xbox, and human review (with appeals). The publishers of Minecraft believe these features led to winning parental approval and opening access to major youth markets, ultimately increasing its growth.
Ready to get started?
Moving from correlation to causation and quantifying the return on Trust and Safety investments is neither easy nor a one-size-fits-all approach. For some businesses, particularly those where trust isn’t a primary driver of stakeholder behaviors, the ROI of these initiatives might be more evident through cost savings, such as reducing fraud, data breaches, or legal and compliance costs. In other cases, offering leadership directional guidance rather than precise figures may be sufficient. By utilizing a foundational framework that evaluates both direct and indirect stakeholder impacts, companies can better understand and demonstrate the ROI of their T&S efforts.
“For us, [demonstrating ROI for T&S] depends on what the business model of our customer is. There are different necessities by industry for why you invest in T&S... Risk reduction is where we ended up when we talk about ROI. There are a ton of levers we can point to for T&S to reduce risk or spend in certain areas.”
Glen Wise,Co-Founder and CEO of CinderPwC has worked with a wide variety of T&S organizations to develop customized T&S ROI frameworks, establish T&S baselines through primary and secondary research, and demonstrate the return on T&S investments. We help T&S teams clearly demonstrate the significant value that Trust and Safety can bring to an organization.
Trust and Safety Outlook 2025
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