
Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0 - brianmckenzie
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/gyrobase/yelp_and_the_business_of_extortion_2_0/Content?oid=927491&page=1
======
kolya3
I've definitely seen the same scam from the user side. My friend left a 1 star
review for an auto shop after getting ripped off. Several weeks later the
review disappeared. She contacted Yelp who claimed that they "rotate" reviews
in and out. This might make sense when you have hundreds of reviews and you
want to show a balanced mix on the first page but this shop only had 7 reviews
so the rotation strategy didn't make sense here. She left another bad review,
again it disappeared. We knew something shady was going on but hearing the
story from the other side makes me wonder if the shop just paid Yelp to remove
the bad review.

------
wushupork
I also have some experience w/ Yelp in this matter with the martial arts
schools I teach out of. I've even blogged about it a while back
[http://blog.pekpongpaet.com/2008/06/25/yelpcom-stop-being-
ev...](http://blog.pekpongpaet.com/2008/06/25/yelpcom-stop-being-evil-a-
commentary-on-todays-social-review-sites/)

Basically tons of genuine reviews (well written) have entirely disappeared.
I've taken to just copying the reviews and putting them on our site in case
they "disappear". Also, they've strong armed us implying we might not be
listed up top if we don't advertise.

I've taken it up several Yelp employees of different departments and I get the
same cookie cutter legal cut and paste response.

My impression of the company as a whole seems shady at best.

~~~
brandnewlow
Thanks for sharing that link. I just posted it up on the Windy Citizen so
Chicagoans following the story can get a local take:

[http://www.windycitizen.com/chicago/spotlight/2009/02/yelpco...](http://www.windycitizen.com/chicago/spotlight/2009/02/yelpcom-
stop-being-evil-a-commentary-on-todays-social-review-sites)

------
yan
Yelp's response: [http://officialblog.yelp.com/2009/02/kathleen-richards-
east-...](http://officialblog.yelp.com/2009/02/kathleen-richards-east-bay-
express.html)

Also, their founder has been active on twitter: <http://twitter.com/jeremys>

~~~
ojbyrne
So? He denies it, engages in character assassination, and uses a (presumably)
co-conspirator to provide supporting evidence. I heard about this two months
ago.

Never overestimate the integrity of a CEO.

~~~
yan
I am not taking sides, just providing references to relevant information.

------
gruseom
I'm astonished that Yelp would do something like this to jeopardize, and
potentially destroy, their reputation. But there are far too many people
telling the same story here for me not to believe there's something true in
it... they can't all be liars and trolls. It makes me sad. I was a fan.

~~~
gcheong
Would be interesting to actually hear a recording of the advertising sales
pitch being made. Should be easy enough to set up and it's just a Youtube away
from sharing with the world.

------
gaika
More evidence from fellow hacker - <http://jwz.livejournal.com/1002269.html>

~~~
mchristoff
dna is a rad place and i have utmost respect for the people who run it (i'm
actually 50yds from it right now), but jwz's comments don't prove anything.
for one thing, night club reviews notoriously suck ass on yelp or any other
review site, and therefore shouldn't be taken as the standard. anyone with
half a brain can parse through the stupid reviews if they really care that
much about a venue, but most of the time if you're going to a club you're
going for a specific night or event and you'll judge for yourself. yelp's
sweet spot is really restaurants, particularly restaurants in major cities.

also, speaking to his specific claims of "extortion", i don't believe they
hold water. paying a fee to put your favorite review on top or putting
sponsored links on the site (like google) seems pretty legit to me. deleting
negative reviews etc is shady, but i think the jury is out whether that is
true or not.

i know i've personally found yelp invaluable moving around to new cities over
the past few years. being someone who loves food, i find the vast majority of
the time the reviews of restaurants are completely on point, especially if you
know how to parse through the comments. does anyone remember the days when the
only thing that existed was citysearch? what a piece of junk. i've found so
many amazing places on yelp that i wouldn't have found otherwise.

in my experience most small businesses (mostly restaurants) i ask about yelp
love it. i ran into a restaurant owner who's friends with a friend of mine in
berkeley a few months ago. he was ecstatic about yelp because that night 20 of
his seats were filled by yelp alone.

i'm all for exposing shady practices of yelp or any other company for that
matter, but most of this stuff is baseless.

~~~
mchristoff
hn amazes me sometimes. how does expressing your point of view warrant
downvotes? bad language? going against popular opinion?

~~~
sho
Well I didn't mod you down, I argued with you ; )

~~~
mchristoff
fair

------
fizx
Who knows what's true here, but I know a lot of businesses that hate Yelp
because the business can't control the tone of the publicity. I also know a
couple people that game Yelp, by emailing users and bribing to change reviews.

Yelp's the web 2 service that's actually made a difference in my life, but
these things always have shady underbellies (e.g. Google, SEO, click fraud).

------
jwesley
This is what they get for trying to mix advertising with user generated
content. There are too many conflicts of interest between Yelp, advertisers,
and anonymous users. Who would buy an ad for a page that can be easily
defaced? No one who isn't promised censorship. It's a shame because Yelp is a
great service. Maybe they could become more like a search engine, with links
direct to vendor sites and user reviews in a separate section on Yelp. Then
ads could go direct to business sites, eliminating the bad review issues.

------
drenei
There are three things that come to mind:

1\. I use Yelp and so far I've found it useful and accurate. Of course I tend
to look for substance in the good comments as well as the bad. (hyperaware of
how easy it is for a business to succumb to selling itself through 'fake'
comments; aware of the fact that everyone has bad nights and competitors) More
than ever these days (I have IB back in high school to thank for starting me
down this road): understand that every source has bias.

2\. Yelp, to me at least, has shifted power into the hands of the consumer. It
is now possible to hear, theoretically, what the users of a business (refer to
1.) think of it - good or bad. This, I would think, would make a few people
unhappy - changes in power usually do. And complaining about being unhappy at
'power to the consumer' isn't really a story that is going to get much
sympathy.

3\. Yelp's business involves a trusting user. To undermine that by allowing
businesses to remove negative reviews for a sum of money strikes me as being
very short sited. Everything gets out eventually, especially in this day and
age. In conjunction with 2., the best attack against Yelp (or the most
effective) would be an attack on whether or not you can trust Yelp. Again, I
can't see Yelp 'offing' itself like this - unless the team behind it really is
that short sighted.

I like yelp, I find it useful and if/when it stops being useful, and if this
story is true it won't be long till that happens, I'll stop using it.

------
bbobb
I use yelp when in a new city to find restaurants and have been favorably
impressed with its ability to weed out the wheat from the chaff. I would
definitely be concerned if Yelp were strong arming content to make money.

At first when I was reading this, I couldn't help but think why Google's
Adwords (which I heartily love) doesn't strike me as seedy, but I guess it
comes down to how the service is sold. Adwords is opt in without any pressure
and a lot of tools that at least make me feel like I'm optimizing my buck. I
think if I were called by an Adwords rep and asked to spend more cash or else
my pagerank "might go down," I'd feel just about the same as I do about the
hypothetical Yelp sales practices.

That said, I'm with you dpifke, it doesn't help the credibility of such an
incendiary article that it appears in a lesser-known publication.

~~~
nostrademons
Adwords also clearly labels which results are sponsored and doesn't touch the
non-sponsored ones. I think the meat of the allegations in this article are
that users have no way of knowing whether a negative review was left by Yelp
staff, or a positive one was hidden because the business didn't pay up, or a
negative one was hidden because the business _did_ pay.

~~~
webwright
Adwords labels results, but I'm not sure I'll grant clearly.

If you plunk down the average middle aged person in front of Google search
results and say, "click the first result", do you think they click the light
orange ad at the top of the list? If you told them that was an ad afterward,
do you think the average person would've known that?

Or, put it another way-- if you inverted the ad color (light on dark) or put a
dark border and bolder ad label, do you think CTR would drop dramatically?

I do.

------
Maro
Idea: a campaign to mobilize people to use Google's new reordering/removal
feature to punish evil sites/businesses. I suppose these changes are somehow
reflected in the ordering other users see (?). Targets:

1\. Experts Exchange

2\. Yelp

3\. ...

I already delete experts exchange links from my Google results.

~~~
jasonkester
You realize of course that Google's reordering tool only affects the results
they display to YOU, right?

Please tell me you haven't been furiously hitting the delete button in the
hopes of tidying up the internet!

~~~
pg
Currently. They might do more with it.

------
lawrence
When you raise $31M in funding, the pressure must be immense to get the
revenues up. It's not enough for these guys to get to profitability. They need
to be profitable with $100Ms in revenue. No wonder they are (allegedly)
pushing the envelope.

(disclosure: I work for a pseudo competitor)

------
ucdaz
Sites like yelp don't give value to the local businesses. A better solution is
to allow the businesses to reply to the customer's post like a forum. My team
and I are working on this right now and will be launching soon!

~~~
sosuke
That's a great idea for sure but I had a question. Most reviews for products
are generally bad unless the product was so extremely good that someone wants
to share how awesome it is with others or is already a member of the
community. That being said how do you think small business owners will respond
to forum trolls? My first thought is that it could turn into some ugly threads
pitting the business's word against the reviewer where the reviewer is in the
anonymous and protect position and the business is more vulnerable.

~~~
ucdaz
My answer is to check out sites like GetSatisfaction and Uservoice.com. As for
the trolls, we have a karma point system in place.

------
tlb
Someone should do the proper experiment. Create a fictitious retail business,
and generate a stream of reviews for it. Any other reviews would have to be
faked. If they are writing fake bad reviews and removing them for money, you
would then have strong evidence.

~~~
joe_the_user
It is not so easy.

The behavior that you read described in this thread is placing real bad review
at the top of the list, review that "normally" wouldn't be so high.

------
dpifke
Some of the behavior of which Yelp is being accused in this article is plainly
illegal. Which makes me question why these "anonymous sources" are talking to
a reporter at an alternative weekly newspaper instead of a lawyer. Color me
dubious.

~~~
nkurz
Which of the activities would be illegal? The article concludes that while
these activities may be unsavory, they probably aren't illegal: "So is it
legal for Yelp to do all this? Probably, according to Matt Zimmerman, senior
staff attorney at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation."

For reference, I'm a Bay Area business owner with positive reviews on Yelp. I
recently received solicitations for advertising, and noticed that our most
negative review (non-recent, low votes) appeared to have been moved to the top
of the list just prior to the advertising pitch. The sales agent was asked
about this, and responded: "The review algorithm has a number of interesting
caveats in it. Some of which are best match and relevancy issues."

We did not receive promises of special treatment or the repositioning of this
review, but I felt this was implied. While I don't feel that Yelp was acting
illegally, I lost a lot of faith in their business practices as a result. I
did not participate in this article, but I believe it is accurately reported.

For what it's worth, that negative review (which was from a customer with a
legitimate complaint) is now back in a more neutral location, without any
further action on our part. Perhaps (and I hope) this was a few rogue
employees on the sales team, and the company has now cleaned up its act.

~~~
moonpolysoft
There is no such thing as rogue people on a sales team. In most of the phone
jockey shops I've ever been in/around (mostly in the credit card industry)
they teach you what is in compliance, but then set unrealistic sales quotas.
The idea being that the brighter employees will learn the underhanded tricks
they need to get ahead, and the straight arrow ones will fall behind and
either quit or get fired.

Running telemarketing shops like that lets management have plausible
deniability in the case of a lawsuit yet maintain a status quo that would be
out of compliance with any industry regulations.

~~~
gruseom
This rings true, and seems like a theory that fits all the data nicely. Come
to think of it, why would they go about it any other way?

I hear it's also a handy way for politicians to authorize torture and crime
bosses to knock off their rivals.

------
flatline
Based on the article and the comments here, the following seem to be
consistently agreed upon:

-Yelp "rotates" reviews

-They offer to "sponsor" good reviews for a fee

As far as I know, other sites (I'm thinking TripAdvisor, and for paid sites,
AngiesList) do not do this, which makes the whole thing seem a little shady.
Doesn't take much to imagine that they would go one step further into shaking
down "customers" to rotate out bad reviews.

------
sireat
Unfortunately, such despicable behavior can be found more often than one would
think. In fact, this is not a problem only on internet. When I ran a small
business, a serious newspaper(part of a major chain) offered to write
favorable article, if I started advertising with them.

Let's just hope it doesn't end like this:
<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075865/>

------
callmeed
I built a Yelp-like site for my local area several years ago (before Yelp
existed). I never really pursued it, but it was nice to see the idea validated
by Yelp's success.

That being said, it stinks if they've really resorted to this. I understand
they need to answer to investors, but their choice of business models is
fairly un-creative.

If I were to _build a better Yelp_ , it would look like this (off the top of
my head):

\- Reviews in two columns: positive reviews on the left, negative reviews on
the right.

\- Bad/good reviews cannot be deleted (unless it can be verified false or
shills), but the business owner/manager can reply to the review (tripadvisor
does this)

\- Business model: allow businesses to sell printable gift cards or discounted
vouchers (ala restaurant.com) and take a %

\- Business model: for a monthly fee a business can add videos, images, and
additional tools (similar to yelp's current sponsorship program but better)

\- Business model: build a flexible reservation/appointment SaaS that can be
used by any business that needs it. Anything from restaurants to salons to
mechanics could use something like this. If a customer could find a good
business AND make an appointment on the same site, that's gold right there.

Think out of the box, Yelp ... c'mon

------
j2d2
I ran this article by a bunch of nontechie friends and _every_ one of them
said they don't want to use yelp anymore. Half of them use it all the time
too...

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blurry
They also scrape reviews from other websites. I've found a couple reviews that
I wrote elsewhere, "written" by various strangely prolific Yelp users who had
single-handedly managed to post hundreds upon hundreds of reviews. (These were
for small neighborhood hangout-type restaurants... meaning there is no way
they were paid for).

------
Eliezer
Well, crap. Someone please replace Yelp.

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fallentimes
If they're not selling review placement and/or editing, what exactly are they
selling of value?

~~~
Harkins
The business owner gets to put one (presumably excellent) review on top of all
the others, and hide the display of competitors on some local search pages.

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wallflower
Extortion 1.0 presumably being the 'protection money' that Chinatown gangs
asked for to 'protect your business'.

------
d13hard
yelp is ner the top of a long list of sites that

1\. people love

2\. cannot make money

3\. should have found a way to get bought in 2006

get in line behind zuck

