
Yelp 'pay to play' pitch makes shops scream for help - alex_c
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/13/yelp_sales_pitch/print.html
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jexe
So Yelp puts businesses up for public criticism and simultaneously try to sell
advertising to those same businesses.. that puts them in a tricky spot of
trying to stay fair and still make money.

The local advertising market is hot, but maybe they should be exploring other
revenue ideas if they want to keep from descending to Citysearch's depths of
mistrust - licensing the data they collect (like InfoUSA), data mining (like
Macrosense), maybe even selling a product?

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blurry
I mistrust Yelp because they scrape reviews from other websites. I have found
a couple of reviews that I posted elsewhere under fake user names on Yelp.

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thwarted
Considering that things like "elite status", which is based on contribution,
is coveted by some users, it's entirely possible that the content in question
was posted by an actual user who cut and pasted it from another site. It would
be pretty hard to verify that someone's review is truly their own. If you
notice something out of the ordinary, there are tools available to flag
content.

Disclosure: I work for Yelp.

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vaksel
Yeah thats why I'm not that big on online reviews, because most businesses are
now savvy enough to know that they can game the system

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noor420
This is quite an interesting read. Looks like a lot more business owners will
realize the importance of negative reviews, start putting fake negative
reviews on rival businesses and flood their own yelp page with good comments.

What will be bad for yelp down the road if that happens? maybe an online guide
of business reviews with no credibility and guininity.

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Goladus
The key to using yelp isn't to just read the first few reviews, but to find
reviewers that either match your tastes, or have observations that appear to
be particularly trustworthy. That can sometimes be determined by reading the
user profiles and other reviews.

I wouldn't recommend anyone just reading every review on yelp. You have to
come up with some sort of filter.

