Is Yelp acting like the Mob?
There is an article over at eastbayexpress.com about how Yelp is asking for money from restaurants to help them hide bad reviews. In response to the article, the CEO of yelp responded on his blog about the incident and goes into detail about how the reporter did not do a good job of fact checking (apparently she did, see the update below). The article has a bold claim against a popular website and is driving a lot of traffic to their own website (I had never been to eastbayexpress.com before and the article in question has been the #1 article on the website for some time). Unfortunately the claim that it is extorting restaurants looks likely is not proven (I guess it’s not totally unproven either) and in the end only servers to put into question eastbayexpress’s reporting. They didn’t mention in their article that eastbayexpress owns and operates a competing service for restaurant reviews. The damage done to yelp has already been done as the article is getting wide circulation due to being posted on sites such as slashdot.org.
Update: I have had friends anecdotally tell me that yelp participates in extortion practices. Eastbay express has follow up article, as pointed out by Dano in the comments and yelp has yet to respond. I emailed yelp for a response just to see what they say (I kinda expect them to ignore me. Maybe I’ll call them). The initial claim appears to have some legs. That kind of sucks since I like the idea of a community review site. I just wish there was a trustworthy version. The articles seem to have effected yelps own rating on it’s own site from an average of 4 stars down to 3 stars (click the image for a larger view):
East Bay Express also took the time to trash talk the Mercury New’s coverage of Yelp as well. The only large competing service is yahoo local, and there is no guarantee that yahoo local will be any better considering that yahoo does not have the greatest track record in the morality department. I guess I’ll start using yahoo local, but my brand loyalty to it is less than stellar.
Eastbay express is not the only one reporting the extortion by yelp:
I’ve found that most of the people reporting that the story is not true basically asked a representative from yelp, they said no, and then they stopped investigating (the already mentioned Mercury News article did exactly this). They forgot to actually talk to merchants with these claims to verify them instead of just asking for a PR response from yelp.
When I originally wrote this post I noted east bay express’ conflict of interest in that it had a review section of it’s own website. Unfortunately yelp appears to be lacking in the morals department and east bay express appears to have good reporters.
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You’d think it’s a sketchy article, but I’ve had a couple of friends tell me that their reviews on Yelp were removed or shifted to the bottom of the list. There’s definitely something to this article…
The CEO went nuts on Twitter after the initial story came out — you can go back and look at his posts from 2/19.
http://twitter.com/jeremys
Looks like he learned to keep his mouth shut though. East Bay Express did a followup and this time only used people who agreed to go on the record publicly. No response from Yelp.
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/news/yelp_extortion_allegations_stack_up/Content?oid=946025
They do make a really good point. The CEO was complaining that the Express used anonymous sources, but Yelp is nothing BUT anonymous sources.
[...] still waiting to see what yelp does to respond to the updated criticiscm about extortion (see my updated yelp post). I emailed them asking for a response (nothing yet) and their official blog still does not have [...]
In general, I am convinced that the author of the follow-up was able to get in touch with some business owners who had dealt with shady characters from Yelp. I’d love to have seen an interview with a yelp ad-salesperson. I’m not going to make a blanket statement about marketers, but I definitely wouldn’t be surprised to find out that they don’t have the power to do the things they say they do (at least unofficially) and were simply lying in order to increase their commission on ads sold. Also, where’s the business owner who bit and decided that advertising would be a great way to manipulate the business’ yelp reviews?
I’ve always treated yelp reviews much like I treated hardware reviews on newegg.com I assume they were all written by people who have no idea what they’re talking about. “Yeah dude, I bought this sweet LED fan for my pimped out case, and between that and $2000 worth of other parts, my computer just screams! But, sometimes my computer crashes, so I give this part 2 eggs, but +2 for super fast shipping, so 4/5 total.”
On the other hand, if you look at 10 bad reviews and they all say the place is too small, well that’s a useful indicator that it’ll be crowded at peak hours. If half the positive reviews say the dj was spinning killer house music, well, there you go. It probably has a dj.
It’s too bad if yelp is manipulating its reviews, but I don’t see it as actually diminishing the value of their product much, since I never trusted individual reviews anyway.
[...] I previously posted that the eastbay express article along with a follow up article ran about Yelp. They wrote about business owners begin extorted by Yelp. The CEO of yelp responded on his Blog (twice), but did not respond to the second article which did not have anonymous sources. I posted a 1 star review of yelp on yelp.com. Within yelp itself, the CEO of yelp, Jeremy Stoppleman, responded to my 1 star review and to the allegations made in the east bay express stories and we have been going back and forth a bit today. I figured I would post the exchange below since it is interesting. I will always remember this day as the day my career as a hard hitting interviewer took off. [...]
I don’t particularly care for Yelp myself. I’ve also read some of the negative things about yelp supposedly trying to extort money from businesses in exchange for highlighting positive reviews, etc. I think it’s a better idea to avoid them and stick with established sites like citysearch, and I’ve noticed a lot of new review sites cropping up like fairplayreviews.com