A Series of Tubes

Well I had a previous post with the back and forth with Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of yelp.  It was incredibly frustrating to have to ask him the same questions over and over since he kept answering the questions he wished I had asked instead of the questions I did ask.  His final response to me is as follows:

We have many thousands of advertisers on Yelp these days, I suggest a much simpler and faster solution… pick up the phone and call a handful of advertisers (they are easy to find on our site) and ask about their experiences with Yelp.

The East Bay Express did that and buried their findings at the end of their 4k word piece…

Interviews with more than a dozen local business owners suggest that Yelp sales reps may be wording their sales pitches more carefully these days. Owners who were approached by Yelp in recent months said they were told they could choose one positive review that would appear at the top of their page, which would clearly be denoted as a “sponsored review.”

And plenty of Yelp advertisers still have negative reviews on their pages. “You pretty much have to fight tooth or nail to get a bad review moved or removed,” said one East Bay restaurant advertiser, who wished to remain anonymous. Peter Snyderman, the owner of Elite Cafe, said his sales rep never mentioned moving negative reviews.

Basically Jeremy thought that the scientific approach  that I suggested was too labor intensive, and instead suggested that I should personally collect anecdotal evidence instead.  I really just want to tell him that you cannot draw any conclusions from anecdotal evidence, that his approach is inferior, and that if he was serious about dispelling the accusations about review manipulation he would invite more transparency and an open and fair evaluation of yelps advertising program from an independent 3rd party.  If I did that I would of course just be repeating myself yet again.  In discussions with Jeremy I feel as if he speaks loudly and carries a stupid stick. I’m gonna go ahead and let him have the last word on the matter because like a kid on a spinning tire we keep going around and around with our arguments and frankly I’m dizzy and if I keep this up my sanity is gonna puke.

So what is to be gained from all of this?  The take away message of the back and forth with the yelp CEO is this:

-Jeremy Stoppelman will respond to random people on the Internet very frequently which means his duties as CEO are taking a back seat to his attempts to converse with anonymous Internet users.  That makes yelp a horrible investment since the CEO obviously has skewed priorities.

-I still have large doubts regarding the ethics of yelp since the CEO would constantly avoid direct questions.

-On the positive side of things I found in this article about a guy from Vancouver getting banned from yelp.  In it he mentions a competing service to yelp called urban spoon.  Seriously check it out.  I must admit that during the back and forth with Jeremey, I stil used yelp because there was no real alternative.  Urban spoon provides an alternative without the questionalbe ethical policies.