Restauranteurs Say Yelp Uses Extortion To Ply Ad Sales

Readers Mike Van Pelt and EricThegreen point out a story in the East Bay Express alleging that online restaurant review site Yelp is doing more than providing a nice interface for foodies to share their impressions of restaurants. Instead, says the article, representatives from the site have called restaurants in the Bay area to solicit advertising, but with an interesting twist: the ad sales reps let restaurant owners know that, if they buy advertising at around $300 a month, Yelp can "do something" about prominently displayed negative reviews of their restaurants. If the claims are true, it sure lowers my opinion of Yelp, which I'd thought of as one of the good guys (and a useful site). I wonder how many other online review sites might be doing something similar.

Comments

Disappointing

[jetsci]

That's rather disappointing for a community based effort. My girlfriend and I use a similar site but it skimps on the advertisements: http://ottawafoodies.com/

Re:Disappointing

[von_rick]

I didn't think it was a 'well guarded secret' or anything. Squelching negative reviews of your business and dampening the highly positive reviews of your competitors has been the dominant practice ever since the dawn of two businesses selling similar products.

From the article it seems like Yelp had gathered a reputation of being impartial and fair. It understandable that people's confidence will diminish.

Re:Disappointing

[eddiegee]

The CEO's response makes mention of "anonymous sources" as being an issue with the article and mentions one interview subject as having posted "fake" reviews. He doesn't mention the other business named in the article that talk about being contacted by Yelp sales and given these terms. There are several mentioned.

This is coming from someone who has submitted a few Yelp reviews in myself. If this is Yelp's response I would have to say I'm still leery.

Re:Disappointing

[afidel]

From the CEO's response it seems like some sales droid was being overly pushy and overstating the facts, which is SOP for a salesmen in many fields. The actual practice of allowing a single positive review to be pinned and labeled at the top of the stack is perfectly acceptable IMHO. Personally I discount half of all negative reviews online since people tend to only go online if they have had a really good or bad experience, unless someone says they have repeatedly had bad service or food or almost all of the reviews for an establishment are bad then it's probably at worth at least trying out once.

Yelp bends over to restauranteurs already

[leroybrown]

I lost confidence in Yelp after I posted a negative review of an Italian bistro in Haddonfield, NJ (which I won't name to avoid giving them any free publicity) and it was removed after about a week. Over time other reviewers for the restaurant made references to their previous negative reviews being removed as well. My girlfriend and I had dinner at this place for Valentine's day last year and the experience was miserable. The food was bland and overpriced, and the kitchen manager was making very rude sexual comments about his dating life and experience with women. I wrote to the owner first explaining the problem and he responded with suggestions that I'm a prude, obviously don't know good food, would not be happy anywhere, and suggested that if I'd like to come back sometime (I live in PA), he'd be willing to settle this outside. So since I wasn't getting anywhere with that route, I posted both my and his emails into a yelp review. Gone a week later. I've watched the review section since then and have noticed several negative reviews go up and are then removed shortly after. Currently there are only two reviews up, with 3 and 5 stars. My only idea at this point is that the owner of the place (whose email address looks suspiciously like the word "douche") badgered Yelp into removing them.

Anyone else have this experience?

Re:Yelp bends over to restauranteurs already

[Culture20]

Keep posting them. Eventually that restaurant will run out of money in their "Yelp fund"

Bucket of salt

[Joe the Lesser]

after RTFA I am not so sure what's going on is clearcut, so take this story with some salt.

Clearly the sales reps are 'shaking down' some restaurants, but I think it's more likely that they are trying to inflate their own numbers and don't have the power they pretend or are wording it in such a way that it seems they can do more than they can.

What you get is just the ability to choose one review to be 'front and center'. Otherwise all reviews are placed by an algorithm. So a sales rep says 'we could help with that negative review' but what they mean is 'because you get to place one featured positive one at the top'

Re:Bucket of salt

[Jay L]

I think it's more likely that they are trying to inflate their own numbers and don't have the power they pretend or are wording it in such a way that it seems they can do more than they can.

I was thinking the same thing... If Yelp's search results change frequently, and if reviews are regularly removed (for any reason at all), couldn't this be a combination of two classic scams, plus confirmation bias?

1. The Perfect Prediction scam: You send postcards to 10,000 people, predicting the winner of tomorrow night's game. On half the postcards, you write the home team's name; on the other half, the visiting team's name. You keep track of who got which postcard. The day before the next game, you send 5,000 postcards - to only the people who got the "accurate" postcard. Repeat a few times, and you'll have a few hundred people who think you have the inside scoop on fixed games, and who will pay you for the next "prediction".

2. The White Van Speakers scam: "Psst! Hey, wanna buy some speakers? I, uh, these were left over after we did a high-end home theatre job. Yeah, and the boss said throw them out, but I figured someone could use them, you know? I'll let 'em go for only $500." When you get them home, you discover they do work, but they're horrible. Who are you going to complain to? You bought what you thought were stolen speakers out of the back of a van.

It seems to me that even if Yelp isn't *actually* gaming their reviews, there might be a sales team that's discovered it's in their best interest to *claim* they are. The recipe:

1. Wait till the next "Google dance" on Yelp.
2. Check out the newly-sorted review page for your potential client.
3. If they now have good reviews at the top, claim you did it, just to show what you can do.
4. If they have bad reviews, claim you can fix them.
4a. And if they turned you down last month, hint vaguely that this is the result.

Naturally, when the next Yelp dance occurs, that client will have a newly randomized set of results - and they may not be better than the current ones. But who are they going to complain to? "Hey, I paid to have negative reviews removed, and they're still up there."

I live a town over from Haddonfield

[geoffrobinson]

Please name names.

Re:True

[inviolet]

Absolutely true. I personally know a restaurant owner in San Francisco that complains about these suggestive calls.

Apparently the Better Business Bureau operates the same way, but with more obfuscation.

Membership in the BBB allows your company to 'respond' to customer complaints, which means that your company no longer has a nasty "complaints unresponded" number. You don't actually have to do anything about the complaints; you just have to respond, which requires member$hip.

MBAs are wrecking our society.

East Bay Express has conflict of interest here

[bikerider7]

Yelp directly competes with East Bay Express for restaurant reviews, and their "Best of" awards, so no surprise that the Express would run a Hit piece against Yelp. Moreover, the Express has also had controversies of its own in how it does reader "rankings" of local restaurants. And for those of us trying to improve local public transit, the author of this EB-Express article is very well known for her slanted and inaccurate hit pieces against AC Transit (the local bus service).

Re:Yes and no

[The name is Dave. Ja]

Yelp.com just neglected to pay _their_ protection money. This "exposé" (essentially a negative review) is just to show them what can happen.

Re:Yes and no

[tjonnyc999]

1. That some businesses would want to slander (or libel) the competition, yeah, that probably goes all the way back to the dawn of time.

Astroturfing and astro-slander goes on all the time, on almost every review site. After all, if a business is going to invest the time/effort into promoting themselves (via fake reviews), why not slander the competition while you're at it? Makes sense from the time-management point of view.

Which is why most countries have various numbers of laws to contain the phenomenon.

And we're all keenly aware of just how well those laws work. Everything on teh interwebz should be taken with a grain^H^H^H^H^H large industrial-sized shaker of salt.

We're in an age where someone's reputation is probably the most important asset of their business.

Completely agree with you here. This goes double for new businesses especially, that do not have an established brand name or an expensive marketing campaign to bring new customers. And triple for online-only-based businesses. Of course, the more valuable reputation / credo becomes, the more incentive there is for competitors to trash it. Unfortunately, unless and until the "general public" learns to distinguish astroturfed reviews from real ones, this will keep happening, and there's precious little anyone (legislators, review sites, or businesses themselves) can do about it. And considering the general mental skillset of the general public (i.e. "sheeple"), this isn't very likely to happen anytime soon.
All that being said, I'd like to point out (after positioning tongue firmly in cheek) that Yelp (and a few other sites I won't mention here) aren't threatening businesses with adding bad reviews, they're offering incentives to remove the existing bad reviews. Which, according to their terms, they're well within their rights to do. Ever notice the "we reserve the right to remove any review if it does not meet editorial qualifications" or "if we suspect fraudulent activity" or similar verbiage? It's there for a reason. So technically, it's not extortion. *takes tongue out of cheek*.