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Yelp To "Clarify" How Advertising Affects Listing
WrongSizeGlass writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Yelp is going to change some features in the wake of the class-action suit brought against it. Yelp has been accused of extortion; the Yelp co-founder denies all. The NY Times Bits blog has more details about the changes Yelp intends to make. According to Ars, the business that filed the lawsuit says that the newly announced changes do not address their original complaints at all."
FP!FP!
Yelp. Yell for Help!
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
just look about you, particularly towards the sky.
never a better time to consult with/trust in your creators. as it says in the manuals; everything made by man fails. that's neither good or bad, just true.
Did anyone else misread that as New York Times Tits blog?
One of the mentioned changes --- giving a link to see the reviews that Yelp's filtered out --- addresses some of the concerns, by at least making it possible to research what Yelp is filtering / not filtering (assuming they really show all reviews in the unfiltered view). The other change the article mentions seems totally besides the point though: the fact that businesses who paid could choose a review to always appear first was never the problem, because that was up-front and part of the advertising package. Removing that feature doesn't even seem necessary.
What the controversy is over is: did or didn't Yelp modify its filtering for particular entries based on whether they were advertisers, and did or didn't they get people (employees or associates) to add positive or negative reviews based on whether they were advertisers? And, separately from that, did their sales staff offer or threaten to do any of those things as part of the attempt to sell ads (and if they did, was that Yelp policy)?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Users 'Ninnle Linux (1460113)' and 'Ninnle Labs, LLC (1486095)' are nothing but poseurs, and no nothing about the true nature of Ninnle!
It's all about BATMAN!
Here's the inherent problem. Even if Yelp's policy specifically denies anybody's targeting non-advertisers for unfairly bad profiles, the sales team is made of individuals upset they're not getting a commission from the guy who decided not to buy ads. So, what's going to stop the sales team from trashing the profile of the non-advertiser? This is impossible to prevent unless the site has a staff-free sales system, like Google does with AdWords.
Yelp is shady. I can't wait until they are assimilated.
I searched the linked articles, and several articles linked from those, but couldn't find the word "clarify" in any of Yelp's statements. In fact, the only use I found was also in quotes, in the Ars article.
It appears Ars has decided to substitute scare quotes for "commentary." Readers ought to be informed that the "journalist" may be misleading them, because in fact, Yelp's changes (as "reported" by Ars) do not aim to "clarify how advertising affects listing."
(Please note that my last use of quotes was not intended to scare, but to set off language that came from another source. Sorry if I frightened anyone.)
If they were on the up and up to begin with, they wouldn't have to "clarify" anything.
Stop using Yelp. They have no credibility. Google Maps is now aggregating reviews of businesses. Use them instead.
Had these 2 links in my inbox this morning from Yelp:
http://officialblog.yelp.com/2010/04/announcing-steps-to-avoid-confusion-increase-transparency.html
http://officialblog.yelp.com/2010/03/yelp-review-filter-explained.html
I'll believe it when I see it. I know for a fact that the sales people do or at least did have direct influence over reviews and ranking of them. I'm talking to you James (sales person at Yelp)
If they do this it will make them more of a legitimate service other than just ad/revenue generation for themselves.
Yelp has been around for quite a while now. They turn up pretty highly listed when you search for businesses (at least in the Silicon Valley area). Their reviews are written by people like you and I who have visited these businesses and wish to let others know what their experiences were. When I'm trying to figure out where to eat I sometimes hit Google for suggestions and Yelp is always right there in the top listings.
Do those Yelp reviews affect where I'm going to go (and take others)? You bet it does. There's good and bad restaurants out there and I'm always interested in any clue I can find to avoid a "meh" dining experience.
But there's other sources of information I draw upon - and I've NEVER found a situation where what the Yelp review said was significantly different from what others had to say. What is out there are a lot of businesses being run by people with no business knowledge at all which provide lousy service and substandard food. When someone like Yelp publishes reviews from people who have had bad experiences at that restaurant - the business decides to use the legal system to suppress those bad reviews rather than deal with the problems in their businesses.
Is it possible that some Yelp advertising salesman decided to adjust the ratings to make a sale? Yup, it's possible and it's probably happened. But that doesn't invalidate the larger number of well-deserved bad ratings. There's some really crappy restaurants out there and nothing anyone can say is going to make them acceptable. One SLAPP suit doesn't invalidate what Yelp is trying to do - they could do it better but they're providing a valuable service.
So last year the business I work for started getting AstroTurf by a competing business. I work in an entertainment type venue at night, yadda yadda yadda, whatever...
Our competitor basically said that we were a dull venue, but if folks wanted a non-dull venue to please try theirs. They and their gang would re-write their reviews on a weekly basis just so it would float to the top. To the yelp staff, these fake reviews were deemed credible because one of the ringleaders of this astroturfing had an "Elite" next to his name, I guess that makes him special.
One of my regulars, who is also a yelp "Elite" responded by rewriting his review, but included a ton of links to youtube video of our venue that wasn't staged, showing it was lively. Yelp removed the review saying "It contained to many external links" after the other "Elite" douchebag and his buddies flagged it. (When google was thinking about buying yelp, I sent snail mail letters to the google executive staff with a printout of the review and an explanation. I put in big bold letters googles mission statement of "DO NO EVIL". I hope it changed their minds when it came to buying them out)
Back on subject though. NOTHING got yelp to let up. While all this was happening, we got emails and phone calls from yelp salespeople *CONSTANTLY* promising this would all stop if we joined their ad program. We even tried their "Owner comments" but after a few weeks they banned us because we didn't comment according to *their* guidelines.
One reviewer said, "Your waitress looks like the hooker from hamburger hill, me so horny". I think I said something equally offensive to him. Yelp holds business's at a double standard for how they can comment from the reviewers, it's complete bullshit. We got banned from commenting for responding the way our reviewer did? Why didn't they ban him?
Eventually I got tired of it. I recruited friends to start photoshopping the heads of some of the astroturfers on transvestites, gay porn, whatever. We'd post this weekly on our website. We also started dropping dox on our website on slobbleman and the rest of his crew.
Like magic, our sort order returned to normal. Yelp stopped calling us, the little shittards that astroturfing us stopped as well.
I hate yelp. I hate slobbleham and his whole fucking extortion scheme. I have no doubt there will be some slashdotters that are "ELITES" that will have a problem with what I say, and what I saw but let me ask you this..
Have you ever worked at a business that was being actively astroturfed by a competitor? Did yelp offer to genuinely help you or did they tell you paraphrasically "Pay us or go fuck yourself?"
That's what they told me, paraphrasically. Fuck you slobbleman, I hope you choke on a dick.
The other change the article mentions seems totally besides the point though: the fact that businesses who paid could choose a review to always appear first was never the problem, because that was up-front and part of the advertising package. Removing that feature doesn't even seem necessary. Massage
from the former-lawsuit-is-an-ex-tort department
ex-tort
extort
Yelp was accused of extortion! I get it!
No, really, I liked that pun; keep up the good work.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
The fundamental problem with user review sites is that they don't work unless the number of reviewers is large compared to the number of things reviewed. Yelp needs a statistically significant sample size per thing reviewed to work. Movies, yes. Resorts, probably. Major restaurants, maybe. Local plumbers, no. Joe's Plumbing will be reviewed by Joe, Joe's brother in law, Joe's plumbing supply house rep, and maybe a customer.
That's bad enough, but Yelp sales reps "making you an offer you can't refuse" is worse. There are small businesses that live in terror of Yelp.
Back in the 1990s, the SF Bay Area had a "rating service" which got into trouble for extortion. This was before the Web got big. They used window stickers in participating businesses, and heavily promoted their ratings. Their sales pitch to businesses was "your competitor has one of our stickers, shouldn't you buy one too?". They were shut down.
-- check the history of the Better Business Bureau, it's rating system, how it is financed, etc.
Yelp is just more of the same of the worst part of the BBB, but on the web.
Nothing new here, move along, move along.
NotYelp.com is starting...
Disclaimer: I work for NotYelp.
NotYelp.com [notyelp.com] is starting...
Disclaimer: I work for NotYelp.
A new approach to reviews has emerged which does not rely on written user reviews but rather uses the principles of market research to determine the user experience of any service provider. It does rely on advertising and enables businesses to work with their customers in a more direct way. The service is called the Customer Satisfaction Monitor (www.customersatisfactionmonitor.com).
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