Two law firms, Beck & Lee from Miami and The Weston Firm in San Diego, have filed a class action lawsuit in Los Angeles federal court alleging unfair business practices by local business review and rating website operator Yelp.
The plaintiff in the suit, a veterinary hospital in Long Beach, CA, is said to have requested that Yelp remove a negative review from the website, which was allegedly refused by the San Francisco startup, after which its sales representatives repeatedly contacted the hospital demanding payments of roughly $300 per month in exchange for hiding or deleting the review.
Sounds familiar, you say?
You may be thinking of last year, when East Bay Express ran an explosive story, basically accusing Yelp of being in the ‘Business of Extortion 2.0′, which covered similar ground. Shortly after reporter Kathleen Richards published the article, Yelp vehemently denied everything and called her piece inaccurate.
Now, the company will have to defend itself in court rather than on its company blog.
The lawsuit essentially alleges that the heavily funded startup runs an “extortion scheme” and has “unscrupulous sales practices” in place to generate revenue, in which the company’s employees call businesses demanding monthly payments in the guise of advertising contracts, in exchange for removing or modifying negative reviews.
The case, which is styled Cats and Dogs Animal Hospital Inc. v. Yelp Inc., was filed on February 23, 2010, and is pending in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. We have an e-mail in with Yelp and are awaiting a response.
Update: a Yelp representative commented as follows:
Yelp provides a valuable service to millions of consumers and businesses based on our trusted content. The allegations are demonstrably false, since many businesses that advertise on Yelp have both negative and positive reviews. These businesses realize that both kinds of feedback provide authenticity and value. Running a good business is hard; filing a lawsuit is easy. While we haven’t seen the suit in question, we will dispute it aggressively.
The class action lawsuit comes mere weeks after Yelp took a large investment from Elevation Partners, and months after we reported the company walked away from a $550 million Google acquisition deal.
(Image via Gawker)
Good lawsuit, Yelp is scum.
How do you know this?
Anyone who answers the phone at a small business listed on Yelp can confirm this.
Why? I’m curious as to why you think this? If they don’t like the service, why would they continue to support it? Thanks.
Interesting…
I posted a very poor review of the Bainbridge Athletic Club and what do you know… it is gone. They left another poor review about an extension which has since been closed, but mine was very specific, very detailed, and very critical about their extremely poor customer service.
Interesting becasue I liked Yelp… but I have now deleted them from my bookmarks.
Any other reviewer sites to recommend or avoid?
To follow up…
I went into my account information and… poof… my full review is still listed in my “Recent Reviews” which means that it still exists, but why is it not on Bainbridge Athletic Club’s review page?
I would not place my bets on a company in which its strings is being pulled by a bigger network of corporations. Well, anyway.. The reason why they turned their backs to the half a billion offer by G remains a mystery. Details: http://bit.ly/yelp-decline-google-best-worst
Perhaps, this event is a godsent for G, to think that what it’ll buy could be an ‘extortionist company’ (if proven guilty)
looks like Google doged a bullet here
Here’s a tip to learn this for sure, and journalists take note, it makes for a fun investigation.
Try to get in touch with Yelp sales staff, saying you want to pay for a listing. Use a real or fake business and try to get them to call you.
First off they’ll take like a month to follow up. When they do its some snarky stoned kid who sounds like an intern, joking with their friends in the background and basically treating you like you’re a waste of their time. Like you’re sucking up valuable chat time with their buddies in the cubicle next door. They can’t even answer basic questions like “what do I get if I advertise?” or “how much does it cost?”.
Now, hang up in disgust. Then, imagine having a real business with reviews you want to remove. Watch how that attitude translates into an extortion scheme by the untrained, unmonitored sales staff.
I don’t doubt this stuff for a minute.
Here’s another tip about another company that’s been an even bigger offender – RipOffReport.com run by an ex-con who’s been employing the same ‘extortion model’ beyond just business reviews.
Here’s an extensive thread that documents a legal quagmire worthy of a 60 Minutes investigation, including horror stories of businesses and individuals completely destroyed by anonymous posters , and in some cases, stalkers:
http://bit.ly/HDDu4
The thread allegedly claims the operation goes to great extremes to hide behind a shell company with servers hidden offshore in Turkey.
Much litigation is pending employing tactics such as the Communications Decency Act, the RICO Act, and even the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Beyond ROR’s “advocacy program” where you can “protect your company” from the anonymous comments for thousands of dollars a month, this has spawned a sub-culture industry of “reputation defender” companies that will, for a range of prices, attempt to bury the offending ROR page further down the Goggle search results index. It’s even been thought that the bottom-feeders behind ROR have also started many of these companies.
Nothing like a full-circle racket.
Perhaps the lawyers at Beck & Lee and The Weston Firm might also set their class-action sights on ROR. It’s one thing to enjoy Freedom of Speech, it’s also quite another thing to enjoy Freedom of Protection from anonymous, false and defamatory attacks.
WOW – the internet seems to be going to hell in a handbasket. More and more garbage; harder and harder to find stuff we can trust.
Why don’t you find out for yourself. Find out a restaurant in your area that has less than 4 stars rating in your neighborhood. Then go talk to the owner of that restaurant and ask him if YELP has contacted him.
Chances are, he is going to tell you “Yes. And the offered to remove my negative ratings if I pay them 300 dollars in ad fees. They also threatened to remove the two 5 star ratings if I DON’T pay them 300 dollars in advertising fee
This is pure daylight extortion . YELP’s CEO who calls himself “Big Daddy” or whatever is a total egomaniacal loser.
He has responded many times to these allegations completely denying them, but on his blog, which has COMMENTS DISABLED, so it is a one way tirade.
Are you kidding me ?!
$360/month….told them I couldn’t afford that. Two days later, several of my 5 star reviews were removed and my star rating was dropped. GOOOO lawsuit! F Yelp!
Biz Owner
They filtered all our 5 stars review after we pulled the ad!
$300/month to advertise or your listing an ratings do not show up. First hand experience.
should’ve sold to google when it had the chance. besides, yelp reviews are skewed. how can you be “objective” about personal taste in food and restaurant service?
how is any review not “skewed”?
We’ve actually been trying to work on this problem and have found that unless your reviewing something as objective as megapixels on a camera, reviews really should be taken with a (large) grain of salt.
Our solution is video. I’d be curious to know what you think.
http://www.mycitylives.com
cheers
by not filtering it through some pseudo algorithm involving 300 buck
here’s how it could work: weight the rankings based on user agreement. if you and i both give restaurant A a 4-star rating, then we probably like the same thing. so if you give restaurant B a 2-star rating, that should matter more to me than the rating of some anonymous joe.
it would be easy to do, and it would add tremendous value to facebook.
however, if it’s true (and the east bay express evidence is really compelling) that facebook’s business model is extortion, they have no interest in making the rankings more relevant and more transparent.
Yelp. Not Facebook.
Don’t be a whiner. I have eaten at Yelp 4+ star restaurants (at least 75 or so) over the past couple of years. NEVER had a bad experience. The reviews are quality. I’ve also been compelled to write 50 reviews, myself. It’s not about personal taste, it’s the wisdom of crowds.
Dave…that may be true but the fact remains that Yelp reviews are not always legitimate. I’ve heard business owners say that they create false positve reviews for their own businesses and false negative reviews for their competition. And unfortunately, stupid people believe everything they read.
Crowd wisdom is an oxymoron. The aesthetic of a crowd is the classic herd mentality, and should be trusted the same way. That is why good critics are trusted and enjoy a lot of prestige: they bring deep domain knowledge and a fundmental sense of good taste that you will never get from a crowd.
Yelp is scum…no doubt
I actually know of a two local businesses that paid and got -ive reviews removed…I am not sure about the quid pro quo here but the businesses were convinced that by paying they were able to get rid of the bad reviews and highlight the good ones
Yelp is all about extortion 2.0 style… run by Jeremy and his henchmen…
Karma is a bitch…
ah, it seems that techcrunch does a lot of editing… now how come that seems familiar?
here’s my original reply.. which got edited above?
Jeremy is a douche.. we all know you run a con game at yelp… and it’s the reason google ran for the hills after some due diligence (oh, yeah I know you tried to spin it as you guys walked away from the deal- nobody believes that!)
yelp is all about extortion and charging ridiculous fees to manipulate ratings.
let’s see if Techcrunch has the balls to leave this comment up without “editing”??
Yes, my negative reviews were deleted as well. But this is the same story across them all. Check out Rewardsnetwork.com, Upromise.com,IDINE.com – there isn’t a single negative rating. The reason being that they don’t allow anything below a certain rating post online – which they use to market their services.
It’s about time this started coming out. I’ve been dealing with the devious tactics of YELP for over a year. My story reads….The girlfriend of a business competitor of mine , who runs YELP in the major Northeast metro center in which I work(yes, Boston)- has actively traded favorable YELP mentions and events to obtain exclusive and preferential treatment her Boyfriend’s liquor business. I always thought I just had to bite my tongue because I looked like a jerk for complaining about it.
Good luck Yelpers- you get what you deserve….
I think its time for Yelp to have better policies as well as a sales process. I’d imagine that its a little tough to generate/grow revs with their model and this may be compounded by the fact that they’re well funded. But we’ve heard so much about this that it makes you think some of it might be true.
I’d bet that yelp lacks a “standards of business conduct” policy. It’s a common oversight for young companies until they get their private parts in a wringer.
Well business conduct doesn’t necessarily have to be published to the public. A code of conduct is internal and even still isn’t instilled in paper but by the moral and ethics of its employees and environment. Some where inside Yelp they must have slowly bread this type of mentality that has been passed on over time and now become expected. Each new recruit is indoctrinated into the system of promoting the site via extortion and coercion. Lets just say I don’t think it’s easy to just change on paper. They may have to get rid of a lot of the management to make the new policy trickle down appropriately.
In the meantime there should be room for others to jump in like http://www.baduku.com to show new perspectives on how to approach reviews.
businesses everywhere are rejoicing right now and just wait till you see the pace with which they join the lawsuit…
I agree.
I am in a year contract with them now, which ends in a few months. Complete waste of $$$ for us but can see it would work for the top rated companies.
I had positive reviews removed from our listing & when I called to complain they gave me an algorithm excuse & said they couldn’t reinstate them.
I asked them what the point of having a listing was if they removed positive reviews. She kind of danced around it.
Lucky Us…..
I’d like to hear more about your experience and some ideas you may have to make it better. If you’re interested, ping me back at olzj@msn.com. Thanks.
Same things happed to my small bz. Multiple positive comments were deleted by Yelp; and only left negative comment. The negative comments have hurt our bz and as result, we have to lay off 5 people.
Yelp deserves the BAD Karma they created themselves.
If you’re rejoicing about this, then you’re either a micro-business, or provide crappy customer service. There are small local restaurants and services who have built their whole businesses around their Yelp reputations… I don’t know whether or not they do shady things like remove reviews for money — I tend to doubt it. But regardless, $300/mo as an ad fee to be able to have a presence on their site, and drive thousands of dollars in monthly revenue, is a good thing.
You’re never going to escape the basic premise of your customers speaking out about you online. It’s only going to get louder and more in your face.
sarcasm…i thought it was obvious. Sorry
What about the third kind of business that would be rejoicing: businesses which have been targeted by their competitors with really bad, phony reviews?
I recently trashed one of my compeititors on a different review site with about 20 clevery written, bad reviews. Wow did they look terrible! They probably don’t even know what hit them!
Personally, I love review sites! Unless someone does that to me of course.
You’re clearly a giant douche.
You are a scumbag. But thanks for posting that tidbit for all those helpless yelpers out there. You are messing with the livelihood of hard working families. What about all the jobs lost when businesses have to close because they get bashed by jerks like you??? Someone mentioned karma in this thread……you should watch out.
$300/month for 500 ad impressions which you cannot track and could be eaten up by your personal visits to the site is not ‘a good thing’ no matter how you spin it. Add to this the fact that there is no tracking, fulfillment, or spotlighting (place a tracking pixel on their page to see how your campaign is doing) and you basically have a 1996 implementation of advertising that fools most businesses into thinking they’re in control.
I asked for a simple free trial for my fiance’s business just to see how effective the program was and they refused to even do that.
After speaking to a scripted ‘salesperson’ who didn’t know what the word CPM meant, I finally got in touch with Yelp’s Director of NYC Sales and he refused to put me in touch with an engineer to find out more about how their algorithm worked nor budge on any of their ridiculous rates.
Here is an example of rates that were quoted to my Fiance’s Salon, Bloom Beauty Lounge, in NYC:
-$300/mo – 500 ad impressions/mo
-$500/mo – 1,200 ad impressions/mo
-$1,000/mo – 3,000 ad impressions/mo
Note that those rates require a YEAR long commitment. I can stop and start a Google adwords campaign after a few minutes.
Here are the rates if you wish to go month to month:
-$350/mo for 500 ad impressions/mo
-$575/mo for 1,200 ad impressions/mo
-$1,200 for 3,000 ad impressions/mo
To add to the review deletion horror stories, my fiance just opened a few weeks ago and 5 of her clients wrote reviews. After a week, the profile went from 5 reviews down to 1. Now her clients are complaining to her that Yelp deleted their reviews, and she has to put up with the lack of Customer Service on Yelp’s behalf.
Talk about a trainwreck!
Here is the Yelp page in question in case anyone wants to see the ‘algorithm’ in action:
http://www.yelp.com/biz/bloom-beauty-lounge-manhattan
Pretty unbelievable. But if Yelp contacts the reviewer, and the reviewer is legitimate, then Yelp is no obligated to take the review down. Unless their unfounded and slanderous accusations.
Now if they offered to take it down for a price, that should be criminal.
well, not so fast. i agree with you, offering to tailor the reviews for a price is shady. but it’s definitely not criminal. it’s their website, after all, they can advertise however they want on it.
the point for us is, yelp isn’t a reliable reviews board. clearly, yelp is making money by distorting user reviews by how accessible they are. shame on them for pretending to be representative of user reviews.
Well this isn’t good for Yelp, they’re a pretty cool and fast growing (it seems) site too.
I used to think so until they censored my review without any legitimate reason.
I had no idea they did this. If all this is true, Yelp has a pretty reprehensible business model.
They are cool for shaking down businesses? Or are they cool for deleting reviews that their users submit?
You make an excellent point.
funny cause just recently i was doing a search for a pet insurance company that a friend reviewed months ago. i used 20 different search strings with a combination of 5 different cities, including the main city they operate in. Nothing. Calling yelp didn’t help when I asked them why I could no longer find this company, but with the help of my friend who bookmarked the page, you could only find it that way. Yelp never responded.
im assuming this company ” http://www.yelp.com/biz/vpi-pet-insurance-brea ” paid more than enough to get unlisted because of their almost 100% negative reviews.
i love that now when i see those stickers on business windows, ill know someone got paid something.
that company you linked to has a P.O. Box listed as the address. is it a local company?
its a nationwide company with their headquarters in Brea, CA (and other offices in ny and chicago). In the past, the minute you typed in the business address in ANY city, their listing came up. Now, even if you specify the city they actually operate in, you get no hits. The ONLY way to find this listing is through a bookmarked link. I asked Yelp time and time again and only those emails get ignored. They’ll communicate back regarding any other topic so its apparent to me they don’t want to discuss what happened. Which, in my mind, can only mean one thing…
This insurance company paid up.
While it may be a pain to pay for it, actually having the ability to remove negative comments is an extremely valuable service. It may seem shady, but it’s certainly not criminal. People who have bad experiences say extremely rude and ignorant things about businesses. Some may be warranted, but many are not.
Yelp has plenty of bad reviews, but they are often constructively bad, as in “this particular one of a company’s services did not work for me”.
The way to not get a bad review is to provide good service. Yelp may be doing us all a favor by charging bad businesses an extra fee for their failings.
Also, if the insurance company had enough bad reviews to warrant paying to become unlisted, then we’re all better off not having it come up in search. No news is good news, right?
“The way to not get a bad review is to provide good service. Yelp may be doing us all a favor by charging bad businesses an extra fee for their failings. ”
Taking payoffs that skew actual feedback either positively or negatively is simply a fraud on the users of the service, end of story.
Furthermore, if the story is true, it’s obvious that there’s a huge financial incentive for Yelp to *pay* a little something to some anonymous “reviewer” to do nothing but post negative reviews – then offer $300/mo to remove them.
Taking payoffs that skew actual feedback either positively or negatively is simply a fraud on the users of the service, end of story.
Are you the same Phil who posted on this thread about leaving fake bad reviews about a competitor?
If so, you are galactic douche and a hypocrite!
Pete,
I used to think so, too, but we have great reviews for our stores (all organic reviews as well) and we don’t pay, so when Yelp sent us the stickers for the door, of course we put them up. They’ve not gotten a dime from us. Oh..they have TRIED…and tried and tried. And when we said “no” the few negative reviews somehow reappeared. Extortion? You betcha. But…I kept hammering on them…and now only the reviews (good and not-so-good) are included.
I look forward to seeing how this plays out.
really funny that they now just responded to my email (nice timing or coincidence)
“Yelp’s search results are based on an algorithm that is designed to provide the most relevant results based on a number of different factors”
I’d love to know those algorithms because I tested as many use cases as possible, including being logged in, out, starbucks ip address, address, city, state, misspellings, shortened version of the name… you name it.
I guess those algorithms would just confuse me. Thanks for doing me a favor yelp. Im done with you.
you gotta love yelp. because they saw my complaint on techcrunch, they emailed me and said the problem was fixed… and that i can now find that listing… how convenient.
and by convenient, i mean bullsh*t
I’m a hairdresser whom is booth rent. And you’re right! As My friend Sean calls it: you have to be a yelp warrior! I know other salons in the area pay out the ass to have their reviews not messed with. I’ve had a bunch of great reviews just go away. and bad reviews stay up and had to contract the reviewer. in some cases with the bad reviews just emailing them politely asking them to come back and apologizing the review is removed and never seen again.
Here’s my thing the bad reviews are written by other hairdressers…kinda like that giant d-bag Phil on this thread. Using terms like 90′ cut beveled cut and rv6? really? fake reviews suck and yelp calls ALL THE TIME! Even comes in to our salon.
yes – someone probably paid a lot to promote a company like this
More likely than not this is the act of a lone idiot who wanted to ramp-up his commision.
And leave it to a legal firm to come up with a way to “mine” someone with a class action suit.
This.
I dunno, I keep hearing stories about Yelp doing exactly what is claimed in the lawsuit. If it’s true – and I think it is based on the number of stories I’ve read about this behavior – then it’s despicable, and they deserve to suffer for it.
No this has happened to me as well. same story differant name…
well that lone idiot must work in boston, and LA, and san francisco, and florida – and all over the united states! what a coincidence! or not!
Not that it makes any difference in the suit whatsoever, but I wonder how much this business has gained vs. lost on Yelp…It does have an average of 4/5 stars, which is damn good. http://andrewjkaplan.com
Hint for the future- if you’re going to pretend that you’re not the owner of the link you’re pasting in and saying “this business” and wondering about…. might want to not have your user name be the same as the link.
Just FYI. Because, you know, it just makes you look like an idiot.
I think he was referring to the business that filed the lawsuit. Not his .sig.
Hrm, someone looks like an idiot but it isn’t Andrew.
If this is true then they are in trouble
If this is true then I hope the jury will bankrupt Yelp.
If this is true then my name’s also Barry Manilo.
Hi Barry
Yes, because I’m sure that every single employee of Yelp fully deserves to have to go hunting for a job. It couldn’t possibly be the work of a select group or even one or to individuals.
Yes, because Yelp employees deserve priority over those small businesses who got screwed.
After all, these mom/pop stores are faceless insignificant entities, and the damage they incurred is not quantifiable.
well said! Possibly the best comment on TC I’ve ever read.
Inc. magazine had an article about Yelp in their February 2010 issue ( http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100201/youve-been-yelped.html ). Before I read the article, I was barely aware of Yelp. Now I think the site is a great idea, but some of the methods they use to generate revenue are questionable from my point of view.
Yelp ~ Comscore
There is nothing wrong for Yelp to call businesses who have bad reviews and sell them advertising.
I seriously doubt Yelp can delete bad reviews/offer to delete bad reviews. They are too smart to compromise their editorial integrity.
Seems to me Yelp and the Web is shedding light into many industries/businesses that for a long time avoided scrutiny and this is IRREVERSIBLE. The solution is for businesses with negative reviews to clean up their acts and for Yelp to investigate complaints fairly and strengthen their processes as they have been.
they don’t necessarily delete reviews, though they will rearrange reviews for businesses who pay.
I’ve also seen screenshots where a user sees different reviews being logged in vs logged out.
Caught them red handed…
http://media.libsyn.com/media/livemusicpodcast/jack_gage_scammed_by_yelp.doc
Wait, why do they have to show your review?
I do not disagree your point. However their slogan is misleading and disingenuous. I guess you could say the same thing about that “Fair & Balanced” cable station but I think it is far less obvious on Yelp.com and they deserve to be exposed. The internet will be a better place for it if they are.
There are reviews order are tailored to your profile when you are logged in and not when you are logged out….I don’t believe that this is some weird controlling thing that has to do with being a user or not.
Rearranged? How about completely removed from public view!
My poor costumer service review is gone….
Although I love Yelp and think its a great product, I think your comments are bit biased. I don’t think you can assume institutions won’t break the law because “they are too smart”. If that was the case, we wouldn’t have Sarbox.
Man, I wish TechCrunch were more like Yelp. I could pay them to have your comment removed because I don’t like it.
Whoa, did I just stumble upon the greatest way to monetize a blog ever?
Yes. Yes you did. One suggestion, though.
Instead of a blog, make it an online newspaper or something to that effect. The kind of fights that get started in those could kill a man at 50 paces.
So…a business owner didn’t like a review. Tried to get it removed…and then claimed foul?
Sounds like the same old hogwash blackmail routine.
A headache for Yelp, but from everything i’ve seen it looks like the same old B.S. to me.
Might help to read the article.
A business owner didn’t like a review. Called to have it removed. Yelp told them they’d ‘remove it’ if they paid them a monthly fee.
That’s the problem. Not the review part, but the “pay us if you want the bad reviews to disappear.” If Yelp was/is doing this, or using this as a sales pitch, then it could be considered Extortion.
Oh I read the article. I also know that given the tech savvy of a lot of business owners, it would be very easy to misunderstand, “You’re welcome to place an add on the page” as “We’ll change it for a fee”. A point re-affirmed in my opinion by the fact that the business owner, thought they could get a bad review removed to begin with.
From what I’ve read Yelp has a very thorough and strict feedback system. They’re also very sensitive to any type of immoral behavior by their sales people. Had a minor complaint about a call I’d received a while back and was very impressed by how they handled it.
Agreed. I too had experience with Yelp and the small business and was very pleased with how they handled things.
This is total crap. Finally a site that allows customers to organize and form opinions and as soon as people do, the local businesses get pissed. These businesses simply need to use the site properly by taking the comments as feedback and use them to do better by their customers. That said if yelp is allowing business to pay for reviews to be pulled then they need to stop this practice. However, paying for advertising seems perfectly fine to me….
Right and therein lies the problem. There will always be a small but vocal minority of disgruntled business owners that don’t want their customers to speak out. Websites are protected from those disgruntleds taking any action against them, under the Communications Decency Act which holds users responsible for their postings.. But some yahoo at Yelp might have gotten overzealous and made promises of removing reviews for money, which makes things messier.
Regardless though — all the crybabies out there need to realize that they can’t stop people from speaking out online. What they should be doing, is a) steering their happy customers to write reviews, b) posting replies to reviews if they allow this, and c) contesting reviews from non-customers. Anything else is ridiculous.
“real people, real reviews” – NOT. It started that way and it was great. Now I don’t trust them.
The problem is that Yelp filters reviews. We've had two reviews for our small business. One negative and one positive. The positive one no longer shows up. It was a totally legit review too, from a very happy customer. Yelp does not even acknowledge that it ever existed.
One issue with Yelp is the credibility of the reviewer. You don’t know if they have an alternative motive when writing a review like friends of a certain company leaving a glowing review or a competitor giving a business one or two stars. This maybe where some problems arise. I think Yelp should have a credibility check system in place to try and prevent this. Maybe a rating system for reviewers beyond the “elite” status.
I just yelped yelp itself and found some interesting results. They have many 4 and 5 star reviews but a good amount of posts with one or two star ratings. Some reviews state that yelp blackmails small businesses. This leads me to believe that they subject themselves and their reviews to the same algorithm as any other business.
If Yelp was in the practice of removing bad reviews for cash, don’t you think they would *maybe* remove bad reviews of themselves?
….. or if they’re leaving a negative review having never actually been there. This has happened to many establishments after having a bad story posted on a blog somewhere.
trash!! its not a site that would compromise in ethics and integrity. its acquisition by google speaks itself.
“its acquisition by google speaks itself.”
You’re kidding, right?
Google lacks ethics in many areas.
Psst. Yelp is a privately-owned business that hosts consumer-created reviews. You don’t have to like or put up with them.
If you don’t want bad reviews on Yelp, try being a better business, yourself.
If Yelp wants to charge you to hide a review, then they’ll charge you. They’re at absolutely NO obligation to do it for free.
believe it or not, even privately-owned businesses are subject to the law. crazy, huh?
Tell that to the Mafia…
Yelp is pretty shady. I’ve stopped using them.
Actually, the definition of blackmail is to demand compensation to prevent/commit an action that is other wise truthful or legal to do.
So for example in the David Letterman blackmail incident, it was true he was having affairs, and it’s perfectly legal to publicly expose Letterman, but when the guy demanded money from Letterman, that was criminal blackmail.
Yelp seems to be doing the same, asking for $ in order to remove the negative review. Keeping the review up is perfectly legal along with taking it down. It’s the act of asking for $ that potentially offends.
Even if it’s bs that a business ask that a negative review be taken down, it’s way worse if Yelp, a company that advertises itself as being all about people’s reviews, actually contacts the business and says that they will take the review down for a fee.
I’ve also heard from one business own that Yelp asked for a fee or else it would not allow reviews of the business to remain online.
If either is true, and undermines Yelp’s credibility completely.
This lawsuit is welcome, and I’m surprised it took this long for someone to fight back!
I’ve run a company in the local merchant lead gen space. It’s very tough to get the attention of small business owners and sell them an advertising service…especially at several hundreds/mo.
However, they respond more to fear than greed. Fear in this case is that this thing called the web (or the social web) is eating away at its customer base…then they’ll pay attention.
We changed our sales tactic to take advantage of this dynamic and it was very successful without being unethical as Yelp.
However, many merchants confirmed this disgusting approach by Yelp sales people. They know it’s the only way for them to get dollars in. But it’s not sustainable as a business.
I’m surprised Google or Elevation are valuing the company at such a high rate, because it’s essentially a web version of “la cosa nostra”…
I am not defending their business practice… but how is Yelp’s strategy any different than the Better Business Bureau?
+1 This is precisely the BBB business strategy.
Exactly. BBB is even more open about being pay-to-play
The BBB doesn’t tell you, “Pay us or the reputation gets it.” If you are not already a member of the BBB, then when someone complains to them about you it means nothing. It doesn’t get posted on some website where people go for referrals … it does not appear anywhere.
Yelp posts anything about anyone and claims to offer the “wisdom of the masses”. Then, they offer you an opportunity to modify the profile that has been created for you by persons unknown who posted a review of some kind by subscribing to their service. Otherwise, the review stays.
Now, if Yelp simply posted the reviews, like Angie’s List does, then that would not be a problem. The problem is that they charge people with the promise of rearranging the comments in their profile to project a more positive image. There is no mechanism in place to guarantee that a bunch of bad reviews have not been posted by your competition, or by Yelp employees with the intention of perpetrating their “advertising” scam. There are no protections, and no guarantee of service.
All Yelp offers is a “pay us now, or regret it later” proposition that no business owner should be faced with.
Those businesses should spend their time treating their customers well instead of complaining about bad reviews.
They do. You just don’t know about it.
Right, because Yelp reviews are always true.
Gaurang and EH, you are spot on.
The logic that puts the onus on businesses to “manage” their reviews and “do better” assumes that the customers posting the reviews are sane, reasonable, and well-meaning. But, we have seen extortion work the other way (against our online business).
“Customers” have attempted to defraud us, then when caught, threatened to post negative comments about our service on forums and blogs if we terminated their accounts. A few have actually made good on their threats and have even claimed that we defrauded them. How’s that for a kick in the head?
It’s a near no-win for the business to plead its case when the complainer isn’t earnest in the first place. Sure, you could say that the overwhelming majority of reviews being positive helps to outweigh the negative, but what business needs the undeserved taint?
And, interestingly, many people (as evidenced by Jillo’s post and several others) tend to automagically give the “customer” the benefit of the doubt. The business has to prove itself, but an individual frequently has instant credibility simply by appearing to be a customer, especially if his/her review is negative.
This is exactly why a service such as Yelp has so much power over businesses should they chose to wield it inappropriately (I don’t have any experience to say whether they are).
I love this. I hope many more lawsuits are filed against this scumbag company. I know a lot of business owners who have negative reviews about their products on the site (Yelp won’t remove them) and any positive reviews by genuine customers of those companies are manually removed by Yelp staff.
I have to imagine that the Google lawyers properly (and thoroughly) vetted Yelp before they offered to acquire them.
While there may indeed be some less-than-scrupulous things going on over at Yelp (hard to judge without all the facts), I’d be surprised if it rises to the level of formal illegality.
That assumes that Google’s lawyers handle acquisitions better than they handle feature roll-outs. Considering they allowed the privacy nightmare that is Buzz see the light of day long before it was ready for public use, I have serious doubts. Google, and presumably Google’s lawyers, don’t have the best track record when it comes to recognizing ethical and legal gray areas. Or perhaps they do recognize them, but don’t care.
uh…like they did before launching GOOGLE BUZZ???
another class action right there!
The other thing is that no one knows for sure what the big G had in mind with the Yelp acquisition. They could have promptly exited or evolved the seemingly shady part of the business to make it legitimate, and simply sought to plug this merchant DB into some new/existing G product (or plugged that product into Yelp).
But, as far as Yelp goes, clearly if the treatment of any customer review in any way varies based on whether that business is paying them, then they’ve got a lot of splainin’ to do.
yelp is a fake wannabe hustler site.
How is this any different from Classmates.com charging people to see photos of them / read messages people are trying to send them? How is this different from Facebook requiring that you create / sign into an account before you can see photos you’ve been tagged in? If you don’t like that someone posted photos of you at a party on Facebook, you have to create an account to see them and remove tags. Accounts are free, sure, but its exactly the same in spirit.
It does sound like Yelp is shady and needs to have a clear code of ethics. However, they’re basically running a service that you have to pay for if you want to manage information about your business. Businesses can request to have their business removed from Yelp if they don’t like the service, can they not?
Well, it’s different in that, if Classmates.com had nude pictures of you, and called you up and asked you to pay them $300 to NOT let your friends see them.
Or if Facebook knew your employer, and told you that you had to pay them $1000 for them to NOT let your employer see those risque photos of you at the party on that day you called in sick.
No they can not have their business removed.
It’s about time. 1. VC’s gives a couple hipsters money 2. They buy a database of businesses 3. They start holding businesses hostage with their reviews asking for “advertising”
Again – just because its VC and hipsters and cute little “yelpers” doesn’t make it right – these are shady sales practices for anyone.
if it weren’t for the web2 glow on yelp, we wouldn’t even be discussing this…replace “yelp” with “yellow pages” and ask yourself if this wouldn’t be a slam-dunk case. the question isn’t if the case has merit, but why it has taken this long for the legal system to become involved
Yelp is total BS assclown scammery. Yelp takes down positive reviews when businesses don’t advertise with them. Meanwhile they purposely leave up negative reviews.
i have reason to believe that Yelp purposely rigs the system. It’s called payola. If a company pays them tons of “advertising” money, then the positive reviews stay in focus. when a company declines on their “advertising, all that’s left is the negative reviews.
Meanwhile, there’s no proof that Yelp employees aren’t writing some of those reviews to prep for the sales calls. This tactic is quite obvious when there are negative reviews posted about a company that has records of clients (such as a doctor’s office) and there’s no record of the client that is posting a negative review.
Yelp is a big scam and I hope they get eradicated from the internet while paying out millions to the companies they are harming.
False. As a Yelper I’ve written over 50+ reviews for lots of large businesses and small businesses. All personal opinion of course. Most of these businesses probably haven’t even heard of Yelp. All my reviews are still there, some come up higher than others, but none have been deleted.
just sayin’…
dear “yelper”.
just because your reviews, amongst the millions of users and millions more of reviews – means just that. nothing more, nothing less.
implying that YELP is not deleting any reviews solely based on your single experience is senseless.
p.s. the lawsuit is a CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT. You do know what that means right ??
Then I must be the exception… since I wrote a positive review for a barber, and it was taken down. I later learned that this guy paid Yelp to advertise and when he stopped advertising with them, they suddenly removed over 10 positive reviews.
Also, just sayin… something is really wrong with Yelp!
You should try visiting the pages of those 50 establishments without logging in. When you are logged in, it appears that all of your reviews are still there. However, if you logout and visit the same pages, you’ll probably find that many of your reviews aren’t really visible to the general public. I’ve only written 8 reviews but 2 of them are gone.
Those bastards censored my 5 star rating of Jack Gage in Kansas City. I hope they get what is coming to them.
Here’s the evidence
http://media.libsyn.com/media/livemusicpodcast/jack_gage_scammed_by_yelp.doc
you do realize that link doesn’t work, right?
Just tried it and it worked fine. Try this one if you are still having problems.
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%253A%252F%252Fmedia.libsyn.com%252Fmedia%252Flivemusicpodcast%252Fjack_gage_scammed_by_yelp.doc&h=ff817d3d9f7868fa890dd9834fd5bc2a&ref=mf
As I mentioned before you may just have been flagged by more regular users of Yelp. You have only written one review and it was a 5 star glowing review. Someone may have flagged you thinking it was a fake as a lot of 1st reviews are and then they administrators make a decision and review it. It looks ok to me and it might have been a bad decision but either way it does not prove anything in relation to the class action.