Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0
Local business owners say Yelp offers to hide negative customer reviews of their businesses on its web site ... for a price.
By Kathleen Richards
The phone calls came almost daily. It started to get creepy.
"Hi, this is Mike from Yelp," the voice would say. "You've had three hundred visitors to your site this month. You've had a really good response. But you have a few bad ones at the top. I could do something about those."
This wasn't your average sales pitch. At least, not the kind that John, an East Bay restaurateur, was used to. He was familiar with Yelp.com, the popular San Francisco-based web site in which any person can write a review about nearly any business. John's restaurant has more than one hundred reviews, and averages a healthy 3.5-star rating. But when John asked Mike what he could do about his bad reviews, he recalls the sales rep responding: "We can move them. Well, for $299 a month." John couldn't believe what the guy was offering. It seemed wrong.
In fact, something seemed shady about the state of his restaurant's negative reviews. "When you do get a call from Yelp, and you go to the site, it looks like they have been moved," John said. "You don't know if they happen to be at the top legitimately or if the rep moved them to the top. You don't even know if this is someone who legitimately doesn't like your restaurant. ... Almost all the time when they call you, the bad ones will be at the top."
Usually, John said, he would politely decline to advertise. "Well, thanks," he'd say. "I'll talk to my partner about it." Or, "It's not really in my budget right now." But inevitably, in another week or so, he'd get another phone call. Occasionally, the voice on the other end of the phone would change, but the calls continued. These days, John chooses to not answer his phone when it's from a number with a 415 area code.
John may sound paranoid, but he's got company. During interviews with dozens of business owners over a span of several months, six people told this newspaper that Yelp sales representatives promised to move or remove negative reviews if their business would advertise. In another six instances, positive reviews disappeared — or negative ones appeared — after owners declined to advertise.
Because they were often asked to advertise soon after receiving negative reviews, many of these business owners believe Yelp employees use such reviews as sales leads. Several, including John, even suspect Yelp employees of writing them. Indeed, Yelp does pay some employees to write reviews of businesses that are solicited for advertising. And in at least one documented instance, a business owner who refused to advertise subsequently received a negative review from a Yelp employee.
Many business owners, like John, feel so threatened by Yelp's power to harm their business that they declined to be interviewed unless their identities were concealed. (John is not the restaurant owner's real name.) Several business owners likened Yelp to the Mafia, and one said she feared its retaliation. "Every time I had a sales person call me and I said, 'Sorry, it doesn't make sense for me to do this,' ... then all of a sudden reviews start disappearing." To these mom-and-pop business owners, Yelp's sales tactics are coercive, unethical, and, possibly, illegal.
"That's the biggest scam in the Bay Area," John said. "It totally felt like a blackmail deal. I think they're doing anything to make a sale."
Yelp officials deny that they move negative reviews, although such allegations have surfaced many times before. The issue is even addressed on the web site's Frequently Asked Questions page. Chief Operating Officer Geoff Donaker said advertisers and sales representatives don't have the ability to move or remove negative reviews. "We wouldn't be in business very long if we started duping customers," he said.
But Donaker's denials are challenged by nine local business owners and also by a former contract employee who worked with Yelp in its early days. That person, who is still close to some Yelp employees and only agreed to be interviewed if granted anonymity, said several sales reps have told him they promised to move reviews to get businesses to advertise. "It's not illegal or unethical," he said they told him. "We're just helping the little guy. It doesn't hurt them, it benefits them."
Such tactics may be legal, but they clearly raise ethical concerns. Yelp touts its web site as consisting of "real people" writing "real reviews." The allegations of business owners who have tangled with the company suggest otherwise.
If Yelp indeed suppresses honest reviews in exchange for its advertisers' money, it is cheating users who expect genuine consumer feedback. Conversely, if Yelp demands payment to remove even dishonest reviews, then advertisers are being cheated.
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I wonder about the people who have been complaining about Yelp. Anyone who works with the public should know that everyone has different likes and dislikes. Just because you have a review that you don't like doesn't mean that it is not written by a "real" customer. The fact that you are complaining and blaming it on Yelp leads me to believe that it is more than likely real.
I work for a cafe that has been reviewed on Yelp since 2006. I will agree that we first found out about Yelp because we received phone calls from Yelp. Yes, the calls seemed to be every day. Yes, they asked if we wanted a business account. But never did they offer to move or delete or add anything to the reviews. We have always said "no thank you" and told them we just like to read the reveiws. We have 44 reviews and a 4 star average. Some customers gave us 2 or 3 stars. Some gave us 4 and 5 stars. We seem to be in the #1 spot quite a bit. We also won an award in the Best of the East Bay issue. We don't even know how that is picked. Not all our reviews are great but I think that by saying Yelp is ruining your business and putting bad reviews up and taking good ones down because you don't pay them is crazy. I was also told by someone that was mad at me that they were going to post something bad on Yelp. I still have faith that our customers will be able to tell the difference between someone who probably will never be happy and might even lie in the review and the ones who just want to share their opinion. I believe that you can't please everyone all of the time because we are not all the same!
Cat
Hello,
my name is Amy Bouzaglo,
My husband and I own ABC Amy's Baking Company in Scottsdale AZ.
We have been virally attacked by Yelp and the New Times.they have even gone so far as to post online my Federal criminal History from 9 years ago for everyone to see just to personally attack my character and then told me to sue them.The people who posted my Federal court documents work for the New Times as editors.
We have contacted Yelp and asked them to take down these horrible reviews, they will not. they even have sent personal emails to loyal customers of ours who have tried to post legitimate reviews telling them that they will not show those emails and blaming the customer for posing as me.
I am sending you the links as to some of what is going on.
Sincerely, Amy Bouzaglo
www.amysbakingco.com
they are calling me CrazyAmyB because I responded to a guy that came into our restaurant last Friday night who was acting rude and belligerent, who verbally insulted our 18 year old waitress by screaming profanities and her and then refusing to pay for his pizza. After my husband made him pay he sent me an email thru our website reading" I hope that $18 was worth it "and sent me the link to the Yelp review.
http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/bella/201…
All you have to do is read the link Ouch today's hard lesson on yelp.
Thank you
As a small business owner I can appreciate yelp's help. For a fee of course.
They need to pay their bills too.
I feel sorry for the poor bastards that don't go along with yelp's extorsion scheme. They get stuck with bad reviews.
Yelp is like a modern day mafia.
You pay them and all is well.
Nice place to do business America is.
Yelp finds it so easy to remove legitimate positive reviews, I expect it will be equally as easy to remove the erroneous negative reviews. I want to delete my account. I don't wish to be associated with a company who does business in such a manner. It's a shame that Yelp has a business model that only rewards negative reviews, and deletes positive ones. Where can I review on Yelp? Their video that attempts to explain their rational about deleting positive reviews only makes it even more clear that they want Business owners to sign up for their $350 a month business account. I refuse this. I will not be blackmailed. I hope this lawsuit puts them out forever.
The exact same thing just happened to me. I asked the yelp sales rep. "How does a person find me on yelp, hire me, I do the job, that same customer writes a great review, and it gets removed?" Funny how the removal of my 5 reviews, all of which 5 stars, coincided with me emailing back the sales rep stating "why would I pay for advertising if I am at the top of list when yelpers are searching for my particular business?" I stated I have found various articles on the web pertaining to certain savory yelp practices and she replied “there are certain conspiracy theories out there “and she had no power what so ever in manipulating reviews.
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