Yelp’s Ethics Called Into Question

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Yelp’s Ethics Called Into Question

I like Yelp, though I’ve been forgetting to use it lately. I used it to find a great Italian restaurant in Hollywood, where I had some of the best food I’ve had in years and saw a couple of celebrities. It pointed me to some of the best Thai food in the San Fernando Valley, and a greasy Chinese joint that I order from twice a month. I think it’s a quality site.

However, a detailed and well investigated story by Kathleen Richards of the East Bay Express reveals that Yelp be involved in some pretty dubious tactics in its attempts to squeeze money out of restaurateurs and merchants. Among the allegations:

Yelp offers to move down negative reviews if merchants agree to advertise with them for $300 to $1000 per months
Yelp moves down bad reviews before attempting to market to a client.
If the client choose not to advertise with Yelp, the bad reviews return to where they were before the sales pitch.
Yelp uses reviews made by their own employees when talking merchants into advertising with them and getting those bad reviews moved down.
There are reports that some restaurants received a series of negative reviews after being contacted by a Yelp sales rep.
There are other reports that legitimate good reviews were removed or moved down after merchants declined to advertise with Yelp.

There’s no evidence that these practices are illegal, but they raise big questions about the honesty of the reviews we read on Yelp.

In my opinion, the worst part is the accusation that Yelp is using reviews written in-house to try to sell merchants on their advertising. It’s basically like asking for ransom.

I can’t vouch for the accuracy of some of these allegations, but it raises serious questions about social review sites. At least the restaurant reviewer at the paper isn’t taking a payola, and doesn’t call the restaurant for ransom threatening to run a bad review. Reality really is fungible, and when there’s money to be made, the truth is the first victim.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 9:22 pmand is filed under Site Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.