Interview: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO

Compere this: (from http://www.eastbayexpress.com/eastbay/yelp-and-the-business-...)

"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."

... with this answer from Stoppelman:

"So, a typical case history might go like this, 'OK, I got a call from Yelp advertising' — because we call pretty much all the local businesses, so everybody gets a call — and so that business owner declines advertising that time, looks at the site and then sends out lots of e-mails to their friends and family members and preferred customers, and they say, 'Hey I found out about this Yelp thing; it's great; review me.' And it's a success, they get 15 reviews up on their page. But that's also extremely biased, and if every business could do that, the site wouldn't be useful. And so what happens? Well, all those reviews get filtered. And so then they are convinced that if they had paid, those 13 reviews would have stayed up."

No, they are convinced that if they had paid, the already existing good reviews would have stayed up.

Another Yelp data point: the CEO saying that there is a definite correlation between people getting Yelp sales calls and their positive reviews being taken down. But it's for the site's own good. Yep.