Yelp 'pay to play' pitch makes shops scream for help | Hacker News Reader

Yelp 'pay to play' pitch makes shops scream for help

theregister.co.uk

26 pointsalex_c7 comments

So Yelp puts businesses up for public criticism and simultaneously try to sell advertising to those same businesses.. that puts them in a tricky spot of trying to stay fair and still make money.

The local advertising market is hot, but maybe they should be exploring other revenue ideas if they want to keep from descending to Citysearch's depths of mistrust - licensing the data they collect (like InfoUSA), data mining (like Macrosense), maybe even selling a product?

I mistrust Yelp because they scrape reviews from other websites. I have found a couple of reviews that I posted elsewhere under fake user names on Yelp.

Considering that things like "elite status", which is based on contribution, is coveted by some users, it's entirely possible that the content in question was posted by an actual user who cut and pasted it from another site. It would be pretty hard to verify that someone's review is truly their own. If you notice something out of the ordinary, there are tools available to flag content.

Disclosure: I work for Yelp.

Yeah thats why I'm not that big on online reviews, because most businesses are now savvy enough to know that they can game the system

This is quite an interesting read. Looks like a lot more business owners will realize the importance of negative reviews, start putting fake negative reviews on rival businesses and flood their own yelp page with good comments.

What will be bad for yelp down the road if that happens? maybe an online guide of business reviews with no credibility and guininity.

I helped develop a Yelp-style site for the UK market, and you'd be surprised how often businesses review themselves and review their rivals negatively, it's a pretty common practice.

We tried to curb this by letting businesses reply to reviews and control their listing details, but they still come along and blatently review themselves!

The key to using yelp isn't to just read the first few reviews, but to find reviewers that either match your tastes, or have observations that appear to be particularly trustworthy. That can sometimes be determined by reading the user profiles and other reviews.

I wouldn't recommend anyone just reading every review on yelp. You have to come up with some sort of filter.

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