Companies like Yelp and Foursquare are actually in the blackmail business. They needed the users to achieve a massive amount of reviews. Now they just collect "protection money" from business to remove / prevent bad reviews and laugh all the way to the bank.
At least, that is the only way I can see their move making any kind of sense.
I've never seen a place with an undeserved good/bad reputation. And I've seen a lot of reviews from those sites (and went to those places)
As the number of reviews increase the "I'll never go back to this place" begins to show, but they're compensated by good reviews.
Now, systematic bad reviews usually mean there is an issue with the place.
"Sponsoring your listing" helps if you have a small amount of reviews (something like 5 to 10 reviews)
Two years ago I sat in on a call with a Yelp rep with a former employer of mine (small business connected to the real estate industry). The Yelp rep said "Advertising through Yelp will almost instantly increase you rating." My employer asked "Does that mean you'll manually fix my score?" To which the rep responded, "Your rating will get better if you advertise with us."
That was 2 years ago. I know Yelp has gotten flack since then, and maybe they cleaned up. But that stink of being a thug doesn't wash off quickly, especially in the small business community.
Moreover, assuming that s/he did say what you're quoting, you have to put it in context: Yelp employs hundreds (if not thousands now) of telephone sales reps. They get paid crap, work in a call center, and have zero ability to influence anyone, anywhere. Sales people, when incentivized to say things for money, tend to walk as close to the ethical line as they can without going over. I haven't looked, but there probably is data showing that advertising increases your rating. It wouldn't surprise me.
Every time I've bothered to dig into these claims, it's a story like yours, where a business leapt to a conclusion because they thought they heard something that validated a rumor they read on the interwebz.
"That's a nice kid you have. It would be really pity if something happened to him, right?"
"Children who buy our product end up smarter and healthier than those who don't."
...and now it's just marketing. The rep didn't say that the rating would get worse if you don't buy an ad, just that it gets better if you do.
"What? No, not because the teachers favor them and inflate their grades, but because they end up with more school pride and do better in class!" Wink wink, nudge nudge.
What the Yelp rep said was not clear. The Yelp rep didn't answer the question my former employer had. She avoided it. Does that mean Yelp was/is up to something nefarious? No. But it has that appearance.
And that's the point. Yelp can, in fact, be doing absolutely nothing wrong as far as their data is concerned. But small business owners don't see that. All they see is aggressive Yelp sales agents, and a better rating if they advertise through Yelp.
It's an image problem, not a data problem.
I've seen dozens. It happens in smaller towns, and smaller markets in large cities.
Now, Yelp is a marketing tool, it brings people in, if there's already an established customer base, it's irrelevant, same thing if it's a "Maltese Falcon specialist", the market between specialists and service buyers is so small that people don't even bother with a review.
And even that is skewed by the ones that reject everything, and the fake positive reviews (and people with no idea on what they're reviewing)
It has 33 5-star reviews that are "unapproved", and eight 1-star promoted reviews that amount to a 2 star overall rating. I'd say that's an undeserved bad reputation. And no matter how many good reviews there are, the 1-star ratings are still the only ones weighing in.
In comparison, Google review page has a near perfect 5-star non-curated rating - https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
The real kicker here is that to get to these 5 star Yelp reviews, you have to navigate a barely legible grey link at the bottom of the page. Purposefully hiding good reviews until the business pays for membership borders extortion to me.
I see 1 5-star, 4 2-stars, 3 1-star, the rest is closed
Now, if you see the hidden reviews, there are a lot of "5-star" ones (which are really 3 or 4 star) but a lot of 1-star ones as well
A lot of them are from people with a few friends (however, a lot of them seem to come from "high-quality" posters)
Well, Yelp better watch out if Google can give a better result
I'm glad that Yelp reviewers biases coincide with somebodies, but they don't coincide with mine. I basically ignore the star rating at this point.
Why? Customer service. Some restaurants have absolutely delicious food yet take pride in having poor poor customer service, and frequently lose points for that.
Guess what, Yelp?
I don't care about poor customer service. I have two questions about a restaurant: how good is the food, and how much does it cost?
For the 5-star rating system to be useful, I should be able to compare two restaurants and simply pick the one with the higher rating. Sadly that often leads to worse food.
So if I'm trying to use Yelp as anything more advanced than a restaurant directory, I end up reading each review, and then the reviewer's reviews of other places to get to know each reviewer's rating system, how they feel about restaurants I already know, and this inevitably takes far more time and effort than I care to.
I hope you have some kind of evidence for that, because it's a pretty serious accusation to throw around.
"The number of complaints might not come as a surprise to those who have followed the numerous lawsuits and allegations of extorting money from businesses to remove negative reviews."
"For years, businesses have claimed that negative reviews pop-up on their Yelp pages after they’ve declined to purchase advertising with the company."
Besides actual journalists have made this connection and published it, just google "yelp extortion"
I heard a business owner complained that yelp was showing mostly bad reviews after he refused to pay. So that's only anecdotal evidence but there seems to be more of it out there.