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Facing public criticism from businesses, a class-action lawsuit, and troublesome civil court allegations, Yelp recently announced two significant changes to its review and advertising policies. In an effort to change perceptions about its treatment of businesses — it has been accused of favoring those who pay for advertising — Yelp will discontinue allowing advertisers to select the first review on their listing and will also provide a link to allow visitors to see those reviews that have been removed by Yelp’s controversial spam filtering system. According to an article in The New York Times, he old advertising policy, combined with the secretive filtering system, suggested to many business owners that Yelp was pulling the strings behind the scenes to unfairly favor its advertisers while penalizing those who do not pay Yelp for its services:
many businesses are irked because they feel Yelp is not transparent about why certain reviews show up on their pages and others do not. Some of the confusion came from the fact that advertisers, who pay $300 to $1,000 a month, have been allowed to choose one review that shows up at the top of their profile page. Yelp’s spam filter also scans for suspicious reviews, like those that could have been written by a competitor or a business owner’s friend or relative. [link]
The article goes on to say that not all controversial practices will change: ”Some of the features that confuse and irritate businesses will remain. Mr. Stoppelman acknowledges that Yelp’s spam filter will continue to sometimes remove legitimate reviews, for example, and Yelp will continue to rank reviews according to a secret formula that takes into account not just the date but metrics like how prolific a reviewer is.”
Adding to these new efforts to improve perceptions, Yelp will also “create a formal advisory council of business owners to counsel Yelp on the site and new products.”
As for the timing of the move, Wired.com reports the following:
[Yelp's] Stoppelman said the changes don’t have much to do with the ongoing class action lawsuit from local businesses, although legal advice might have something to do with that stance. But there’s also the matter of Google reportedly having expressed interest in buying Yelp to augment its own local reviews offerings, and no company with the motto “Don’t be evil” wants to look like it is building a business on extorting small businesses.
More on the web:
Claire Cain Miller, “Yelp Makes Changes in Response to Small-Business Owners“, The New York Times (April 6, 2010).
Eliot Van Buskirk, “Yelp Fights Fraud Allegations by Unfiltering Reviews“, Wired.com (April 6, 2010).
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