I've been hearing these stories too. But till date I've yet to find one (just one!) piece of incontrovertible evidence that Yelp sales folk engage in blackmail. Surely, after all these years, there must exist just ONE phone recording or email??

I'm convinced that there is an untold number of third parties/scammers cold-calling listed business numbers falsely representing themselves as Yelp, targeting owners who are not technologically savvy.

Unfortunately, Yelp's current model seems to encourage extortion at the hands of these third parties, and is also incapable of punishing them.

What I think happens / Paraphrase of what I'd imagine a 3rd party call to be like:

"Hi, this is Yelp. Pay us and we'll boost your rating/visibility and hide bad reviews. If you don't pay, your Yelp ratings will suffer."

Then they just manipulate ratings and review visibility with fake accounts. Add good reviews and hide bad ones if the owner paid, and add bad reviews and hide good ones if they didn't.

(Also I'm aware that there are plenty of "legitimate" businesses that provide this service and don't misrepresent themselves as Yelp itself)

And you should be convinced.

I'm a Google Trusted Photographer in Houston and I visit and talk with businesses that get targeted every single day. I'm loosely affiliated with Google and I have to make that clear. They get calls twice a day from "Google" and "Yelp" about their pages and reviews. This is their #1 complaint when I call them or walk in their door. Being local helps.

I've gotten a few prerecorded calls from "Google Local" about my business, saying something about needing to verify details. I never really listen though, because I don't have a business (they're calling my personal cell phone). It's really quite strange.

Try having a listing on Google maps and see how many times you get called.

You know, the old protection rackets (which probably still exist) were easy to make seem non-illegal. If that's a word. One person offers to prevent the consequences of ignoring threats, but doesn't make the threat themselves. A person with little or no known connections to the first makes the actual threat and carries them out. The first guy was trying to help a neighborhood business with a potential problem, you see. In other words, if you pay me I'll protect your store from these lawless thugs destroying other people's stores who do not pay for my protection.

Now, looking at such things from a common sense perspective makes it quite obvious what's going on. But proving the same in a court of law, which often will have a much higher requirement of proof, may not be so easy.

You didn't look very hard: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/3k2bxt/yelp_salespe...

Rossman embellishes his stories. He once tried to claim that the recent debacle with error:53 and the iPhone was a conspiracy by Apple to brick phones and increase sales.

I wouldn't believe him if he told me it was pouring rain outside. I would check first and make sure it wasn't just a drizzle.

They don't need to say anything incriminating to execute this.

If you decline, the Yelp sales person could simply have their friend visit your business, have a "1-star experience" and then write a review.

Hey they faked the moon landing they can do this, surely.

Seriously though, I'd agree: you'd think at least one of these shady sales people would fess up for the publicity alone.

> Yelp as a company has no way of knowing what shady practices their sales people use to try and get an ad sale

Sure they do, it's just too convenient to look the other way and maintain deniability.

> Yelp as a company has no way of knowing what shady practices their sales people use to try and get an ad sale.

This phone call may be recorded for training or quality control purposes.

Right but how long do they retain any recordings and what percentage are reviewed for policy violation? And what if the employee calls from an unmonitored phone (personal) on their own time or even company time in order to increase their personal sales at the expense of company reputation, for example. It's not unheard of for sales staff to go off the reservation in order to better compete against hamstrung staff.

That's a matter of making sure that any sales representatives that might get ideas like these realize that such are capital offenses, as in: do this and you're out.

Which has happened. The Rossman incident shows that reps are fired for breaking rules regarding do not call and do not email and for having friends write false reviews.

I've also seen this first hand, except rather than a bad review, a bunch of 5 star reviews were made invisible. 3.5 stars on yelp vs 4.8 on google. From then on I've always used google ratings instead of yelp, which also has the benefit of being integrated well into the maps app.

Yelp reviews contain more content than any other service, whereas most google reviews I read that have anything more than a star rating come from illiterate or barely-literate foreign reviewers. My wife had a time period when every one of her reviews on yelp was flagged even though she put a ton of effort into her writing, whereas I never had a problem. Their spam/business-owner detection system catches a lot of false-positives, but that doesn't make the ones that do make it through necessarily worse. Verifying an email address and linking with facebook (although not necessary), and having friends helps reviews on yelp not get auto-flagged.

I usually dive into reviews and see what people are saying, not just go by a star rating. It adds to the hilarity when you read a 1-star review for a restaurant because they "are scumbags who serve lion" (actually, a menu item had dandelions on the side) or because someone drove by and saw a balkan restaurant "roasting a dog on a stick" (actually, it was lamb, but I had a great laugh).

Facebook should not be the basis of a web of trust.

I don't disagree. I also think their automatic flagging system is too aggressive and opaque partly because of such things having influence.

Google ratings are much easier to game, from what I hear

Blackmail notwithstanding, what was the $300/month meant to be for? How do they rationalise it?

You read a LOT of Yelp blackmail stories (or I have). But it isn't clear what legitimate product they're actually selling to businesses, since they'd at least need a cover.

PS - I am surprised any business has less than five reviews. If I ran a small business, I would create fake reviews just to get the ball rolling, no matter how immoral that is. Just makes good business sense.

Advertising. You buy, for example, searches in your category in your zip code(s). It's pretty excellent advertising.

Network effect. The important metric isn't how many reviews you have, but how many your competitors and neighbors have. If no one uses yelp locally, nobody wastes time on it. My daughter's optometrist has no reviews and the most popular optometrist in the county has five. Clearly a waste of time. My favorite "old time" hardware store has one review. Yelp seems to be for coffee and food. Observation shows possibly as many as 0.1% of coffee drinkers will write a review, and a local family run very popular burger joint that all the non-vegetarian locals have probably eaten at has over 0.03% of their visits reviewed. That is far higher than doctor rates or hardware store review rates. I drove past that restaurant yesterday and they had more local license plate cars in their parking lot than total lifetime yelp reviews... Clearly whatever it is they're spending their time on is more financially rewarding than boosting their yelp score, LOL.

They sell advertising on their own site.

If someone is looking at coffee shop A, they would show ads for my coffee shop.

It's excellent until you realize that you're paying WAY more for every click than you would with AdWords and that their reach is only limited to Yelp and doesn't do THAT much to boost your presence. My mom was considering it for her daycare business but I argued against it for this reason and many other small businesses that have dealt with them concluded the same thing.

yup, same here. I help SMBs with marketing, and Yelp is usually never worth paying for.

The only small case is when the ROI on adwords is reaching the level of diminishing returns

So does Google :)

Except for recording phone calls, monitoring emails, etc. Which is what they bring to court. Which is why none of the lawsuits go anywhere.

In reality it could be a third-party business that is wanting to then upsell you in the future positive reviews to counter-balance.

Yelp will perish, because, unfortunately, the moral quality of the individuals isn't high and the founders/CEO seem to be blind to it.

As much as you need to be a very good business man to build a business that Yelp is, you need to surround yourself with good people, and recently, plenty of good people have left Yelp, and realistically, there aren't many out there.

I think this type of thing will be the eventual death of most social media type enterprises. People just don't realize it's hard to maintain and curate such things, worse if it gets popular. It's especially difficult when so many people just don't understand how the internet works and believe every trollish thing they read on it.