dchuk

Yelp Class Action Lawsuit

These fuckers deserve it...I've talked to a few business owners who pay them with absolutely terrible ROI's

thunderlips

dont hate the game

Andrew Scherer

Trying to pull the same shit that con artist at ripoffreport does - "you give me hundreds/thousands per month and I will edit/delete the negative review"

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PhillipMarlow

Truth

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Best Article I've ever read online

Traska

FUCK YELP

d00723

eh not so much game when its unsuspecting smbs who know no different. kind a scammy and just the fact that they turned down 550 from google and 700 from micro$oft means their pompous too. Not huge a huge fan.

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Boo Yah

iliketurtles

This. A prime example of it is Cash4Gold.

JarredLv

There was a nice big article about them in INC last month (maybe two months ago), where they pretty much admit to extorting businesses into purchasing special business owner accounts for several hundred dollars a month. If they declined their listings would suddenly disappear from rankings or negative reviews would be show more, sleazy shit like that.

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Jon

Yeah they absolutely deserve it if they did in fact say "give us $300 and we'll remove/hide the neg feedback/review". Ripoff Report does the same shit. Its not worth the small amount of cash in exchange for the amount of damage you potentially make your brand and resource subject to. Either you sell advertising or you don't.

As for the recent investment debacle, I don't think they are pompous for rejecting offers from Google or Microsoft, even if they are hyper inflated ones. Seems most traffic behemoths of the internets are getting hyper inflated valuations. Kinda like a dotbomb buildup 2.0. They may be foolish to reject it with the current view on their business and standings, but who knows, maybe in the future they'll pull a Facebook and get a valuation of $15 billion that everyone thought was impossible to achieve when Yahoo offered them $1B or so for the whole company a year before. They, after all, ended up taking a $240M investment from Microsoft for only a 1.6% stake. Look at that incredibly annoying and useless time wasting site we call Twitter, getting a $100M round of funding. Or YouTube and Google buying it for over $1B. Unreal is all I have to say when news like this drops, rejected or accepted, its all just unreal.

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d00723

Great points jon. I guess from my perspective, I'd cut and run, eventually their "biz model" is going to be splashed across the nyt, cnn, et al. and the valuation as I see will take a nose dive. But regardless I see your point the opposite could just as easily happen.

Case and point, playdom, ugh, 250 mil.

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Boo Yah

yellowarrior

If they could have scaled that $300 bucks a month business model then the monthly rev. would be super high. That said, given the shadiness of the model, I would have cut and run =).

dchuk

I think what happened with them is that they realized that they created a platform that caters to the free users rather than the paying businesses, so they're trying to monetize by extorting the businesses. It's just amazing how much that alienates both sides of the equation.

users want unbiased reviews, ones that aren't moved around by the businesses. Businesses don't want bad press. Everybody is screwed by Yelp's strategy.

The shadiest part of it all is the rumors that Yelp sales people post their own fake bad reviews of businesses in order to move the sale along. That's the biggest bunch of BS in the whole thing.

behnk01

Best
idea
ever

turbolapp

All I'm going to say is that if the FTC has a problem with fake good reviews they sure as shit better have a problem with fake bad reviews.

Andrew Scherer

They must have also learned that from Ed Magedson @ ROR.

You wouldn't believe the kind of child-molesting-coke-sniffing reports they craft, they're so outlandish its hilarious

I'd feel sorry for yelp if they go down the same path, it's never any good to have businesses suing your ass everytime you turn the corner.

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mGrunin

I think it's fine for a business to contact sites like "Yelp" and ask for a bad review to be removed, and for Yelp to charge them. BBB does it, and many other known companies, so it's nothing new.

What's not alright, and what they have been accused of is:

- Faking Negative Reviews
- Deleting Positive Reviews
- Calling businesses themselves and telling them to fork over the money

This "extortion" model can be ran legally, as we see with BBB, just that Yelp needs to be be open about it, not fuck with the reviews, and let businesses themselves decide if they want to pay, without getting constant calls and notices to pay.

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Sonny Forelli

those bay area morons are extortionists - plain and simple.

I know no less than 3 brick and mortar business owners who were told by sales reps in essence "you really need to become an advertiser- we offer protection and help in resolving bad reviews" - when they mentioned "we don't have any bad reviews though- our customers love us" the response back was basically "well bad reviews can happen"


Lol- ok Tony fucking Soprano.

I hope they get bent over and fucking railed.

mGrunin

Lol. I honestly don't know how retarded you have to get to imply extortion commonly as a company.

Some people believe that just because it's the internet, laws don't apply.

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Sonny Forelli

even better- these were cold calls to the businesses. and then repeat calls ever few months getting more and more aggressive. for one with ~50 positive (glowing) reviews a couple negatives popped up, one that was clearly from someone who had never stepped foot in the store (they described what a store in that category would do, but not what this business does).

uh- yeah, brilliant kids

mGrunin

Yep, I heard it was being run by a couple ignorant kids. Shit heads.

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pileofcrap

Techcrunch should hit back with a "hey give us $5000 and we'll take down the story" lol

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iliketurtles

More like 5 million considering the entire worth of the company is $500MM and this is a major blow to their brand/reputation/worth.

pileofcrap

haha those numbers are adding up. any response yet from Yelp about the lawsuit?

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schockergd

The internet sure is a interesting place to live in

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Dave_FM

Agreed. This is going to be a very interesting lawsuit to see how it plays out. If all this talk of them manipulating reviews from THEIR side, they are going to be really f'ed in the end. Big difference between a visitor to a site making a comment/review, whether it is negative or defamatory, vs. the site operator or its employees doing it themselves. Seems to be going the same way as the other mentioned site, Ripoffreport, who I think in the past has been accused of making the postings. Big issue here is going to be who made the reviews (yelp or its "users"), how reviews were edited by Yelp staff, etc..

And if a lot of these extortion claims come to be true, they will probably be hit with the RICO act. Interesting to see what comes of this case and I hope since this is a class action, a lot more business owners can jump in on it. I've heard very similar stories from some local businesses owners out in the NY/NJ area. Seems like Yelp became too big for their own good and started to get greedy. Hope it bites them in the ass.