They Yelp Me, They Yelp Me Not

The review site straddles the line between company and community, wrangling businesses, reviewers and the elite

By CARA BAYLES

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Ever since San Francisco's East Bay Express ran an article entitled "Yelp and Extortion 2.0," accusing the review site's salespeople of essentially blackmailing businesses into advertising in return for a good web image, the 5-year-old company has dealt with a slew of media coverage. But as Yelp answers questions about its advertising, it's clear that the young company is still negotiating its identity as a review service, an online community and a business among the different groups it connects. And as its Boston community grows and adapts, it will affect local consumer and business communities alike.

The Boston Yelp community—founded during the second wave of the company's expansion in 2005—is very active, with lively message boards discussing everything from the Obama administration to the best place to get a rabbit spayed. Yelpers police the site as well, consulting one another about whether to flag suspicious reviews (where the author has only reviewed one business and maybe its rivals). In fact, "spelp," a cute word-blend with "spam," originated here in Boston.

Yelp started out as a review site in San Francisco in 2004, whereby anyone could review the plethora of foodie institutions that dot the Bay Area. "Looking around the web, our co-founders asked, 'Why is it that it is so difficult to find objective reviews about doctors or mechanics? How is it that in this day and age of the internet, in this medium, there isn't one place you can go to, to find out this type of information?'" explains Yelp spokeswoman Stephanie Ichinose. "It was about bringing word-of-mouth information to help consumers make better local purchasing decisions." And that service still exists; anyone who visits the site can peruse reviews generated for free by users in dozens of cities.

But Yelp has also morphed into a social-networking site, with users meeting on the internet and becoming flesh-and-blood friends. And then there's the Elite Squad, a group (the number of Elites remains undisclosed, Ichinose says) of rabid reviewers who have been recommended to their local "community manager" (each location has one such web referee). Once a member attains Elite status, their reviews appear higher up on pages of venues, and they get perks like invites to Elite parties sponsored by Yelp and hosted by local businesses. Shannon Sweetser has been a Boston Yelper member since the early days in 2006, and soon became an Elite member, attending the second-ever elite event held in Boston. "I suppose the benefit of having these Elite events would be to kind of make it so the users get addicted to the site," she says. "It's like a benefit to the user—you write reviews and get these awesome privileges, and Yelp gets to make connections with the community. ... Yelp is becoming close and building relationships with these businesses that, in turn, would be willing to work with Yelp in the future, and do sponsorship programs."

Among the allegations recently brought against Yelp is that the site is pay to play. Yelp—which has not yet earned back its capital investment, but expects to be profitable by 2010—generates most of its revenue by getting local businesses to sign up for the sponsorship program, whereby a business pays Yelp anywhere between $300 to $1,000 per month—depending on how many impressions (search results) it wants—to come up in searches and to pick one review to appear at the top of its page. But, Ichinose points out, the top review is clearly demarcated as the Yelp sponsor's favorite, and when you search for, say, Mexican food in Boston, only the first review is a sponsored link ... whether the reviews after that first one are sponsors, she says, is completely random.

Downtown Wines & Spirits in Davis Square has four and a half stars on Yelp. According to general manager Daniel Parsons, the store has been a sponsor for a few weeks now, though it's felt the effects of Yelp reviews for at least a year. "It's been a huge boom for us," he says. "For whatever reason, our store gets reviewed more than most liquor stores. It's just nice to have a conversation going online about it."

About a month ago, Downtown hosted a Yelp Elite event. A few weeks later, it hosted its own independent tasting. "We engaged with people as they came in, because we're tasting and talking about the wines, and we asked them how they heard about it, and they'd say, 'Oh, I heard about on Yelp,'" he said. "That was what tipped the balance to convince us to [become a sponsor], just the sheer volume of people that came in at once in that one day. We thought about it previously, but it's sort of hard to quantify that stuff." So why pay to be a sponsor, when the store already benefits from exposure on Yelp for free? "For our thinking, it was a mere range," Parsons says. "The sponsorship gives us a banner for searches within a certain zip code, so it broadened the reach."

Some have argued hosting Elite events guarantees good reviews. Several of the reviews on Downtown's main page make reference to the Elite event. Ichinose insists Yelp Elite parties have their own review pages separate from those of the venue itself.

Yelp users have, at times, clashed with the company itself, and its sponsors. Take Blanchard's Liquors in Allston. Last month, a YouTube video surfaced that allegedly showed security camera footage of the store's owner, John Corey, stomping on his son's puppy. The video immediately went viral, with many animal advocates encouraging others to boycott the store.

Blanchard's Yelp rating fell, as many revised their reviews to give the store one star. Some Yelpers who had not previously reviewed the store (and, in at least one case, someone who'd never been there), gave the store poor reviews, referencing the animal abuse incident. Several of these were taken down. "Hearsay reviews from people who have never stepped foot inside the business don't address the average customer experience and therefore fall outside our review guidelines," says Leighann Farrelly, community manager for Boston Yelp. "The reviews were flagged by the community and our customer service team removed the reviews that fell outside our guidelines. This rule applies to all reviews, regardless of whether a business is an advertiser or not."

But the response was overwhelming. Reviewers manipulated the rules, with comments like: "If you want to kick it with some Red Dog, Blanchard's can't be beat! Just stop by and pick up a crate, er, case." Some called out Blanchard's status as a Yelp sponsor, saying, "YELP HAS DELETED MY REVIEWS 3 TIMES! SO I DECIDED I WOULD GO INTO THIS PLACE AND PURCHASE SOMETHING SO I COULD 100% SAY I HAD A CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE IN THE STORE! IF THIS REVIEW GETS DELETED IT'S BECAUSE BLANCHARD'S HAS SPONSERED [sic] YELP AND IS A COMPLETELY BIASED SITE!" and, "Yelp—don't sell out. Keep these reviews ... people need to know the truth about Blanchard's." The Yelp page for Blanchard's still features one five-star review on top, the "sponsor's favorite," followed by several one-star reviews. Blanchard's overall rating is now three stars. Corey didn't respond to the Dig's request for comment.

The East Bay Express article alleges that Yelp salespeople can move around all the reviews on a business' page, and there are business owners in Boston who claim to have been extorted by Yelp. There's a lot at stake here; if members believe Yelp is manipulating reviews, that would undo the very appeal of the site: the perceived honesty of random people sharing their experiences.

David Ciccolo, who owns The Publick House in Brookline, said that when he read the East Bay Express article, it described his experience. Ciccolo says that three months ago, he got a call from a Yelp salesman. "He said, 'Your reviews are fantastic.' And I'd looked at them the day before, and I knew our reviews weren't fantastic, and I was like, 'Why is this guy telling me this? He's full of crap,'" Ciccolo says. "So when I got off the phone with him and looked, the best [reviews] are on top. And that's when I was like, 'Oh, you gotta be kidding me. They have the power to move this stuff around to make a sale.'"

The next day, the Yelp salesman called again. "When I hung up with him and made it very clear that no way would any of our businesses ever advertise with him because of their tactics, I went downstairs, literally an hour later, and guess what? The good [reviews] were off the top and the bad ones were in the top position."

Ciccolo says he already harbored a certain degree of disdain for websites like Yelp and Chowhound, which don't allow business owners to respond to inaccurate reviews in a public forum. "We're defenseless as business owners. It's really hurting us," he says. "Especially in this economy."

When Kelly Griffith, who has been a Yelp reviewer since December 2007, clicked a box on her company's Yelp page last year to indicate she owns Closed Circle Photography (a feature that allows business owners to contact reviewers, write an "about me" section and view pageviews), she immediately started getting calls from Yelp's sales department. "They call me all the time. The first couple times they called, it was like, 'We really think that we could really benefit you, we really think you should really do this,'" she says. "It's gotten to the point where I recognize the area code, and I've stopped picking up the phone when I know it's them. I don't return their phone calls. I get it. They want me to advertise."

Then, in January, she lost her Elite status, thanks to a new company rule that business owners cannot be Elite due to what Farrelly terms unspecified "conflict of interest" concerns. It left Griffith feeling "a little miffed."

"I don't understand what the conflict of interest could be. ... I still can't review myself, no matter how elite I am," says Griffith. "I think they're really trying to just drive the business owners toward the paid sponsorship, and I kind of get if you're Elite and a paying sponsor, how that would be a conflict of interest. But I have no intention of becoming a sponsor."

Ichinose said there was no truth to allegations that Yelp coerces businesses into advertising, adding that the sponsorship program has drawn so much heat because people don't understand it. "It's kind of counterintuitive to the way a lot of businesses have looked at advertising and marketing programs in the past, where it's strictly pay to play. Prior to this, there was the Yellow Pages. You got an ad and you knew exactly the messages being delivered, it was very controlled," she says. "But Yelp is a new platform. All these businesses that are doing really great work and delivering great products and services and food, we're more than happy, whether they pay us or not, to drive a lot of traffic to them. Ultimately, we're about connecting businesses."

Even as Yelp sells itself as a public resource, it is a privately owned space, and is within its legal rights to cut out reviews, court businesses aggressively and strip users of their Elite status. The question is, is Yelp being transparent about its practices? Yelp may strive to cultivate a community of consumers and businesses, but it is, itself, still a corporation.

Full disclosure: Neither Dig Publishing nor Yelp paid / was paid for the "Yelp" column, which appeared regularly in the Dig until 1.7.09.