“Yelp is Evil” – SF Chronicle Newspaper Ad
UPDATE 1/2014: Thanks to the overwhelming interest in this topic, we have recently published two books that talk about online reviews. We hope you will find them helpful!
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[e-book for Kindle] Yelp for Business: Quick-Start Guide to Managing Your Reviews
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[e-book and paper book] Five Stars: Putting Online Reviews to Work for Your Business
We often hear local small business owners lamenting their presence on Yelp – and the strongarm tactics that some describe hearing from Yelp salespeople. A recent ad in our local San Francisco newspaper proclaims: “Yelp is Evil.” The ad was taken out by Brass & Glass, which currently has a 2.5 star average on Yelp.
Stomaching negative online reviews has got to be one of the most difficult aspects of small business ownership these days. Readers, do you have any advice for companies like Brass & Glass?
18 COMMENTS
I totally agree with what this person is doing. Yelp is just plain evil. From their “filtering” to allow their insane posters to take pictures on private property of things that could make a company look bad, even if they have to stage it. In fact they “know” that this can happen, and then offer a package plan to will cost you anything from $300 and up per month to protect you from the crazy one star people.
It has been such a problem that when I here about a new place I want to visit as a bad rating, it actually makes me want to go more. Because I do know that most of the places that have a great rating pay Yelp to help keep them looking good.
I hope that they get taken of the internet.
Completely agree here too. It’s not about businesses being unable to take constructive criticism, which is how Yelp loves to try to characterize this. It’s about hard-working small business owners being literally held hostage on the Yelp system – Yelp is the only major site that does not honor any form of de-listing request – to be targetted by completely unfiltered garbage, often from “reviewers” who are disgruntled former employees, people who have been refused service for good reason, or unemployed kids trying to shake the business down for freebies.
Yelp is doing anything and everything to pump up their own listing volumes and search ranking, including refusing to drop businesses even after they are closed and listing individual consumers who don’t even really run public businesses. Then they abuse a very narrow legal exemption to justify being grossly negligent in failing to provide any kind of grievance process for bogus reviews. The only way out is to buy advertising from them. It’s such a rotten racket it absolutely stinks. I think the current small business class action about advertising extortion is only the tip of the iceberg. The next waves to come are probably that: 1.) Yelp will be sued by its competitors because it is unfairly competing in the market by inflating Yelp listing volume and search rankings with dirty practices their competitors are ethical enough not to use; and 2.) Yelp recklessly and willfully sits back and allows their site to be used by reviewers for extortion too.
Yelp intentionally went out of their way to make themselves an enemy of the business community – now for many years they will reap what they have sown.
Apparently yelp is broken from the inside and out. Read below what yelp’s own employeesand sales force have to say about Jeremy Stoppelman and yelp:
“low base salary”
“high turnover rate”
“sales classes of 20-40 people come in every 2 months, leading to a feeling of expendability and lack of importance (it’s demoralizing celebrating new employees who do the exact same job that you do except better, even though you’ve been on the job for 6+ months and they’ve been on for 3 weeks)”
“Very unfulfilling – hard to feel like you’re making a positive difference for the majority of your clients who sign up”
“lack of transparency about product updates. Yelp gave employees sneak peeks into new products while simultaneously releasing new ones without telling the sales org, making it very unprofessional when a client brings up these new products and we have no idea what they’re talking about”
“Even though the company is expanding, opportunities for advancement are limited – most people will have to relocate to Phoenix office if they want a promotion”
” “Drink the kool-aid” kind of environment. It feels like the higher-ups in management implicitly discourage employees from questioning specific “why” or “how” details about the advertising product, and most employees don’t believe in its viability anymore after 6+ months”.
” Turnover rate is ridiculously high. My class of 30 was down to 16 before training was over and I don’t know how much more it went down after I left. I was told when I interviewed that turnover rate was very low and I was a little disappointed when I saw what the truth was”.
“They could make the selling process a lot easier if they focused on being able to give tangible numbers to potential clients rather than abstract facts and careful wording”
“Doesn’t seem like the CEO has any idea of who is involved in the sales org or what the sales org does”.
“Loud music constantly playing. Often with mildly explicit lyrics (anything but a lot of “F” words goes). I don’t care if my friends or peers are swearing around me, but trying to talk to potential clients with songs some would find degrading/demeaning/inappropriate just wasn’t professional in my opinion”.
“Management has no problem with swearing. Again, I know I am a more conservative guy when it comes to this but it just goes back to professionalism. When you hear the CEO saying “F*** yeah” it just makes him seem immature in my opinion. I just felt like I was at another frat party when I was working there and I wish it was slightly more professional. Not a huge deal, but it did rub me the wrong way”.
“the place is run by kids. All your peers are in their early to mid-twenties, who think they know it all”.
“you will be overworked and underpaid, resulting in burnout and turnover. Think 12 hours a day for a little over $30k/year”
“management and HR make you feel like you should be blessed to have a job there. Therefore, you should never turn down a request…and you should smile while doing everything as you’re told”
“lack of racial diversity, especially in the Scottsdale location”
“high pressure environment. If you don’t hit your targets, you will be cut loose, before and after the 60 day trial period”
“incompetence is rampant from the top down”
“no racial diversity. Homogenous work environment. Scottsdale location is 95% caucasian. Minorities rarely ever get hired. I was the one of the few minorities in the office”.
“boiler room environment. Did you get a college degree only to work in a high pressure call center”?
“Laughable compensation”
“long hours and high turnover. You are just another cog in the machine here”
“Big decisions are made without context, or with little explanation – growth/direction is feeling secretive to the ‘average’ employee.No formal evaluations or structured methods of peer recognition – it’s all ad-hoc
Disparity between departments (sales, engineering, ops, etc)
Quick growth = less personalized experience.
“It feels like the uniqueness of working at yelp is being silenced by quick growth and this “we’re in our groove so keep on trucking” mood.
“Very phony, I was not able to buy in to their system and thus was “frowned upon”. I could have gone along, but I just felt it was absurd, though I can understand how others like it. Some very nice people there, but a lot of mindless folks as well”.
It’s easy not too fit in with the “cool crowd”. I felt like it was high school again.
“CEO visibility gets lower and lower every month”
Account Executive in San Francisco, CA:”I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody I care about”
I am a small business owner. I received my first review on Yelp, a fake, by my competitor. Everthing contained in the review is a lie. Since then several of my customers have written us positive reviews and they have all been screened by Yelps filter.
I have written Yelp (no reply and now my e-mails are blocked), I have called Yelp (no answer), I have flagged the review and the author (one-time user, which should be a red flag) yep, you guessed it, nothing!
Yelp is awful!
I am experiencing the same issues with yelp as many other small business owners. This parasite mafia organization is feeding off of hard working business owners. We are hopeless and suffering because of this evil entity. I cannot believe how they should be in the business of destroying the core of America. I can believe our system is allowing this to happen and our judges to be on their side.
Pay me or I will bring you down.
Yelp is a purely evil corporation run by an immoral, arrogant, condescending, and juvenile CEO who has become rich off the misery of others. Yelp allows questionable, profanity-laced reviews of professionals and restaurants to remain at its site, while it filters out many other real reviews.
One of my friends is a doctor who received an unbelievable and unwarranted nasty review from a one-time visitor to his practice. The woman’s review included the “f” bomb and the “a” word. It was way over-the-top and full of false information and accusations which was typical of this woman’s many reviews of other doctors and businesses. I flagged the review (and several others the “Yelper” wrote on other businesses) since it appeared to violate Yelp’s guidelines, but of course nothing happened.
Yelp arrogantly doesn’t respond to emails, letters, or phone calls (if you can find their phone number). Now that I know that the millionnaire CEO himself, based on employee comments above, engages in puerile profanity-laced behavior, I realize that Yelp is run by arrogant juvenile delinquents who must enjoy sticking it to small businesses and professionals.
Yelp entices its “elite” members with free booze parties to keep them writing their reviews, thereby promoting an animal-house mentality. And Yelp likes to hide behind the Communications Decency Act to defend their evil practice of allowing false and questionable reviews to remain at their site and filtering out others.
Stoppelman hopes to cash in on an IPO in the Spring of 2012. I hope this evil company and its “management” chokes on the cash it gets from bearing false witness against the reputations of others.
My friend was also a victim of yelp reviews as well. Since I came up with a new startup to take on Yelp. Its launching next month,but before any reviews get posted they must be verified.
I am a small business owner. I received my first negative review on Yelp, a fake, by my competitor. Everthing contained in the review is a mistake. Since then several of my customers have written us positive reviews and they have all been screened by Yelps filter so they called me and want to sale me advertising , i said hell no so after having 15 positive reviews and 1 negative they kept the negative one and filter the positive one, what does that says to you , scam
you can play them at their own game… from what I have gathered, their algorithm will not filter new users with 0 friends and 1 negative review. It seems strange that a filter exists if it wouldn’t remove something like that, clearly a new user with 1 review is disgruntled/competitor. But from their standpoint, this user is new and just getting started, so seeing their review appear on the business listing will help them notice the benefits of yelp and keep them writing more reviews. If that first review is positive, it sometimes shows up, but not as much as a negative review. (horrible, I know)
So know that we know which reviews won’t be filtered, and see that this type of account can be created very quickly without having to make dummy reviews…spam em’
Just make 50 new accounts and rate your business poorly while writing nice things. Gleaming words praising the food and service. Your average will drop but at lease you can dilute the negative reviews. You can try mixing in some 5 star reviews while you’re making these dummy accounts, but they’ll most likely be filtered. Yelp really sucks, we’re working on some hacks to really mess with them.
We have 9 very POSITIVE reviews and all of them somehow wound up in YELP’s “filter”. One negative review, by someone who never was a client, and it gets posted and remains that way. When we complained to yelp saying we wanted off their site and then pointed out that the negative reviewer is making personal attacks and is using profanity in the review against their own policy, let alone the person was never even a client, YELP responded basically saying too bad for you, and then completely erased one of the positive reviews from the filtered batch written by a person that was one of our first clients which we were so proud of. It seems no matter what someone writes, if it is a positive review for us, YELP will not let it post. This is a evil scheme and small business owners NEED TO UNITE and show politicians and this one company the power of many, we are the engine of the economy!
Yes, yelp is EVIL!!! I do not understand why the class action suits haven’t worked, but they only want your $$$. Karma yelp!
7 days after signing, I canceled.
Paying $ 600.00 early termination fee gets me peace of mind rather than
being stick to them for a year.
Sales people were very persisitant and I reluctantly signed up.
Something did not feel right from the start.
Both sales perosn and the one who is in charge of my account were mad and became unprofessional because I canceled after a week.
Altogether, I had to pay $ 900.00. but it is fine, way better than being under their manipulation for a year paying $3600.00/year.
Without my permission, they put my business, I told them several times to remove.
They filtered every review, literally every positive review.
I mean every review.
Even after paying for Ad, I cannot edit street location. I have to contact them for correcting minor things. Why I signed up in the beginning?
It is like, even though you are not hungry, when someone keeps pushing you to try other dish, you reluctantly taste it.
I don’t get anything from this company.
Thank god, I canceled so early before I get trapped.
I made a profile on yelp in 2008 to help boost my media presence with my business I have had for 21 years . To keep up with the times they say ! I never really saw reviews just one or two , but clients said they wrote us a great review ..??..!! Weird , where did it go ???!? Well then we had a client come to the salon who then wrote a crazy bad review . Which I also responded to her publicly and have made every attempt to talk to yelp., but all they are interested in is trying to sell me a monthly to remedy this. The more I have reached out , the more weird reviews pop up . They are holding my business reputation hostage!!! As of lately march 2013 some good reviews from 2008 did show up in my filtered section , not public 🙁 . WEIRD
I have also noticed the more I try to care to fix the problem with yelp the worst it becomes with yelp. I don’t have the extra 300$ a month for hostage negotiations with yelp.
I do also understand reviews are helpful to every one , it just needs to be honest full disclosure in real time , not in yelp fantasy time !!!
That is what I thought I was signing up for a honest company.
Notice
As a server and long time vet. I have been following review for our restaurant day after day wondering why our owner is giving so much pressure on our staff about yelp reviews and trip advisory.
I focused and asked many guess that had great experiences to mention them on yelp for the owner to see. Many reviews of positivity were added. Then some how just vanished of the yelp site. What the hell? I work my tail off to give the best service anyone has had. I know so many tricks of the trade different languages and cultures of dining. Why make my job even harder with a site that will set you up for failure.
I’m getting really sick of Yelp and how they just want to keep negative reviews from 2012 readable and just hide the most recent reviews.
Yelp is not a lagit…. site to go to for investigative work. Wish both owners of yelp and my place of work new this.
Chris
Please sign this petition to white house to stop yelp and share it.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/stop-yelpcom-destroying-small-businesses/svPrcjb1
Negative reviews on yelp cannot be responded to effectively. As business owners, we need to be able to defend ourselves when attacked. yelp says to suck it up and move on. forget that. I Defend my business against the two batshit neg reviews Ive gotten. politically correct? No. Happy I did? yes. Screw yelp.
trying to leave yelp is a massive pain – random charges are just popping up and most of them dont make sense i wrote everything my yelp account manager said last week said but today she saying something different
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