Although Zagat issues a charge for full access to its restaurant reviews, the public Yelp has worked to the non-paying commoners as a poor man’s restaurant and business review outlet. However, the website does not work to the advantage of the non-paying businesses it features.
Yelp found itself in San Francisco’s Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for allegedly altering the ratings of business who refused to take out advertisements with the website. Although Yelp has vehemently denied ever doing this, several small businesses claim they saw their ratings dip after they neglected to pay for Yelp advertisements.
These claims may be skeptical, considering Yelp reviews are provided by real people (and probably a few self-ratings, let’s be honest), but there is a way for Yelp to skew a business’s ratings. Consider the case of dentist Tracy Chan. After refusing to buy advertisements from a Yelp sales representative, Chan was dismayed to find several five-star ratings were removed from her business’s page. After she caved and purchased Yelp advertising, the positive reviews were miraculously restored.
If Yelp is really doing this, it completely defeats its purpose as a review site and is kind of insulting to the intelligence of Internet users, let alone the businesses suffering. Despite this, it was ultimately determined that legally, this practice is totally OK, because Yelp is a business, not a public service.
“As Yelp has the right to charge for legitimate advertising services, the (alleged) threat of economic harm is, at most, hard bargaining,” Judge Marsha Berzon wrote in the Tuesday ruling.
There could be quite a potpourri of repercussions for Yelp now that people know they are allowed to alter reviews. Users may lose trust in a review service that isn’t necessarily telling the truth. If you’re on Yelp looking for a good Italian restaurant in your neighborhood, it may be a little obvious the ratings were tampered with if the Olive Garden is rated above the authentic Italian eatery with the homemade pasta. If people can’t take Yelp’s reviews seriously, what’s the point of using the website at all?
But there is a flip side, and it doesn’t paint a pretty picture for small businesses. Now that it is known that businesses can heighten their reviews by sweetening the deal for Yelp, businesses will be clamoring to buy advertisements. This may all be well and good for big businesses with the extra cash to spare, but for locally owned small businesses who can barely keep afloat as it is, Yelp’s abuse could totally screw them over. Unfortunately, this is the more likely scenario.
And it gets worse. Sure, people may lose a little trust in Yelp’s credibility, but they probably won’t stop using it altogether. Remember when Facebook altered the news feeds of some of its users as part of a depression-and-the-Internet experiment? People may have lost a little trust in Facebook after finding out they were products of its weird social experiment, but Facebook still has about 1.28 billion monthly active users. Plus, Yelp’s format is incredibly convenient and easy to use, and people are probably going to eventually forget this whole little ruling happened in the first place. Is this ethical? No, but it is legal.
Yelp is going to continue to market itself as an unbiased review outlet, whether it is or not, and the public is most likely going to use it as such, whether they trust it or not. Meanwhile, the Yelp pages for small, financially less fortunate businesses will be neglected because in the end, not enough people are going to care enough to look past Yelp’s technically legal funded favoritism. This is simply another case of big business winning and the world blithely accepting it.
