Suffice to say, for the past several years, Yelp's position has been, "We don't extort our customers, but hey, we totally can if we feel like it." They say they don't extort businesses, but when even your own shareholders have sued you for "undisclosed business practices, including but not limited to requiring business customers to pay to suppress negative reviews," something ain't right. This subject has been talked about ad nauseam (here's a good overview from shortly after the case was decided), so I won't go into too much detail here. The case involved a group of companies which believed that Yelp had "extorted or attempted to extort advertising payments from them by manipulating user reviews and penning negative reviews of their businesses." In their case, the plaintiffs argued that Yelp had done this by distorting their rankings - removing positive reviews and publishing negatives ones - and then having their sales people use that as leverage to get them to buy advertisements on the review site.īut the court stated in their ruling, "As Yelp has the right to charge for legitimate advertising services, the threat of economic harm that Yelp leveraged is, at most, hard bargaining." In September 2014, the 9th Circuit Court decided a case that practically could have been named Everybody v. So, what can you do? Yelp is not doing anything illegal in their sales of advertising. It’s been pretty obvious from the beginning that there are problems with the platform, but they have the law on their side. I ended up deciding to write this article because I’ve received the exact same marketing calls from Yelp that my clients complained about.
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