If you didn’t know, Yelp is being sued by two separate law firms claiming that their business is extortion. According to the complaint, one example is a veterinary hospital who claims that they contacted by a Yelp sales person to have negative reviewed removed, if they paid a few hundred dollars. This is similar to claims brought by EastBayExpress.com about a year ago, that claimed that this was part of their business model – selling positive reviews for a few hundred dollars or removing negative ones for the same.

   Normally, I’d find claims like this to be complete junk. Yelp is a great site that many, many people have used to find honest reviews of services. If you’ve used Yelp, you’ll notice that there are often even positive reviews of some of their advertisers, a point which they are gladly to point out. It doesn’t make sense that a well funded company like Yelp would need to nickel and dime small shops for $300 payments in order to meet their sales goals, anymore than Google would offer to adjust search rankings for a few thousand dollars of ad money. While Yelp isn’t Google, it is ranked 308 on Alexa, and has significant and growing traffic as more and more people understand this system.

  Still, there are some things that make me really wonder about these accusations. Would it be unconceivable that a sales person, looking to make a quick buck, would indeed call people with negative ratings and imply that he could do something about those rankings? Sales people are in the business of making sales, and it doesn’t seem impossible that someone might actually engage in that type of business. It’s very possible, but at the same time, I’d find it really weird that a sales person, who makes their money on large business deals would ever want to engage in $300 fraud schemes?

  On the other hand, it’s not uncommon for those who feel they have been wronged in a public forum to sue the forum. In this case, the veterinary hospital contacted Yelp themselves, upset that there was a negative review on the site, and then claims that Yelp asked them at that time to buy advertising, “in exchange” for the removal of the negative advertising. It seems very strange to me that a company, that was recently offered $500 Million, would engage in this type of business. If you look over the site, advertising isn’t really that important to them; they are obviously looking for a large cash payout right now more than anything.

  My conclusion is that these lawsuits are blatantly false. Neither one actually provides evidence, such as emails, audio-tapes or anything that back up the accusations. If these were true, you’d think that not only would there be evidence, but that this illegal scheme would be investigated by authorities, who’d have such evidence. Such a scheme would be quite illegal, violating both local and federal laws. Where is the FBI, where is the local police? Why aren't the executives in jail for this poorly concieved criminal enterprise? On top of that, where are the companies that paid the money, and now are seeing better reviews? Are there any? No.

  This is obviously, in my mind, an example of the legal system run-amuck, allowing anyone to sue another company, defame them without any consequence to them, except loosing the lawsuit. The only extortion going on here is from the people suing Yelp in order to cash in.

 And yes, Yelp ignored my calls to sponsor this blog. Oh well.