YELP

Yelp was founded in 2004 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. It is primarily recognized as a crowd-sourced review web and mobile application service. Other services provided by the company include an online reservation system, an online food-delivery service, and training tools for small businesses. The site does not require user fees and instead relies on business advertising for revenues.

History

Yelp was founded in October 2004 by Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman, two former employees of PayPal. The idea was conceived when Jeremy Stoppelman caught the flu and noticed a lack of online tools for service recommendations while attempting to find a doctor online. The website was launched with the aid of a $1 million from Max Levin, Paypal's founder, through MRL Ventures, a San Francisco entrepreneurship that provides grants and advice to startup companies.

The first review was posted by Katherine W. on October 12, 2014. Katherine awarded Truly Mediterranean with four stars and the comment "dirt cheap, good falafels." By 2007, the site reached 1 million reviews and by May 2008 the site was attracting 10 million unique viewers every month. In 2009, Yelp expanded to the U.K. and Canada followed by the first non-English release of the website. By 2013, Yelp had a presence in 21 countries.

Features

The website works as a crowd-sourced local business review and social networking site. Registered users, also known as "yelpers", write reviews and use five-star ranking systems for local restaurants and businesses. Viewers can search for top-rated venues using categories such as "Food", "Nightlife", "Health & Medical", and "Shopping" within a specific location. The reviews allow users to make comments and post photos of their experiences to benefit other users when comparing local businesses. Dedicated yelpers compete for site awards and badges by posting high-quality reviews, receiving votes for useful, funny, and cool reviews, or being the first to review a business. The "Talk" portion of the website is a discussion forum that allows users to post questions and make comments. Mobile users can also order food through the app.

Yelp Services

Local businesses can claim a page on Yelp through the website. Yelp pages allow businesses to connect to their local community and advertise their services. Members can also use SeatMe, an online reservation system to help to manage their business.

The Yelp for Business Owners app allows users to track visitor engagement, customer leads, and clicks. It also allows owners to respond to reviews with a personal message to the reviewer or public comment as well as respond to customer inquiries. Owners can update the community on information about their business such as hours and menu changes via the website.

Ethical Concerns and Implications

Sorting Reviews

Order of Reviews determined by Users

The order in which reviews are presented to site users is critical to businesses, as most users only look at the first few reviews. Yelp's review-sorting algorithm is determined by the recency of the post, user voting, reviewer trustworthiness among other factors. The site also allows users to increase the status of a review by rating it as "funny" or "cool". This is controversial among yelpers due to instances of helpful reviews being overshadowed by less helpful, wittier ones. While the promotion of entertainment value over content encourages activity and engages members, it can also decrease the authenticity of the reviews. This also provides a conflict of interest for yelpers, who gain reputation, status, and (for the Yelp Elite) event invitations upon reviewing, creating incentives to generate false or insincere reviews.

Order of Reviews determined by Yelp

Despite being denied by Yelp, allegations that the site is biased toward elevating positive reviews for paying advertisers have been made. Many companies have accused Yelp of modifying its review system to encourage low-rated companies to purchase advertisements on the site, however all related lawsuits have been rejected before going to trial. One notable business owner, Rick Fonger, claimed that he felt extorted by a Yelp representative after canceling his ad on the site. The employee pointed out that the ad space on his jewelry store's page featured a competitor and that the ad space could be purchased for $75 per month. In 2015, the Federal Trade Commission examined Yelp's practices and did not pursue any action against the company.

Yelp's business model continues to present a potential conflict of interest in providing reliable, user-generated reviews while receiving its revenues from the businesses being reviewed. One way that Yelp strives to improve the transparency of its review sorting is in allowing users to change the way that reviews are sorted through available settings.

Filtering Reviews

The automatic filtering out of reviews that are considered untrustworthy or believed to be written by a competitor on Yelp has caused dissent in some yelpers. Yelp justifies the effects of the review filter by stating that reviews are never "deleted" and are always shown on a user's profile page. While Yelp claims that it takes time for reviewers to become established, the site purposely refrains from elaborating on what it means to be an "established" user to reduce the risk of malicious members gaming the system.

False Reviews

In 2011, an investigation by the New York Office of the Attorney General resulted in 19 companies paying fines between $2500 and $100,000 for posting fake online reviews. This behavior was likely motivated by the financial benefits of having a good Yelp page and the ease of creating anonymous user accounts. A study from Harvard Business School in 2011 estimated that a one-star rating increase on Yelp resulted in to a revenue increase of 5%-9%. False recommendations are more common in small businesses, especially those with few or poor reviews, than chains as the revenue increase from increased Yelp traffic is more significant.

In addition to discouraging fraudulent reviews, Yelp discourages business owners from asking patrons to write reviews in order to maintain the authenticity of the site. Business owners are advised not to offer incentives for reviews, such as discounts or coupons, and algorithms are used to weed out suspicious reviews.

HIPPA Violations from Negative Reviews

Many patients have begun to rate and review health providers, from doctors and dentists, to therapists and chiropractors, and not all reviews are positive. Many health providers have been responding to negative reviews in ways that have questioned whether they are violating HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. This federal patient privacy law does not allow patient health information to be disclosed by providers without patient permission. Yelp gave ProPublic access to its public reviews, which allowed ProPublica to search over one million reviews for mentions of HIPAA or privacy. Over 3,500 one-star reviews where patients mentioned privacy or HIPAA concerns were found, some in which resulted in disputes between patient and health provider In some responses, health care information is provided, which is in violation of HIPAA. In one instance, Marisa Speed posted a negative review of North Valley Plastic Surgery after the treatment of her son, in which an employee responded giving disclosing information about the patient.In another case, Angela Grijalva wrote a one-star rating for Maximize Chiropractic concerning her daughter, in which the chriopractor replied on Yelp and verified that the daughter was a patient, also violating HIPAA laws.