Been Burned by Yelp? Tell Your Story.

When I began working on my recently published "Rebel Yelp" article, I came across repeated comments online by business owners and reviewers who called into question Yelp's comment-deletion policy. Specifically, there were many claims about a "pay to play" policy at Yelp that supposedly works like this: Business listings on Yelp are provided for free. But unless businesses become Yelp advertisers, at a cost of around $300 a month, their reviews are rearranged and even deleted to accentuate the most negative ratings. And the Yelp salespeople allegedly threatening these actions are described as persistent, to put it mildly.

The most recent update of this controversy can be found at the Register, but the definitive story was written by the East Bay Express' Kathleen Richards back in February. Unfortunately, as Ms. Richards explains, "Many business owners ... feel so threatened by Yelp's power to harm their business that they declined to be interviewed unless their identities were concealed."

The anonymous nature of the article caused Yelp's CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman, to blog his disagreement. Stoppelman also links to several follow-ups by other media that seem to debunk many of the allegations in Richards' article. He even says that Richards retreats from her own claims in the last few paragraphs of her piece. It's not for me to judge Richards' reporting, but I can certainly conduct some research on my own.

So here's an invitation to the commenters on my story and anywhere else on the Internet to participate in The Big Money's Jack Schafer-style bunking or debunking of the claim that Yelp manipulates its comments. There are rules to participate. The main one of which is that you have to give me enough data to validate your claim. The anonymous angle on this story has run its course. So e-mail me at p+yelp@smalera.com with the following information:

• Your Yelp account profile or business page
• Your exact complaint, whether it be a deleted review, unfair ordering of reviews, mistreatment after leaving or deciding not to join the advertising program, or any similar motive-based altering of your data on Yelp. The more links and documentation, the better.

What I'll do is try to verify what you tell me, which may include, after other means, asking Yelp to provide information. I have not run this idea by Yelp, either, so I don't know what their response or cooperation level will be. While I won't publish any details that aren't needed to explain the situation, this will not be an anonymous exercise. Part of the reason I gave short shrift to claims of unfairness in my Yelp article was because so many of them seemed based in anonymity or apocrypha.

And let me reveal my own theory, which is that I think Yelp is simply a different animal than most merchants are used to dealing with. Therefore it's easy to be hypersensitive about Yelp's algorithmic commenting moderation system, which is surely among the most advanced I've ever seen, and to be alarmed by the near-daily fluctuations—sort of like watching a stock ticker too closely.