Yelp.com, a user-generated product-review website, is allegedly selling advertising to businesses in what amounts to a shake-down. In exchange for an ad buy, Yelp offers to promote positive reviews and eliminate negative ones.

From the Daily Californian:

"Yelp.com, which has accumulated 5 million user-generated reviews since 2004, sells advertising packages that allow businesses to highlight one favorite review. But some businesses say they were also given the option to make positive reviews more visible in return for advertising on the Web site.

Jean Spencer, owner of the Musical Offering Cafe on Bancroft Way, said Yelp approached her numerous times to improve her profile on the site.

"What they offered to do was to move the more positive reviews toward the top," Spencer said. "You could move more than one review to the top. You pretty much got your pick of anything you wanted to move.""

Yelp denies that they've offered businesses anything more than the ability to place a single favorable review on the top of their page. But other business owners claim they've been offered more:

"Mary Seaton, owner of Sofa Outlet in San Mateo, said Yelp salespeople offered to eliminate poor reviews altogether.

"The Yelp person said they could enhance the positive reviews and push the negative reviews down, and then eventually have them drop off," Seaton said. "They'd just remove them. It would improve my star rating."'

It's not difficult to imagine how offering advertisers one good featured review could slide into allowing them to restructure their review stream to contain only good reviews. From there, it's a short step to an implied threat of bad reviews if a company chooses not to buy an ad package or publicly discusses Yelp's "offers:"

"After appearing on CBS 5 news in August and complaining about Yelp's advertising policies, Selena Kellinger, owner of Razzberry Lips in San Jose, said that she received a spike in negative reviews. She doubts these reviews were from actual customers, but rather from within Yelp itself."

If these allegations against Yelp are true, they are likely to find themselves out of business before long. Expecting small businesses whose stock-in-trade is their integrity to pay to play, and increasingly savvy and ethical consumers to be duped en masse, is likely to be an unstable business model.

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