Yelp Sacrificing Integrity For Money?
Posted by Matt Gibbs | November 20, 2008
Eventually the Web 2.0 babies grow up and need to start making money. Yelp is no exception, as they recently hired an aggressive sales staff to bring in more ad revenue. Apparently, these salesmen are also making lofty promises that go against the whole point of a user-review site. They’re offering to move negative reviews to the bottom for businesses that advertise on the site. Shady!
While multiple California businesses have said they’ve talked to these Yelp reps and received the same offer, there’s no proof of it on the site. The Press Democrat did some research and noticed that businesses that had ads on the site also contained negative reviews on their page.
Of course, Yelp didn’t respond to requests to be interviewed on the subject.
I find it fascinating to watch some of my favorite websites reach the point where they need to figure out monetization. Google Adsense and occasional banner buys aren’t paying the bills, so how far will they go and how much will the user’s experience be impacted for the sake of $$$? Guy Kawasaki recently surveyed his Twitter followers to gauge their opinions on paying for the Twitter service. Not surprisingly, the vast majority said they’d rather see it go than pay anything, while around 20% said they’d pay $5/month. If Twitter lost 80% of its users by asking for subscriptions, it wouldn’t be very fun for anyone (and Facebook Status would all of a sudden be cool).
In other Twitter news, I’ve enjoyed watching Shaq figure the concept out the past few days. The only reason he found out about it is because there was someone pretending to be Shaq on Twitter. Someone alerted him, so he started The Real Shaq’s Twitter account and admits to being hooked.
Yes, that’s a working Shaq Shoe Phone
