Legal News

Fighting Words! Yelp CEO Gets all ?Orly? on His Attackers

By Ashby Jones

Just a quick post here, to follow up on our item from Friday on the recent lawsuit filed against Yelp, the consumer-driven review service.

At the time, we didn’t have much of a response from Yelp on the lawsuit, which accuses the company of gaming its rating system largely by giving advertisers more favorable reviews.

Now we do. And we love it, not necessarily for its content, but for its form, which strikes us as just so supremely west coast — laid back, informal, direct, and yes, a little cooler-than-thou. In Yelp terms, we’d give the response a solid 3.5 or 4.

It was broadcast on Yelp’s own blog, and comes courtesy of the company’s CEO, Jeremy Stoppleman, who just goes by “Jeremy” on the Yelp blog. Click here for part I of Stoppleman’s response to last week’s lawsuit; here for part II.

Stoppleman’s post opens:

There has been a long history of people accusing Yelp of monkeying around with reviews in exchange for money. The allegations are disappointing, not only because they are false, but because they ignore empirical evidence in favor of conspiracy theories.

You can see for yourself: thousands of businesses that advertise on Yelp have both negative and positive reviews. Despite these counter-examples to the contrary (virtually no advertiser on Yelp has a perfect reputation), extensive media explorations that end inconclusively, and the absence of any actual evidence to support this theory, this unfortunate and untrue meme has taken on a life of its own.

“Meme”? Very Gawker. We love it. But Stoppleman really gets going in part II, namely, when he lays out in his own mind how businesses misinterpret Yelp’s mission :

Why might some business owners think Yelp is shady? Here’s the anatomy of a typical Yelp conspiracy theory:

Step 1. Business owner gets a sales call from Yelp that explains an advertising product which seems nuanced; hears stuff like “Favorite review at top” and “Enhance your presence”. Business owner eventually decides, “Thanks, but no thanks on the ads, Yelp.”

Step 2. Business owner newly-exposed to Yelp decides it's interesting and aggressively solicits all their family and friends to write reviews.

Step 3. We’ve already cautioned against this practice and this is why: a few days later, our automated filter suppresses the suspicious-looking reviews.

Step 4. Business assumes algorithmic process in Step 3 is actually a Yelp employee manually punishing the business for declining to advertise in Step 1.

Optional Step 5. Now-angry business finds the Orly Taitz of internet lawyers who may or may not have read about our recent funding round.

As I’ve said, many might say we’re weird, but we have nothing to hide. We’re doing things differently, but we have never and will never extort businesses; the accusation is beyond ludicrous. In fact, it’s deeply ironic that the very mechanisms and processes we’ve created to preserve Yelp’s integrity generate these accusations that we have no integrity.

The “Orly Taitz (pictured) of internet lawyers?” Wow. In some parts, thems would be fightin’ words!

In any event, we’re looking forward to the development of this lawsuit even more than we were last week.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 01, 2010 (boomark / email).