In the Field with Desi Lydic
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What is the controversy surrounding Yelp's business practices?
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My name is Chef Davide Cerrettini. I'm a chef owner at Botto Bistro, and I give 50% off a pizza if you give me a one star on Yelp.
Why would you want a one-star review? Sorry, let me ask you in terms you can understand. What's the matter, you?
If you want to have a good rating on Yelp, you need to pay for advertising. And I decided to don't pay advertising. So what they do, they manipulate your rating in order for you to give up and pay for advertising.
According to Davide, when he refused to pay Yelp to advertise, he noticed dozens of five-star reviews disappearing from his Yelp page.
To me, that is extortion. Manipulated.
Extortion.
Yes. I'm Italian. We invent extortion.
Well, yeah. I mean, you're not just Italian. You're, like, cartoonishly Italian.
I agree with you.
How exactly did Yelp try to extort you? Walk me through.
Yes, absolutely. You open your business. In a couple of weeks, you have your business placed in their forum. You start to have good review. And then in three or four weeks, you start to receive phone calls. They call you every single day. They're pushy. They don't give up. They keep calling you. We were answering the phone, looking at the number, and we were just telling them to go f*** themselves immediately.
That's what I tell my mother-in-law.
After a couple of days, you start to see the results of your bad decision. So immediately, your rating is changing. Somehow, this good review, they're gone.
Davide's claim that Yelp extorts businesses was a serious allegation, and he's not the only one with a Yelp grievance. In fact, Yelp gets accused of extortion so much that they have an entire page on their website dedicated to explaining how they don't extort businesses. So I went to Yelp's headquarters to meet with their spokesperson, but not just any spokesperson.
My name's Ben Flanick. I am currently Yelp San Francisco's community manager.
And...
And I did some television a number of years ago.
On?
It was on The Bachelor. I was The Bachelor.
That's right. Forget about Yelp extorting people. I had to ask season 16's Bachelor what really went down on that horseback ride with Lindsay or the time he totally dumped her.
I would prefer that we probably keep this conversation about Yelp today, if that's cool with you.
Yeah, no, yes, absolutely. No, I am 100% a professional and I'm here to talk to you about Yelp. I would never, you know, want to talk about it. Go, go, go, go, get out of here. Go, clean it up. Clean these up. I didn't arrange that.
No, no, it's fine, it's fine.
Sorry, excuse me. What would you say to someone who says that Yelp extorts businesses?
I would say that's simply not true. Great. I'm also not in sales. I run the community side of things here. Yelp makes its money primarily through advertising. You don't have to advertise. Reviews are shown just the same whether you're a paid advertiser or not.
How does Desi Lydic explore the origins of Florida Man?
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Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
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Yelp, the most popular crowdsourced review forum online, and a vital resource when choosing which waxing place doesn't laugh so loudly. But can we trust everything we read on Yelp? One extremely Italian restaurant owner finds Yelp's business practices so devious, he's protesting.
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Chapters
4 chaptersSpeakers
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