The Yelp Advertising Scam

YELP IS ONE OF THE BIGGEST SCAMS OUT THERE.

Don't ever put your company on yelp, I put my business on there and soon after I started getting a bunch of calls, daily about making a website and so on, none stop. If it wasn't for a website it was for advertising some other way. Just non stop calls. Don't use yelp to advertise your company.

I was a senior-level account executive (salesperson) at Yelp for two years as my first job in sales about a decade ago. Here's my take:

Yelp IS incredibly helpful for small businesses. Often times you can Google "small business category" + "in city/town" and some of the earliest non-ad results are the top 10 "small business category" on Yelp. Also, Siri depends on Apple Maps which has Yelp results integrated into it. You can think of it as the digital, modern Yellowpages for businesses.

90% of Yelp's revenue as a business comes from advertising. They have almost no other form of revenue stream outside of advertising, so the company's success lives and dies by the success of their sales reps to sell as much advertising as they possibly can.

The way it works is very straightforward: you pay money to be placed at the very top of search results for your category of business when someone is looking in your area. The more money you pay, the more often your Yelp business listing will appear at the top of the search results, before the natural search listings as an ad. Yelp finds new businesses because everyday American Yelpers all across the U.S. are incentivized to write reviews (Yelp's "Elite" Reviewers get invited to all sorts of events in their community, with free stuff given out as a perk) about them. When the Yelper searches for that particular business and does not find the listing, then the Reviewer will create a new review for a business that does not exist in Yelp yet, and that triggers a new business listing. This then lets Yelp sales reps know about the new business, and allows them to contact them to buy ads.

Because of this, Yelp is EXTREMELY aggressive about their approach to getting new advertising customers. The sales leadership use an "ends justify the means" type of approach to get every deal closed, and they will try to sell as big of an advertising budget as humanly possible. The more a business spends on their Yelp advertising, the more that sales rep gets in commission. The reps are armed with data on how many searches have occurred on the platform for that business's category, in their area, in the last 30 days, which gives them leverage to sell the ads (the general premise being that people don't search on Yelp for fun, they do it because they want to buy something... which is somewhat true).

However, there is absolutely no balance to the communication coming from the sales reps whatsoever. Internally at Yelp, they train their reps to be as persistent as possible, and told not to take a no as an answer from any small business owner that has a listing. Hence the sales reps contacting these businesses ending up as borderline harassment since there's no sense of boundaries in their approach, and they'll numb whoever their calling down with pure pestilence until the business owner gives and and gives the advertising a shot.

5. Another major issue is that Yelp leadership will also tell their sales reps to sell advertising to businesses that don't have the inventory of searches necessary to make advertising worthwhile. I remember I sold $30k of ads a month to an HVAC business in Fort Wayne, Indiana with extremely few searches for HVAC services in their area in the last 30 days. I asked my manager, "Isn't this a bad idea?" with me guessing that they wouldn't be getting $30k worth of customers back. They'll always say no and it's because Yelp is able to hide behind the single truth that "Advertising does not guarantee more customers", so if a business even has a sliver of an idea that the advertising would be a good marketing strategy, there's nothing stopping the Yelp rep from taking the business's money and Yelp will not look back twice to make sure it's worth it for the customer.

TLDR: Yelp would not survive as an organization without getting ads running, so they not only train their salespeople to do whatever it takes to get money from business owners, but the company has created a well oiled, Yelper-driven machine to facilitate their reps reaching that goal, driven by sheer human persistence which often blurs the line of harassment.