March 15, 2015

Yelp is a business that, if examined dispassionately, really should never have succeeded. The primary reason was its business model: let anonymous users pick apart businesses in published reviews, then try to sell advertising to those same businesses. Yelp made this challenged business model even tougher by introducing a secretive filtering algorithm that would decide what reviews got published. The objective was to weed out spam, but all it did instead was to spur conspiracy theories among businesses that felt good reviews were being swallowed while bad reviews always seemed to get published.