I think this is why TripAdvisor is better, in my experience, for restaurants than Yelp. If I'm not mistaken, TripAdvisor makes most of its money off of hotel booking referrals.
ANYTHING is better than Yelp. It literally does everything in the book to get you to download the app (to collect your user data, presumably) and is literally designed from the ground up to promote businesses that pay them to
be higher on the index.
Their sales tactics are borderline abusive, too. They will hunt you down forever until you sign a package with them, and they give you zero time to think about whether their ad package (which only works on their site and has a super high CPC compared to AdWords) is right for your business.
This might be true technically but it's common knowledge that not paying will negatively affect perfectly good reviews. To the point that reviews that were ok while we paid aren't the instant we stop.
You can argue whatever you want about your former employers but convincing SBOs that Yelp aren't extortionist scumbags based on this detail is not going to fly.
Source: I work directly with maid services and trust in Yelp is at an all time low. Literally the first comment when they are mentioned in our private group is something along the lines of "Die in a grease fire" or "F*ck Yelp". And this is from some of the nicest ladies (mostly) that you'll meet.
"it's common knowledge that not paying will negatively affect perfectly good reviews"
No, it's a common rumor. Repeating rumors does not make them true, and this "knowledge" is completely false.
I have no financial or business interest in Yelp. I just don't enjoy seeing my own work, and the work of my colleagues, disparaged by completely unsubstantiated rumor mongering.
Would I be in the wrong to call this a "canary"? As in you cannot pay to rank higher in search. But you can pay to have more exposure, better reviews, hidden bad reviews, etc.
Except for the fact that you can be at the top of all search results by purchasing an ad. (SOURCE: Opened yelp in browser on mobile amd searched for coffee in SF)
Yelp is also terrible for owners who purchase a business and are strong armed into doing business with yelp on order to remove all the previous bad ratings, description, contact info, etc. (Source: bought 1 bar in LA and 2 in LV)
The audiences are a little different. TripAdvisor is easier to game, I find it a good guide, but there are definitely false positives. TA is very accurate for shitty restaurants.
Yelp is weird because when it's good, the reviews are great and super insightful. But you don't necessarily get a great picture of the area. (My typical use case I showing up in randomtown, USA for 24-48 hours.)
Foursquare was my favorite app ever, until they split it up into 4sq and swarm. then it became totally useless to me, and all of my friends slowly stopped using it. :/
4sq's venue ratings is hit or miss. I've definitely found some good places to eat at (that I would've otherwise not found), but I've also eaten at a ton of places that are highly rated but nothing special. For the latter, perhaps they are good relative to the immediate area, but not really that good.
Big fan of their SMS bot Marsbot as well if you haven't tried it yet. For some reason it's very low key and they don't promote it at all, but it's a pretty sweet product.
TripAdvisor recommendations get dated fast and are only for a niche audience. In my experience they tend to stick to the most popular places rather than the best places, and they miss a lot of local spots / dive-y spots / places that families wouldn't go etc.
In cities like SF, NYC, etc, I've had much better luck with recommendations from Foursquare and Yelp. Especially with new places.
> TripAdvisor makes most of its money off of hotel booking referrals
Somewhat surprisingly this is the case for a lot of travel POI type sites (hotel referral commission rates are so high). Even a site like Kayak gets a significant portion of its revenue from hotel bookings.
It does not! At least it did not 8 years ago when I worked there. Obviously a lot can change, but they realized the one competitive advantage they had that kept others out of the market was the huge catalog of user reviews.
While other things may be fudged for profitability, there was a clear line between content and advertising we didn't cross.
There are quite a few TA people on HN. Maybe one will chime in?
I don't work at TA, but I do own a tiny hotel in France so I deal with Booking.com and TA rather frequently -- TA does have a paid product for hotels, however other than not having my website URL and the ability for people to book directly with me on my TA profile, there has been absolutely zero difference in our visibility on TA. So far, TA has been really nice to work with despite me not paying them anything (yet.)
TA is definitely my go-to app when I go places; it is pretty good both as a consumer and as a listee.
I found TA invaluable for researching trips to Italy, Israel, and Costa Rica. You definitely have to use it carefully, and I verified with other sources, but there's a lot of good information there.
Ranking on TripAdvisor is based only on review data, with more recent reviews carrying more weight as you'd expect. I work on this personally. Money has no influence whatsoever.
