Yelp has a tough business model. They want businesses to pay for listing and customers to vote art no cost which creates a bias rating system. Another bias is voters typically being customers who had a bad experience.

Unfortunately the moving company model is not uncommon. Many businesses act as an agent for sub contractors. It usually means you have no idea on the quality. When something breaks, it seriously goes bad. A good company would do all they can to compensate and manage customer expectations.

Another rating system that may be broken is google. We picked a cleaning company that had 20+ 5 star ratings. No negative feedback or low ratings. Our experience wad absolutely terrible. We posted a 1 star review. Our review never appeared! We believe the company owner could control and moderate the Google page!

Thanks for the critique!

just a few notes:

– We don’t charge for crawler traffic, what you see in google analytics should be pretty close to what you see on your bill.

– We’re planning to have tiered pricing a la Amazon (so $0.0025/pageview will be for the first X thousand page views, then a lower price until the next threshold, etc)

– We’re going to start A/B testing traditional pricing plans like Justin is talking about to see how it affects conversion rates.

@Christoph An aside about being expensive: I think the tiered pricing we’re putting together right now should alleviate that, but it’s also worth considering that it’s not just hosting, it’s also a Saas product that is constantly being updated.

I think the pricing strategy we’re working on right now is pretty competitive with the Average CPM our beta users would expect to pay for the kind of targeted keywords that Q&A software naturally ranks for in search engines.

Thanks for the awesome show guys!

Amazing how your kids are easy to understand when to others it sounds like sounds 🙂

In retrospect, I probably should have avoided even answering Justin’s question on the subject due to the fact that it’s a politically charged minefield that I haven’t really kept up with.

“This Awesome Accumulation of letters means Rolling on Floor Laughing My Ass Off”

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=roflmao

That’s funny, I didn’t realize it was that unclear what my daughters Izzy and Ari were saying, which for the record is:

“This show is distributed by SoundCloud dot com.”

But I’m glad we got that all cleared up. 😉

BTW, the inspiration for that intro was the “I made this” spoken at the end of the X-Files closing credits for Chris Carter’s Ten Thirteen production company:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6va9B9DNX5I

X-Files is my all-time favorite show.

You forgot to mention the really important fact: Are you male or female? 🙂

——————-

IMHO the RootBuzz.com pricing is waaaayyyyy too high. 1/4 cent per pageview means 10$ / month with only 4000 pageviews.
Users will probably generate 5-10 pageviews per visit on average.
To me this seems very expensive.

I remember someone sending in a clip of their kid saying something like this and did put these two together. I never understood why you would use something like this, but found it very amusing 🙂

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/opinion/dr-mullers-findings-on-global-warming.html

The question I asked was this:

What part of the show is the “beginnign of a show” ? 😉

If you read the quoted part carefully, you will see the typo that I was too subtly referring to. It is on the donation page. When the guys went on the tangent I was close to tears in laughter!

P.S. I thought that the intro talk was some cute gibberish but now that I know, I can hear it clearly as well 😀

With no inflation or deflation people hoard money.

An interesting point is that inflation doesn’t refer to prices but the money supply. People often say that the Fed printing more money will lead to inflation. The Fed printing more money is inflation. The money supply has “inflated”, the rising of prices is an effect of inflation.

But I agree with the sentiment quotes by Jason on the podcast, economics is “the dismal science”. This is because (like psychology and the social “sciences” in general) it focuses far too much emphasis on elegant description and far too little emphasis on accurate prediction.

Cheers
Sam

Wouldn’t it do more damage to them if you put their company name in the text and get your SEO buddies to help get it ranked as close as possible to the Yelp page?

I wouldn’t let my worst enemies use them.

A very well written post (IMO) about the subject
The Yelp Review Filter
-What is the Yelp Review Filter and why should you care?

http://www.searchinfluence.com/articles/yelp-review-filter/

Unfortunately I don’t think Yelp needs help fixing their system but rather they have learned how to make money out of their filtering system. Not only that but a quick search on the internet you can find different people facing issues with Yelp, their “sales” representatives, and their review system.

Understanding Yelp, The Review Filter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqi-jjbEKcs

“Yelp Hit With Class Action Lawsuit For Running An “Extortion Scheme””

http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/24/yelp-class-action-lawsuit/

“A Yelp sales rep promised he could remove bad reviews for a $500 membership fee. Then threatened that bad reviews would be highlighted and good ones would disappear. That’s exactly what happened. Yelp.com Stands Accused of Acting Like a “Modern-Day Mafia””

http://www.newworldorderreport.com/Default.aspx?tabid=266&ID=3285

“How You Can Get Around Yelp’s Pesky Review Filter”

http://www.servicemagicproconnection.com/how-you-can-get-around-yelp%E2%80%99s-pesky-review-filter/

Own Yelp “filter” twiiter account:

https://twitter.com/#!/fightyelpfilter

“Yelp filter system hurts small business owners.”

http://www.yelp.com/topic/seal-beach-yelp-filter-system-hurts-small-business-owners

A very well written post (IMO) about the subject
“Yelp Review Filter Explained (How do I spam that?)”
http://www.searchinfluence.com/2010/03/yelp-review-filter-explained/

As you can see time after time people have posted their own bad experience with the service. Will Yelp listen? Well, lets say the video linked above was first published in YouTube in March 18, 2010. A little over 2 years ago and things have not changed.

It would be nice to see what kind of impact your experience will do to the Yelp community as a whole but in the end I would not be surprised if you just got a call or an email expressing how sorry they are for the bad experience and hope that everyone moves on. After all, how many man hours can you really dedicate to fix this issue?