A lot of people like to accuse Yelp that they fabricate their reviews. That some companies pay them to write good reviews and give them good ratings. The Co-Founder of Yelp, Jeremy Stoppelman says otherwise. In his own words, “There has never been any amount of money you could pay us to manipulate reviews,” . This is refreshing to hear because it shows that not all businesses are just there to completely and totally maximize profits. Sure Yelp could increase profits if they were to accept money to manipulate reviews, however in this case, they are sticking to their value proposition which is likely something along the lines of “providing accurate and concise reviews and ratings of restaurants for hungry people looking for good food”. Another thing that Yelp does is that the company actively looks for companies that are trying to “buy reviews” from “reputation management firms” and posts an alert on the page of these companies revealing evidence of this. That is also great to hear and I’m glad that Yelp sticks to their word and their value proposition. Of course though, one does have to take this statement with a grain of salt as it is coming from a Co-Founder of Yelp.