article_snippet.sent: Yelp, founded in 2004 by two former PayPal employees, is a website that lets users write Yelp, founded in 2004 by two former PayPal employees own reviews of businesses like restaurants and doctor's offices.
article_snippet.sent: However, like many web businesses, Yelp's revenue comes mainly from advertising and the businesses that buy ads are often also rated and reviewed on the site.
article_snippet.sent: While Kaylie Milliken hasn't finished An upcoming documentary yet, Kaylie Milliken tells Daily Mail Online Kaylie Milliken research so far has indicated Yelp's advertising structure appears to punish businesses that choose not to advertise on the site - a claim that company has vigorously denied.
article_snippet.sent: Above, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman in August 2014 .
article_snippet.sent: After Businesses decline advertising services from Yelp Businesses feel like Businesses good reviews get filtered out and Businesses negative reviews come to the front.'
article_snippet.sent: And at hundreds of dollars a month for advertising, the price to work with Yelp is too big for many mom and pop businesses, Kaylie Milliken says.
article_snippet.sent: As a result, Yelp has automated recommendation software in place to go through the more than 71 million reviews that have been submitted to Yelp to select the most useful and reliable content,' Yelp said in a statement to Daily Mail Online.
article_snippet.sent: However, the Harvard Business School study that Yelp's company spokesman Shannon Eis Yelp's company spokesman Shannon Eis cited in Yelp's defense wasn't solely focused on whether advertising impacts the ratings of businesses listed on the site - rather the investigation was designed to find out how many of the reviews on the site were fake.
article_snippet.sent: While the Harvard Business School study that the Eis cited in Yelp's defense's authors did find that businesses that advertise on the site are no more likely to have extreme 1 or 5-star ratings than any other business, businesses that advertise on the site made it clear that Yelp's advertising practices were not the topic of businesses that advertise on the site study and therefore businesses that advertise on the site research was not exhaustive. '
article_snippet.sent: While our analysis provides some suggestive evidence against the theory that Yelp favors advertisers, we stress that it is neither exhaustive, nor conclusive.
article_snippet.sent: It is beyond the scope of this paper, and outside the capacity of our dataset to evaluate all the ways in which Yelp could favor advertisers,' this paper reads.
article_snippet.sent: Standing up: Milliken says that most of the business owners Milliken spoke to were too afraid to appear on camera, for fear of retaliation fro Yelp.
article_snippet.sent: One company began to advertise with Yelp, but then stopped when One company contract came up.
article_snippet.sent: Milliken says that these business owners were so afraid of Yelp that about 80 per cent of these business owners refused to go on camera for fear of retaliation on these business owners own Yelp pages - which these business owners are not allowed to opt out of.
article_snippet.sent: Yelp has fired back with all that...
article_snippet.sent: Milliken says Milliken reached out to Yelp for a sit-down interview, but that CEO Jeremy Stoppelman declined.
highlights_snippet.sent: Filmmaker Kaylie Milliken spoke to several business owners who believe their Yelp ratings went down after their declined to advertise on the site .
  