Yelp alternative opportunity?

I'm gauging interest in a possible yelp alternative site, with significant improvements.

yelps problem is they are arrogant, leveraging their traffic(actually just co-opting regular search volume by outranking a biz site), strong arming businesses, creating a very negative adversarial relationship. something you DON'T want to do when you then pitch those same businesses for MONEY(advertising etc..)

They filter legit positive reviews like crazy.

Are there better existing unknown yelp alternatives out there? Or do you see an oppty to get some funding and create one?

An alternative with the following improvements:

1. Be more friendly to businesses and strike a balance between them and users/reviewers.

2. have users use real names for reviews. This will cut down on fake reviews and vicious attack reviews by miserable people and sneaky competitors. Maybe use a credit card check to verify ID? possibly in conjunction with users earning some type of credits for their participation. How does FB or Amazon or other sites get people to use real names and verify them?

3. attempt to verify purchase by reviewer at the business. this is a big one. You can get slammed by some anonymous reviewer and not know who it is, or EVEN if they ever set foot in your business and bought a product or service.

perhaps a photo upload app to take a picture of a receipt?? this could be made public or kept private for verification only. Or possibly use a GPS checkin app that would help verification.

4. allow businesses unlimited contact/replies to customer reviews. yelp limits the business to a couple/few replies a day so a biz cannot keep up with incoming reviews pos/neg.

5. deliver REAL value to businesses(tools to improve biz and get good feedback) and reviewers(rewards/incentives)

6. generate REAL organic traffic, not just piggyback on existing search volume. YELP claims much higher user numbers but in actuality Yelp is just SEO'd and funnels people to your site by outranking your site for your business. (case in point: my GF has a salon and developing web presence, she found out most of her yelp traffic were not yelp users, but rather people searching for salons in her area and the yelp map came up. hardly value added traffic lead gen on yelps part, but they claim it as such.)

7. Instead of some phony black box super secret proprietary algorithm they claim they have, why not use standard verification and then let the USERS filter the reviews for a business when looking at them. They can choose to look at positive or negative reviews(similar to Amazon) View them by rank, or all of them etc.....YELP only does this to strong arm businesses to advertise for 100's of $$ a month.

8. This could be fastracked by actually marketing this to businesses to then sign up their own customers as reviewers to get a critical mass in a hurry. Thousands and thousands of businesses HATE yelp with a passion. Now THAT's what I call a motivated prospect to buy something. yelp-sucks.com gets 10's of thousands of visits a month already.

did you know yelp owns the domain yelpsucks.com? LMAO. Not a bad defensive move for reputation mgt but the optics look real bad.


the goal:

cut down on spam positive reviews and negative slamming reviews that are not legitimate by having better verification of ID upfront.

provide businesses more accurate feedback on the level of quality of their business, and tools to better interact with their customers.


Please add your feedback to flesh this idea out. I could run it by some VC's if it has some merit.

thanks.