YELP Business advertising Warning Yelp slams small business advertisers Internet, California

Yelp is currently aggressively selling online impression advertising on their site to small businesses. This requires an annual contract at very high impression rates. They promise that someone will walk you through all the steps to design and layout an advertising campaign with you prior to starting which sounds normal. Then they immediately run impressions from your existing yelp account within days of signing up saying your contract start date is the day they start running ads. This is done without warning or any communications.  Any effort to have this put on hold till the site is set up etc is refused and at $1000.00 a month this was an expensive lesson. I tried contacting several people and departments all of which have refused assistance. Customer no service and locked into an expensive contract rolling out of control without recourse. Sadly I have also come to realize that the lofty conversion promises they used in justifying the expensive ads is more than a little dishonest.  Not at all what I expected from what used to be a cool company. Growth and greed seem to be the new motto.  Used to look at Yelp as an apple type company, cool caring etc. Now more like the schizophrenic cousin turned rouge. Be cautious dealing with Yelp they over promise over charge, undelivered and offer no customer service. Stuck like it was back in the days of Microsoft dominance.  Never thought I would choose Google over Yelp but they have honestly been fantastic.