The problem with Restaurant owners hating yelp, is they are yelp's customers. They need to figure out a better way to monetize their business, because selling ads to the people who loathe them probably won't work for long.

I have a local business, and while we have great overall reviews, we have had MANY reviews filtered out by yelp's super-secret algorithms that are from actual customers. We also have a bad review that is by someone that has never visited our business, but is not filtered - despite our contacting yelp several times. All this is fine, overall we have great reviews - the problem is yelp has been contacting us weekly to run ads with them. Why would we run ads to bring people to a page that doesn't represent our business accurately?

Furthermore, the cost per impression/clicks is ridiculously high compared with the industry standards.

That being said, from the consumer perspective, I appreciate and frequently use yelp. ...I think they provide a valuable service, they just need to implement a better monetization method before I would consider investing.