In Wednesday’s (8/28) Rolling Stone, Ethan Millman writes, “The National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) is calling out Yelp over claims that the review site is putting misleading or fake concert ticket listings on venues’ Yelp pages, with NIVA sending a letter to the company’s CEO Jeremy Stoppelman late Tuesday demanding the listings get taken down. In the letter, NIVA executive director Stephen Parker wrote that the Yelp website ‘redirects users from purchasing legitimate tickets at face value from small businesses and nonprofits, instead sending them to a Yelp-branded TicketNetwork website that is price gouging and selling fake tickets.’… NIVA members began contacting Yelp at the beginning of August, a rep for the organization said, but that everyone was directed to talk with TicketNetwork…. In a statement to Rolling Stone on Tuesday, a Yelp spokesperson … thanked NIVA for ‘bringing their concerns about TicketNetwork to our attention’ and said Yelp has ‘taken immediate steps to turn off that integration.’… The situation further reflects the need for Congress to past the Fans First Act, which if passed would look to crack down on some of the issues in the secondary market including speculative tickets and the use of bots to buy up tickets to shows.”
