[tyingq]

Is the extortion scheme as simple as that? Paying businesses get "Yelp Sort", non-payers get "Default Sort"?

If so, that answers a lot of questions.

[InitialLastName]

That's not far off of how (Yelp's partner) Grubhub operates, where the default sort for restaurants is in descending order of the cut they give Grubhub.

[ViViDboarder]

No. I believe every page defaults to the same sort.

[Dylan16807]

They default to the "same" sort, but that sort acts differently depending on whether you've given Yelp money.