[brnstz]

You might say this is frivolous lawsuit, and I'd agree. The plaintiffs have zero chance of winning, there is no coercion, there is no semblance of employment.

But.

Take a moment to think. What is the value of a website like this, without the user-generated content? A Yelp with no reviews, no photos, etc. is just a phonebook. Alternatively, a restaurant review with no platform, no audience is just a journal entry. It's symbiotic.

Maybe that's obvious. Ok, so. Yelp gets paid. Why don't the reviewers get paid? Too easy to game? Too impractical? Because people will do it for free anyway?

Musicians and exhibitionists will do it for free, too. That doesn't mean they are creating no value. It would be good if Yelp reviewers could be paid. It would be good if it were possible to pay people for the value they create voluntarily.

[scarecrowbob]

Here's a larger point from the mid twentieth century: what is the real value of a broadcast TV network with the viewers? IN a sense, the product the network produces is ad views, with the work being done by the audience.

I'm not saying that the audience is an employee, just that the model of not paying for value created by a crowd is large and old.

[brnstz]

Imagine a (very fictional) Yelp user who has 0 money, will never go to a restaurant again in his life, or buy anything at all for that matter. But he has perfect memory and can write excellent reviews of thousands of restaurants he's been to in the past.

Does he have any value to Yelp as eyeball for advertisers? No. If Yelp's audience consisted completely of people like him, no one would ever advertise on Yelp again, no restaurant owner would ever pay Yelp for premium whatever status thing they sell.

But our fictional user can write reviews that are consumed by other users. He is providing real value to Yelp, as a non-eyeball.

In the television case, this guy is completely worthless.

Facebook is a simpler example, because most people are both supplying content and seeing ads. If there were no content, no one would go there to see the ads.