Yelp.com Sponsored Listings

Is anyone familiar with Yelp.com? They're a local business search & reviews website that covers the USA. They also just expanded to the UK -- and may expand to more countries in the future.

There's an article in the LA Times about them here:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus11-2009feb11,0,7767842,full.column

Getting listed on Yelp is free. They also charge hundreds of dollars per month for sponsored listings.

The article addresses some businesses' claims that the Yelp.com sales pitch is aggressive:

But is Yelp also a shakedown racket for merchants? Some restaurant owners say the San Francisco company is unusually aggressive in trying to get businesses to pay hundreds of dollars in monthly "sponsorship" fees to improve their ranking in search results and to move their most positive review to the top of the page.

Stoppelman said Yelp doesn't strong-arm merchants and that the site's sponsorship program -- its main source of revenue -- doesn't offer "pay for play" to advertisers.

"There are a lot of reasons for business owners to spread false rumors about Yelp," he said. "Those that get a bunch of negative reviews suddenly have a bone to pick with us."

I'm wondering if any hostels have been approached by Yelp and what you thought about their sales pitch and services. How much are they charging, and do they ask you to link to their site also?
(Linking to their site pushes your Yelp page up higher in the Google search results -- so a business that links to a Yelp page with bad reviews is actually boosting that page's search engine rankings.)

The LA Times article sounded like you could pay Yelp to remove bad listings, but their CEO cleared it up on Twitter linking to this example sponsored listing that still has bad reviews.

Yelp is a great site -- but after reading that LA Times article, I'm curious what their sales pitch is like because it seems like a really expensive service (5 years at $250 per month is $15,000 for a listing on a business reviews website.)