The GroupOn modifer is simple, more customers in exchange for a lower Yelp score
A fascinating study on what GroupOn does for the Yelp review score of a business: But their most controversial finding is that a Groupon deal seems to have an adverse impact on reputation as measured by Yelp ratings. Their analysis shows that while the number of reviews increases signifificantly due to daily deals, average rating scores from reviewers who mention daily deals are about 10% lower than scores of their peers. It’s not a perfect correlation – I don’t think that the self-selecting Yelp reviewers can be directly mapped to overall reputation (anyone got a link to relevant papers) but
