'That is patently false', says food blogger Seth Lui over paid review scandal

Popular food blogger Seth Lui has refuted allegations that his platform accepts payment for restaurant reviews. This comes after a Facebook post featuring a screenshot of an email asking an eatery to pay for a spot in one of its lists of the best places to eat at Everton Park began circulating. 

Facebook user Charlene Yan, who owns an eatery at Everton Park, took to Facebook last week to share a screengrab of an email sent to her where a team member from SethLui.com said that it was launching a new listicle featuring the best places to eat at Everton. The email said that it wanted to see if the eatery would like to take up a spot in the listicle as an "advertising effort" for the place. 

The email showed that it would charge SG$2,300 for a random spot in the article which would include a 150-200 word write-up with one to two photos and social media boosting. The top three positions were priced at an additional cost of SG$600, SG$500 and SG$400 respectively.

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In her accompanying post, Yan explained that she was "minding her own business" when she received this email from SethLui.com. "We were not seeking to join their list," she said. 

"Like what happened to actual research, trying [and] then putting in your true recommendations? Now they just ask for money, content and pictures to be provided and you buy yourself a random spot on the article," she went on to add.

Lui took to his website to issue a response to the Facebook post saying that it is "committed to transparency and addressing any concerns promptly."

He clarified that SethLui.com uses social media and Google ratings to discover new and trending places.

"Our team of writers then has one job: to eat at as many of those places as possible and write about them honestly. We employ a strict methodology for our ratings and writers try the fare before putting finger to keyboard," he said. "The misconception from the post is that we randomly pick eateries and send them proposals. That is patently false," he went on to say, adding:

If it were true, the biggest names in F&B would top all our lists, squeezing out everyone else.

Lui explained that in this case, which is similar to each time they get sent a proposal, it heard good things about the F&B outlet through its circle. "We followed up with our research and discovered that they have a 4.7-star rating from almost 140 reviews," he said. 

"Our pre-screen verifies that 4.7 stars is a solid rating and certainly warrants a potential recommendation to our readers. We reached out to said business for a potential sales collaboration as with any media company providing advertising services," he explained. 

He added that in a client collaboration, one or more members of the team would have visited them, understood more about their story, tried the food, and then written about it. Lui said:

If the food quality is far below average, we would still drop the client so as not to mislead our readers.

He further clarified that the platform's priority is to ensure a fair recommendation to its readers and to discover new food spots and that the majority of reviews and features are paid out of its own budget, especially for hawkers and small businesses.

"Whenever there is a paid entry, a disclaimer for branded/sponsored content is placed clearly at the end of those articles," he said. He went on to explain that as a business employing almost 20 staff members, it also needs to balance its execution with sales opportunities in the competitive market.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE has reached out for more information. 

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