Fun fact: this is not the first time Yelp has done this. I recall over ten years ago they tried exactly this feature as a way to monetize listing phone numbers

Fun fact: this is not the first time Yelp has done this. I recall over ten years ago they tried exactly this feature as a way to monetize listing phone numbers as part of premium business listings, or something like that. They would charge for phone calls like ad clickthrus. An interesting technical detail: they made the phone numbers gifs so they wouldn’t be indexed by search engines. I could be misremembering details and I can’t find anything online, but I’m pretty sure this happened.