To lubbers what don’t likes to write, but for those of us what be cursed with a constant need to communicate, the idea be patented genius. I can see where the site might be off-putting suggested that I might like to join the Atlantarr Yelp! so I gave her a lookover and eventually decided to join up and participate. “We put the community first, the consumer second and businesses third,” he said.Ī mate of mine up in Washington D.C. Stoppelman said that the site deliberately tilts its rules to support the reviewers. To write back, the business owner can’t send a second message.īut Mr. Responding to criticism from business owners that some user reviews are unfair, Yelp also recently introduced a way for the business owner to send a message back to a reviewer. But revenue from these sources isn’t enough to make Yelp profitable, Mr. And they can pay to add photos andĪ little other information to the page about their business. Instead, Yelp uses some relatively subtle advertising formats: Businesses can pay to have their companies listed first on search pages (identified as a sponsored listing). Stoppelman said, because Yelp has been slow to add advertising, and there still isn’t that much of it. Los Angeles is second, followed by Chicago and New Now the Bay Area represents only about 30 percent of Yelp activity, Mr. The new generation of Web workers took Yelp to be their entertainment bible, and that helped generate enough critical mass One reason for Yelp’s success is that it focused on San Francisco in its first year. Epinions, a product review site, built a similar community (see this interesting Wired piece from 2000) until it wasĭissolved into, now part of eBay. “People come to write reviews as a hobby and also to meet other people,” Mr. Yelp has also started holding social events for its frequent reviewers. Moreover, the site mimics the structure of a social network, so that active members can see information about and follow the work of Reviewers also benefit because they can see how other users vote on their reviews. That the rest of us can take advantage of. Yelp understood that, as with Wikipedia, a small group of people can create something Now a much broader audience is discovering how useful the site can be, and some visitors are adding their own contributions as well. But enough people find it rewarding to turn Yelp into one of the richest repositories Most people aren’t drawn to write a witty review of the scrambled eggs at the local diner simply to get their ego stroked. Like a blog with a little bit of structure.” “Yelp is about the reviewing experience,” Mr. Instead, it structured the site to motivate people through the praise and attention that their reviews receive from others. It didn’t subordinate the users’ contributions to professional reviews, as on Citysearch, or to directory information, as on yellow-pages sites. It didn’t try to pay for reviews, as some sites have. What Yelp did differently than these others, as Jeremy Stoppelman, the site’s co-founder and chief executive describes it, was to spend most of its energy attracting a small group of fanatic reviewers. Citysearch still towers above it with 16.2 million users. In March, it had 3.3 million users, according to Comscore, up 87 percent from a year ago. ![]() ![]() Big companies, from search engines to yellow-pages publishers, have long added user reviews toīut Yelp has thrived. ![]() Start-ups like Insider Pages come and go. To find a sustainable business model more than a decade after its founding. Citysearch, the leader, continues to struggle Who needs another site where people review restaurants and other local businesses? It’s one of the oldest ideas on the Internet. The post has been edited to reflect his comments. His e-mail on this and a few other matters, is in the comments here. UPDATE| 1:30 PM May 13 In response to some comments, Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s chief executive, wrote to clarify that Yelp has paid people to write some of the reviews in cities it is entering.
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