yelp.com

Yelp, Inc. is a company that operates yelp.com, a social networking, user review, and local search web site. Yelp.com has more than 39 million monthly unique visitors as of late 2010.

Products and services

Local search

Yelp provides online local search capabilities for its visitors. A typical search includes what the user is seeking (e.g. a barber shop) and the location from which the search is to be performed, entered as a specific address, neighborhood, city/state combination, or zip code. Each business listing result contains a 5-point rating, reviews from other site visitors, and details such as the business address, hours, accessibility, and parking. Site visitors can aid in keeping the business listings up to date, with moderator approval, and business owners can directly update their own business' listing information.

Listings and related content are organized by city and a multi-tier categorization system. Content and listings can also be discovered through categorized reviews or via Yelp member profiles and their review lists. Maps leveraging Google Maps show reviewed businesses to further aid in business discovery.

Information can be accessed by web or mobile browsers.

Community

Yelp combines local reviews and social networking functionality to create a local online community.Adding social web functionality to user reviews creates a de-facto reputation system, whereby site visitors can see which contributing users are the most popular, respected, and prolific, how long each has been a member, and which have interests similar to theirs. Strong peer feedback mechanisms and the featured placement of popular reviews on the site and in local newsletters help motivate contributors. Yelp also applies a "First to Review" reward system to create a competition among contributing members, further motivating the creation of reviews and adding to the site's business coverage.

The company strengthens the online community through off-line events at nightclubs, bars, restaurants, and cultural venues in various cities for its most prolific and loyal contributors, named "Elite" members on the site. These members must provide a photo and their real name, be at least of legal drinking age, and not own a local business. In return these members receive a special badge on their personalized page for every year they author a specific number of reviews or contribute to the improvement of the online community. The concept is meant to indicate that the user is a trusted author of business reviews. To gain Elite status, it is often helpful to be nominated by other Elite users but recognition is bestowed when one writes useful, funny or cool reviews so members can vote on those reviews.

Content

The Yelp sites have listings for businesses throughout the United States and Canada and accept reviews of any business or service. Listings vary widely in nature with the site including listings for storefronts such as restaurants and shops; service businesses such as doctors, hotels, and cultural venues; and non-business locations such as schools, museums, parks, and churches.

San Francisco, the home city, remains the most active as of 2008, with significant adoption in 18 metro areas including Boston, Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., San Diego, and Los Angeles. San Francisco usage has earned the site over 4000 reviewed restaurant listings, some with hundreds of reviews each. The site boasts of having over 2.3 million reviews overall as of February 2008.Reviews trend 85% positive as estimated by the CEO[20] and are thought to come primarily from the 26-35yo demographic.

Criticism of Reviews

Yelp has been criticized over the fairness of negative reviews on the site. Among other sources, the anonymous nature of the Internet allows competitors to disparage one another by creating illegitimate negative reviews on their respective profile pages. Yelp states that it will not censor user comments, although it does remove favorable and unfavorable reviews that are considered "suspicious". A local news source published a story highlighting businesses that said that Yelp salespeople offered "to hide negative customer reviews of their businesses" in exchange for advertising sponsorship contracts, and removed positive reviews so that the overall rating of a business would go down when they declined to become an advertiser, a practice Yelp denies..

Incidents

There have been several lawsuits filed by business owners against reviewers. In February, 2010, two law firms filed a class action lawsuit accusing Yelp of "extortion" on behalf of a veterinary hospital in Long Beach, California that made similar claims. Partially in response to these allegations and in a move to increase transparency, Yelp now shows which reviews get filtered by its filtering algorithm.

Another form of illegitimate review concerns people who have never visited an establishment. In July 2010, American chef Graham Elliot's sandwich shop Grahamwich had already received a negative one-star-review from a user complaining that the not-yet-opened restaurant had ruined his "pleasant walk". Elliot commented that this made him "question the legitimacy of the reviews involving businesses that are in actual operation. Elliot also said he had been "kicked off Yelp three times for responding to reviews that were just plain factually wrong."

On November 3, 2009, a Yelp user was confronted by the owner of a bookstore in San Francisco at his home. The user had posted a review criticizing the store and received a string of angry messages towards him, which he revealed through screenshots. The user called the police, who arrested the bookstore owner, and obtained a restraining order.

History

Yelp was one of three projects, including Adzaar and Slide, to come out of the San Francisco incubator, MRL Ventures. The project arose out of research into the local services market by David Galbraith, who worked with Jeremy Stoppelman on the early stages of the project and chose its name as a contraction of Yellow Pages. Stoppelman and Russel Simmons, both of whom were early software engineering employees at PayPal, spun the service off as a separate company. After an aborted start as an email recommendation service, Yelp launched its namesake web site into the San Francisco market in October 2004. The company received $6 million in early funding from venture capital firms Mission Street, led by another former Paypal-er Max Levchin, and Bessemer Venture Partners. Additional investments were made in the amounts of $3 million by Benchmark Capital in 2006 by DAG Ventures ($3 million) and a private Investor from Laguna Beach ($5 million) in 2008. Yelp expanded from its San Francisco roots to open an east coast office in Manhattan in the first half of 2008 and by introducing a Canadian-focused version of the site in 2008. Yelp now has international sites in Spain, France, Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands.