Articles tagged “yelp”

Yelp will need to get some momentum going outside of New York and San Francisco if it hopes to fend off the growing local review threat coming out of the Googleplex.

Public shaming of businesses that gin up reviews in their favor is a good idea for consumers, but it will likely begin another battle with merchants who accuse the listings guide of bias.

With three billion check-ins, Foursquare has a Fort Knox of data about consumers' retail habits, but a sizeable portion of its 30 million tips about places leave a lot to be desired. Foursquare will have to do a lot of partnering or get the check-in crowd into review-writing mode to improve its search results.

Yelp's biggest challenges are ahead. with a mobile audience that makes up almost half of it usage and no plan to monetize those users, Yelp may even start losing money faster.

It's difficult to say where the frustration of a struggling business ends and the unscrupulous practices of a shady salesperson begin. If any of the suits against Yelp are to gain ground they're going to need to capture the bad pitch in action.

The value in a star review by Yelp for restaurants or TripAdvisor for hotels is a make-or-break proposition for businesses. Isn't it time for someone to come up with a system that can't be gamed so easily?

When the opportunity to divest appeared, Yelp's biggest investors instead decided to hold on to their stock and signaled a a very confident endorsement of its battle with Google over the future of local information.

Microsoft/Bing's approach to content is indeed more open than Google's, and Bing has done a great job incorporating a lot of Yelp restaurant content on Bing.com without having to acquire the company.

Yelp may have pushed up the announcement of the redesign that will be rolling out over the next few weeks in response to their stock’s 5% drop due to Google's acquisition of Frommer's on Monday.

Now that it is in saturation mode in major U.S. markets, the key to growth is mid-market destinations and abroad, as well as better integration and distribution on mobile platforms.