Comments on: Troubled Insider Pages Acquired By CitySearch

By: Yelp Focuses On Mobile, New And Improved iPhone App Coming Soon « Programming and more

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 06:24:08 +0000

[...] the way, Yelp has decimated most of its competitors. Insider Pages laid off 2/3 of their staff and sold quickly to CitySearch in February 2007, Intuit said “goodbye” to Zipingo in August 2007, and Judy’s [...]

By: Imran

Imran — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 18:52:48 +0000

And probably financial resources as well.

By: Imran

Imran — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 18:49:44 +0000

Insider Pages lack technology expertise to develop new features to attract loyal users.

By: Forget birdwatching - welcome to commentwatching - Tech Soapbox

Forget birdwatching - welcome to commentwatching - Tech Soapbox — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 16:54:07 +0000

[...] read about another 20, and almost every single one had a comment by Kevin L. You can see his work here, here, here, here, and so forth. It consisted of him saying how no one cares about the [...]

By: Citysearch Acquires Insider Pages « Your Suspect

Citysearch Acquires Insider Pages « Your Suspect — Sun, 18 May 2008 15:32:08 +0000

[...] I can’t even begin to estimate Insider Pages valuation. I’ll leave that to others, and already there are theories, critiques, shock, even applause. I think the rumored price is interesting though. Insider Pages, an Idea Lab company if I’m [...]

By: Yelp Raises $15 Million Fourth Round, Rumored Valuation $200 Million

Yelp Raises $15 Million Fourth Round, Rumored Valuation $200 Million — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 07:42:25 +0000

[...] Analytics stats that the company shared with us). Yelp is in a competitive space with InsiderPages (acquired by Citysearch), and YellowBot. The real competition, though, will eventually be Google Local and Yahoo [...]

By: Complete List of 2007 Web / Technology Acquisitions » The StartUp Blog at PartnerUp

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 21:07:59 +0000

[...] was not disclosed, but TechCrunch reported that the price was approximately $13M.Press Release | TechCrunch | [...]

By: GarageSeek Rates Mechanics, But Yelp Will Kill This Category Too | K E K U [alpha]

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 17:54:01 +0000

[...] and starting back in 2004. Despite this, Insiderpages went through a slew of layoff and eventually sold off to CitySearch for $13 [...]

By: GarageSeek Rates Mechanics, But Yelp Will Kill This Category Too

GarageSeek Rates Mechanics, But Yelp Will Kill This Category Too — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 21:24:34 +0000

[...] and starting back in 2004. Despite this, Insiderpages went through a slew of layoff and eventually sold off to CitySearch for $13 [...]

By: Larry Chiang

Larry Chiang — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 19:56:59 +0000

perpetuity (n) – to operate an entity ad infinitum. Its a non silicon valley goal to have. Its also opposite the hit it and quit it model that has worked so well for companies managed in a portfolio

liquidate (v) – actions a VC with zero nerve take in an effort to make the $2k in carry

Hockey stick employee growth doesn’t always precede hockey stick revenue explosion

Hmmm, who can I fire JK

Yelp. http://bigducky.yelp.com. Ad sales are great but what about charging users for features that augment their community factor (i.e. hook up catalyst:
1) ghost authors. Yes I’d pay to have someone draft and org my thoughts
2) Featured Yelpers. Yes I’d pay for placements on Yelp pages at
jean, christinem , lilpeanut and especially, therockstar

By: yellowbot

yellowbot — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 16:58:15 +0000

Regardless of what everyone thinks of Yelp, I’ll be interested to see what Citysearch ends up doing with Insiderpages. I came across an article that says they’re planning to move the team up to San Francisco, possibly near (parent company) IAC’s Ask City rather than down to West Hollywood, CA where CS is. Remember, IP used to be in Pasadena, CA (Idealab offices) not too long ago…that’s just a hop, skip, and a jump away from West Hollywood.

By: Greg

Greg — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 14:26:31 +0000

Lots of good points. Of course Yelp’s advantage is that people are much more likely to be inspired to review a great bar or restaurant than they are a great plumber. Yelp wisely targets people who are online all the time anyway and writing about this stuff anyway. Getting people to care enough to write a review is tough for other sectors because it’s an effort, no matter how dis/satisfied you may have been with a service. As I said earlier, Yelp/Citysearch are very different than IP. That’s why IAC’s multi-site approach makes perfect sense to me.

By: Rajeev Vashisht

Rajeev Vashisht — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 09:42:35 +0000

No smoke without fire, strong nose, keep going.

http://www.o3.i...om/voiceofindia

By: Ashley

Ashley — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 01:17:22 +0000

is yelp considered a social networking site?

By: lawrence coburn

lawrence coburn — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 00:42:01 +0000

Patrick, you nailed it. Yelp is a lightweight, group, structured blogging platform. Reviews falling naturally out of self expression. I don’t get that feeling from any of the other big guys – they seem to be all business. The problem about being all business, is that it ain’t fun to review in that environment.

By: Patricia

Patricia — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 00:00:35 +0000

I’ve always used citysearch but it’s gotten a lot harder to find what I need with all the junk they’ve got on it. Yelp is great but I find it doesn’t have as much on it for searching, etc., so it’s hard to use as a replacement for citysearch (at least for now)

Citysearch seems to have fallen behind a little so it’s great to see them making moves.

By: superhelix

superhelix — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 00:00:12 +0000

Patrick -

I said what you said in 9 words, before you even said it.

Top that.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 22:53:45 +0000

I’ve got a great slogan for Yelp that sums up why they’ve succeeded: “I review, therefore I am.”

By: Patrick

Patrick — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 22:50:38 +0000

It’s pretty simple if you remember that users are inherently selfish. Insiderpages has little benefit to the user who is submitting reviews. The reviewer has to spend time to write a review and only the business and other users get any benefit from that time. This is the same problem that Citysearch has.

Yelp differs in that it subtlely focuses on the user, that is, the user is creating their online identity through the places they visit and the reviews they write. Read some of the reviews of popular restaurants and you’ll notice that they frequently start with some long-winded story about the trip to the restaurant/nightclub/whatever or a completely irrelevant story. Only in the last few sentences do they actually make any mention of the place. The other type of review is what I call the “masturbatory” review: the type where the reviewer is showing off his/her command of aristocratic English and/or knowledge of gastronomic terminology. If you haven’t figured it out yet, Yelp is actually a blogging service disguised as a review website. The majority of its content is being created by people who define their online identities by the ability to review places and services. THAT is why Yelp is succeeding.

As long as Insiderpages, Citysearch, and other competitors continue to advertise their services as “good for the community”, they’ll never top Yelp. Good for the user always trumps good for the community. Even Jimbo Wales over at Wikia knows that.

By: superhelix

superhelix — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 22:48:44 +0000

Yelp has personality.

IP does not.

End of story.

By: KevinL.

KevinL. — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 22:29:52 +0000

I think MerchantCircle has the only truely unique model (then again, I work for them). But think about it, reviews, local, consumers… who’s watching out for the business owners?!? We aggregate all these reviews for them so they can see what’s being said about them and we give them a free web presence! That I think is complementary….

By: Go Away Yelp

Go Away Yelp — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 21:42:11 +0000

@ #27 Carmen,

Are you referring to yelp.com or Insiderpages?

By: vanguy

vanguy — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 21:21:05 +0000

I’ve seen so many of these companies just flame out because they cannot monetize on what ever unqiue attributes they had or thought they had. It is nice to see Natural Selection working on the Web as well.

By: Mooland

Mooland — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 21:00:43 +0000

Didn’t know that Citysearch is still around; thought it went under a few years back. I used to frequent Citysearch to look for restaurants information but stopped using the site a few years back because the site looked dead and didn’t find any new content.

By: pureweb20.com

pureweb20.com — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 19:44:52 +0000

Troubled Insider Pages Acquired By CitySearch…

In crunching the publis numbers, it appears Insider Pages elected to cut their loses early selling for $13 millions after raising a total of $9 million….