Troubled Insider Pages Acquired By CitySearch

When Do You Sleep ?

At least the VC’s got all there money back … Insiderpages was in a very competitive space but at least they have exited without crashing and burning .

Aside from the fact that they took in $9 million in funding, $13 million sounds like a hefty price tag for a struggling company in such a competitive environment.

I can’t believe they convinced someone they were that valuable. Good for them.

When I click through to real estate agents in Atlanta (presumably low hanging fruit on the monetization tree), I see only Google ads. With all of these local content, local search, local aggregation ventures, which are the *matching* ventures that are focused on aggregating the local advertisers to remove the Google slice from the pie, and really hyperfocus the advertising that’s paired with the content?

- I bet they had 50% of that 9 mil left. that got transferred with the price of 13 mil.

- I bet they proved that after firing all their employees they were profitable. Why do you have to sell once you made the right move?

Don’t worry about Michael sleeping, it’s great to have him back. Good exclusive content instead of rehashes or stupid stories like “Digg users ask for Photos”

I would imagine (obviously) that the content they created was the “worth” in all of this. I can’t imagine they’ll continue as a free-standing brand for long.

Also, regarding the price: trying to develop something from an idea in to a real business is difficult as I imagine most of you know. While I bet the founders had different plans when they started, getting out of a very crowded marketplace while making even a meager gain is nothing to scoff at.

Why is firing half your staff imply “troubled”. My biz school prof, Gordon Gecko, from Wall Street the movie said, “You can fire half these VPs and nothing would change around here (including revenue)”.

I agree with Josh.

moral of the story here is no one got rich off of this deal.

If they subsume the brand into Citysearch, they’ll lose many of the users. IAC didn’t pay ~$10 mil for reviews, nice as they’ll be in rounding out Citysearch offerings. But those reviews will get stale mighty quick. They’re buying the revewERS who will come back with fresh takes on new florists, contractors, etc. They have to keep those folks happy and killing off InsiderPages as they know it isn’t the way to do that.

If they subsume the brand into Citysearch, they’ll lose many of the users. IAC didn’t pay ~$10 mil for reviews, nice as they’ll be in rounding out Citysearch offerings. But those reviews will get stale mighty quick. They’re buying the revewERS who will come back with fresh takes on new florists, contractors, etc. They have to keep those folks happy and killing off InsiderPages as they know it isn’t the way to do that.
If they subsume the brand into Citysearch, they’ll lose many of the users. IAC didn’t pay ~$10 mil for reviews, nice as they’ll be in rounding out Citysearch offerings. But those reviews will get stale mighty quick. They’re buying the revewERS who will come back with fresh takes on new florists, contractors, etc. They have to keep those folks happy and killing off InsiderPages as they know it isn’t the way to do that.
If they subsume the brand into Citysearch, they’ll lose many of the users. IAC didn’t pay ~$10 mil for reviews, nice as they’ll be in rounding out Citysearch offerings. But those reviews will get stale mighty quick. They’re buying the revewERS who will come back with fresh takes on new florists, contractors, etc. They have to keep those folks happy and killing off InsiderPages as they know it isn’t the way to do that.
If they subsume the brand into Citysearch, they’ll lose many of the users. IAC didn’t pay ~$10 mil for reviews, nice as they’ll be in rounding out Citysearch offerings. But those reviews will get stale mighty quick. They’re buying the revewERS who will come back with fresh takes on new florists, contractors, etc. They have to keep those folks happy and killing off InsiderPages as they know it isn’t the way to do that.
If they subsume the brand into Citysearch, they’ll lose many of the users. IAC didn’t pay ~$10 mil for reviews, nice as they’ll be in rounding out Citysearch offerings. But those reviews will get stale mighty quick. They’re buying the revewERS who will come back with fresh takes on new florists, contractors, etc. They have to keep those folks happy and killing off InsiderPages as they know it isn’t the way to do that.
If they subsume the brand into Citysearch, they’ll lose many of the users. IAC didn’t pay ~$10 mil for reviews, nice as they’ll be in rounding out Citysearch offerings. But those reviews will get stale mighty quick. They’re buying the revewERS who will come back with fresh takes on new florists, contractors, etc. They have to keep those folks happy and killing off InsiderPages as they know it isn’t the way to do that.
If they subsume the brand into Citysearch, they’ll lose many of the users. IAC didn’t pay ~$10 mil for reviews, nice as they’ll be in rounding out Citysearch offerings. But those reviews will get stale mighty quick. They’re buying the revewERS who will come back with fresh takes on new florists, contractors, etc. They have to keep those folks happy and killing off InsiderPages as they know it isn’t the way to do that.

Boris — What’s going on?

Larry — I love your comment. A great reminder.

Tough Space but the winners will do very well.

They will kill the brand — it is too similar to Citysearch. It would be stupid to keep two similar brands. When Citysearch bought Microsoft’s Sidewalk in the late 90’s they did nothing with the brand or content - they just wanted one less competitor for ad sales and consumers. In this case they will likely migrate users and reviews since it fits well with their current model.

From the Citysearch press release today:

“When the acquisition is complete, Insider Pages will retain its distinct brand identity and positioning in the market, strengthening and complementing Citysearch’s growing local reach.”

This gives some additional credibility to hyperlocal grassroots sites — at least those that develop some depth and breadth.

If Citysearch is smart, and I’m sure they are, they’ll tinker with the InsiderPages database to make it easy for users to extract the most useful information from multiple reviews of the same place.

Local is a tough business. My first job in the internet industry was at CitySearch, where we were selling websites door to door in 1996 to pizzarias, auto body shops and nail salons. I posted some commentary on the difficulties in the online cityguide business at the Lightspeed blog - if you’re interested click through on my name in this post

does yelp have money to acquire a complementary company?

Tom - Of course this is what they will say to keep employees and users in the short term. I’ll bet you $100 that the insider pages brand is gone in 6-9 months once they figure out how to do the data import into Citysearch.

Katie: when you ask if Yelp has the money to acquire a complementary company, I’m assuming you are talking about an events management company that throws parties for startups or a firm that provides go-go dancers?

Go-go dancers would be nice:)

How does someone come up with an idea like yelp.com when there are so many players already in the market? Is yelp.com different? Yes. Is it a significantly better idea? I don’t think so. It’s beyond me why VCs fund companies like yelp.com. Is it just because of the management team?

Can I come up with a similar but slightly better idea and get funded??

Yelp is such a badly designed website. But it has a tad bit more traction.

“Can I come up with a similar but slightly better idea and get funded??”

You don’t need an original idea, much less a “better” idea to get funding for anything. You need to be able to demonstrate that your execution of the idea will produce positive results and you need to know how to get in touch with the right $$$ people.

@Tom…thanks for the update
@Boris…I’m flattered you liked my earlier post so much!
@br…I’ll take that bet (at $0 ;-), hey, we’re bootstrapping here). Flickr isn’t Yahoo photos. YouTube isn’t Google Video. Clearly, InsiderPages is not abrnad on the same scale, but there’s nothing to be lost by maintaing a brand with a distinctive set of users. I don’t think it’s an accident that most local sites are strong on restaurants and bars or contractors and plumbers, but rarely strong on both fronts. It’s all local user reviews but entertainment outside the home and services done inside it are two distinct sectors.

i do not know how the discussion of citysearch/insiderpages led to discussing yelp but…..yelp is good for a reference point but not for anything mobile. you can text them about your interest in a place and all yelp does is send you information and reviews back (thats pointless) google local does the same thing. maybe google should buy yelp to add to their listings in google local integrate with something more mobile friendly about whats going on in the city.

this company is beyond bad. the fact that the investors got their money back says something about the current market.

ive tried to use it numerous times and its aparent that 99% of the reviews on the sight are downright fake, perhaps generated by some sort of markov script. youll find a bunch posted a minute apart from eachother by the same reviewer in random parts of town, with no useful information other than the name of the place substituted into some kind of template..

truly horrible. and definitely not worth $13 million.

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.

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.

@ #27 Carmen,

Are you referring to yelp.com or Insiderpages?

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….

Yelp has personality.

IP does not.

End of story.

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.

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

Patrick -

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

Top that.

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.

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.

is yelp considered a social networking site?

No smoke without fire, strong nose, keep going.

http://www.o3.indiatimes.com/voiceofindia

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.

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.

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