Zipingo, the small business review site launched by Intuit in late 2005, shut down yesterday.
When it launched, Zipingo competed with a slew of other startups that were targeting local business reviews. Of the three that we mentioned – Yelp, Judy’s Book and Insider Pages – only one, Yelp, remains in it’s original form. Judy’s Book changed its model to focus on coupons and deals, and Insider Pages sold for little more than the capital it originally raised to CitySearch.
The message above is all that remains of Zipingo. Without coming right out and saying it, the reason they’ve shut it down is that no one was apparently using it. Comscore wan’t tracking them at all (see Yelp v. Insider pages below).
Other startups, of course, are joing this space all the time. Google and Yahoo will take their pound of flesh, but upstarts like AskPoodle are giving it a shot as well.
Zipingo joins the TechCrunch DeadPool.
Back in the 80’s Intuit did one thing and it did it well: it let me balance my checkbook and told me my expenses. All on a software that fit into a floppy disk. Now Quicken comes on DVDs. DV f-ing Ds.
Keep buying up stupid things and keep releasing bloated software. It’s just ripe for the taking by someone else. It may take time, but every giant falls. Bye IBM. Bye Lotus. Bye Yahoo. Bye Geocities. Bye Myspace. Bye Facebook. Bye Microsoft. Bye Google.
Good for them – focusing on the main thing.
i’m not sold on yelp. the reviews tend to be snarky and amusing, but also uninformative. i also suspect most of the reviews come out of a few (paid?) astroturfers who are likely employees, since many of them read-alike.
now there is nothing wrong with self-populating reviews, but it limits the coverage.
as far as i know, yahoo local continues to dwarf yelp in traffic.
and of course, the issue for yelp is, how do you make money on reviews? any site trying to define itself outside of the google ad monopoly faces the same problem. sooner or later my guess is they all bite the bullet and try to make it on google monetization.
If this was a startup with no big company micro managing every move it would have succeeded. At least sell it to people who would put some blood, sweat and tears.
Michael,
I’m curious why your title reads “Yelp winning this space through attrition” when you display a chart showing Yelp is losing badly to Insider Pages (IP)?
I’m surprised by IP’s come back, seems that the IAC acquisition worked for them, do you have any info on what IAC did to give IP a new, successful life?
NicolasV, If you haven’t noticed, when looking at web companies with a specific target, it is always the SV-based companies that get the favorable reviews here (esp. paypal mafia). “Scratching backs”. How do you think this blog maintains a good stream of insider info from VCs and startups? Get your breaking news here and take the “analysis” with a grain of salt. Next time you see questionably favorable coverage of a company, check their location and you will see it clearly.
I think Yelp is, more or less, on the right track as a concept. Peer reviews of products and services (whether those reviews come from Yelp, Facebook, or good ol’ fashion in-person friends) will always be extremely valuable.
But almost nobody I know outside of SF Bay uses Yelp, and most still haven’t heard of them yet (despite their phenom PR machine). I’m waiting to see what they’re spending all their funding on ($15M?).
I agree with Matt that many of these services are good, but are either geek region region (Yelp) or not very intuitive or detailed in their reviews. (Insider Pages).
A company that we work with, http://www.MojoPages.com, has done a pretty good job at combining outside aggregated reviews with more detailed community reviews. The twist they added was allowing you to collaborate on a private group of your choice providers (dentist, plumber, general contractor…etc) with your network of family and friends.
The question is, what’s the missing standard that enables these review sites to be for everyone?
The local search game is still in its early days. Yelp has shown when you ad a social element you have a glue that may hold the key to getting a huge amount of reviews at a low cost. They have also achieved a stickyness that ensures a significant amount of impressions which they sell to local advertisers in SF and LA to generate revenue and eventually profitability. They will most likely succeed and either sell or go public and achieve a nice return for the investors.
The problem yelp has and therefor the opportunity to other players is the “cool” vibe they’ve worked so hard to produce. Now they are achieving a large quantity of reviews but the quality is poor because the reviews are written to show how cool or funny a member is and the usefullness on the majority of reviews is poor.
The big print yellow pages companies with billions in the bank and flatlined or declining revenue are scared and also looking to make a move so there may be other successful sites that get gobbled up by the big players. The small competitors to yelp like ourfaves, mojopages and others may not be a theat at current traffic levels but in the hands of the big print conglomerates with the ability to throw 20 million into a marketing campaign could do some significant damage.
No one seems to be doing local search ‘right.’ Citysearch is too commercialiezed, yelp pays for reviews from people in different cities than the business, and the rest of the sites are no more than a glorified yellow pages.
A start-up our of Portland, Ore is going into open beta on Sept. 6th. Straight up and too the point local search.
http://www.goboz.com.
“Now Quicken comes on DVDs. DV f-ing Ds.”
No it doesn’t. It comes on a CD, the entire downloadable install for Quicken is 55 megs.
I respect your desire to be overly dramatic, but at least try to be accurate.
“Now Quicken comes on CD’s. C f-ing D’s.”
Yeah I’d be curious what % of users are being paid to write reviews – they recently said they are not profitable yet – must be using it on sales and paying reviews…
Found a great to the point Local Reviews app on Facebook: eSesame Local Reviews. Already a bunch of my friends have written reviews and I can see just my friends reviews or search any review worldwide – without trying to reconstruct my friends on a site like yelp….
http://apps.fac...me/indexrev.php