Comments on: Intuit Shuts Down Zipingo. Yelp Winning This Space Through Attrition

By: Yelp Focuses On Mobile, New And Improved iPhone App Coming Soon | Reviews Manual

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:45:12 +0000

[...] Pages ordered soured 2/3 of their staff and sold quickly to CitySearch in Feb 2007, Intuit said “goodbye” to Zipingo in August 2007, and Judy’s Book closed their doors in Oct 2007. CitySearch relic as [...]

By: Intuit Acquires Homestead For $170 Million

Intuit Acquires Homestead For $170 Million — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 18:55:13 +0000

[...] businesses. Intuit has a checkered history online, with its business directory site Zipingo closing in August. Intuit currently has a partnership with Google that sees Google services embedded in Intuit [...]

By: Judy’s Book To Shut Down. Yelp Is The Last of The Local Review Sites Still Standing.

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:27:34 +0000

[...] players in the local review space have fallen in the last year, too. Intuit shut down Zipingo last summer, and Insider Pages sold for little more than the capital it originally raised to [...]

By: Susan

Susan — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 01:16:57 +0000

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

By: Links for August 27, 2007 « Flying Cloud

Links for August 27, 2007 « Flying Cloud — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 17:06:13 +0000

[...] Intuit Shuts Down Zipingo. Yelp Winning This Space Through Attrition [...]

By: Dead Companies Doing Well Part XXVII | Bronte Media

Dead Companies Doing Well Part XXVII | Bronte Media — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 14:44:44 +0000

[...] Through the news of Intuit shutting down their efforts in their consumer-created yellow pages foray, comes some interesting comScore data at the end of this Techcrunch post covering the news. [...]

By: Jim

Jim — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 05:35:20 +0000

“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.”

By: Jeff the Great

Jeff the Great — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 21:37:23 +0000

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.

By: jon carder

jon carder — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 00:55:22 +0000

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.

By: Chuck Longanecker

Chuck Longanecker — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 21:03:34 +0000

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?

By: Matt

Matt — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 19:01:28 +0000

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?).

By: Frankly

Frankly — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 16:02:07 +0000

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.

By: NicolasV

NicolasV — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 06:11:14 +0000

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?

By: Joel

Joel — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 05:00:22 +0000

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.

By: whoopie

whoopie — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 03:55:52 +0000

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.

By: David Mackey

David Mackey — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 02:31:51 +0000

Good for them – focusing on the main thing.

By: Alaska Miller

Alaska Miller — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 01:53:06 +0000

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.