Local review site Yelp is not going to sit around and let competitor CitySearch have even a day to celebrate their new beta launch.
CEO Jeremy Stopellman, noticing our Comscore comparison of the services - “According to comScore, Citysearch brought in 14.6 million unique visitors in the U.S in October, compared to 143 million uniques across its ad network. (Yelp, by the way, did 6 million uniques)” - emailed us with some of their internal traffic numbers and stats.
Yelp’s Google Analytics stats for the past thirty days show 15.8 million unique visitors, way above the six million Comscore records. And Yelp also shows other interesting stats in the chart below: 4 million reviews, with 34% restaurants, 23% shopping, 8% beauty and fitness, etc. Users are 51% male and 49% female, and 65% have a college degree.
Not bad for a company that was born just four years ago.
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All very well, BUT have you seen this about Yelp today:
Is Yelp.com Paying for Positive Comments?
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/018762.html
Could blow a hole in those numbers and yelps credibility?
RTFA, if you read the article that the blog post links to you would clearly see
“But it is not true. Businesses cannot pay to rearrange reviews, according to Yelp’s Web site. If Easley had paid the $300 a month, she would not have been able to rearrange the reviews — it’s worth noting she has received only perfect 5-star reviews to date.”
If your going to spew blog opinions atleast do a little looking on your own before you make up your opinion…
Another Yelp victim:
http://la.eater.com/archives/2.....victim.php
How about Yelp break out it’s uniques by geography? What, like 99.9% of the Geo is SF, NY and LA?
For better or worse, comScore is “recognized” as a leader in third-party web measurement. The Yelp guys would do well to make sure their own internal numbers measure up with what’s being tracked externally.
But wait, they’re too busy “yelping” about comScore on Yelp! LOL. Kool Aid!
A couple of points:
1. CitySearch has lots of curtains and funny accounting, but they actually pay partners for delivering their content to consumers. This allows sites and applications to make a little (VERY little) money.
2. Yelp, by contrast, is the most prehensile entity on the Internet. Yelp pays nothing to their partners. Quite the opposite, they demand their partners paste their sites with links back to Yelp. This shortsighted approach explains their tiny size in four years of doing local search on the net. If they had shared a little of the wealth, more partners would carry their content. As it stands, partners get screwed and Yelp runs the table.
As far as content goes, Yelp’s is Horrid because it’s “user provided” reviews, which anyone knows is biased. The quality is completely erratic and there is no servicable information beyond stars. Big whup!
Yelp is yet another example of an idea that fails in the market because of the arrogance/greed of their management team, where Citysearch grifts and shortchanges everyone involved.
Take the best of both, and you might have a real functional application. But we’re talking tech here, people. Egos, Venture Capital, uncharted territory. And don’t forget idiot Barry Diller and his infamous “Diller Discount”.
And that is all I have to say on that.
I don’t think you are being fair (and I have been considered a prick by many, including Arrington). There is not a clear way to monetize these businesses, but I’m sure with one night’s discussion I could have several possible methods that could be subsequently tested for results over several months. It’s all about trust, there is nothing else. Lose that, the business is done.
prehensile - wow, what a vocabulary word!
So…is Yelp making money?
Probably not. Yelp is crap IMHO. They use strong arm tactics to get get “approved advertisers” dont give businesses a recourse for negative comments and experiences and dont play well with others in general. Is easily gamed.
it also looks like their entire site is built on google.
Four years is a long time, in internet years.. I like YELP better though. Hope they catch up one day!
Mike
Interesting statistics but also fair to assume that if Yelp’s comscore data in incorrect so is Citysearch’s as well.
There’s no reason to assume that Google Analytics numbers are correct. They are not an industry accepted standard among major agencies or publishers. Comscore is, along with Nielsen. Plus, if you’re going to compare apples to oranges, why don’t you also show us Citysearch’s google analytics figures. For example, here is a comparison of the two on Compete (also not an industry standard). http://siteanalytics.compete.c.....?metric=uv
yelp needs help. the name stinks. citysearch can win the battle by domain alone. citysearch needs a new slogan. “live like an insider” doesnt cut the mustard.
InsiderLocator.com - we know!
Name doesn’t matter. Most people come to these sites via search. Yelp is building a brand and, much like yahoo or google, doesn’t need a self-explanatory domain name.
I have to agree name plays a role, but not in this case….
I person types in “XYZ pizza reviews”, or “pizza places in XYZ city”
They don’t search for “City search”
So in this case name does not matter…. Name matter in direct goods like Vibrators.com or Cars.com
I wouldn’t say that comScore is recognized as a leader in third party web measurement. They blew a lot of their credibility last year with their Google forecast fiasco. comScore is far from perfect and shouldn’t be seen as concrete evidence of how much traffic a site is receiving.
Full disclosure — I worked at Citysearch for several years.
The static around Yelp continues to be short-sighted. There are so many good points made above like: 1) where’s the money being made on Yelp, 2) are they doing sneaking things like paying for reviews or taking down negative ones or 3) that Citysearch’s internal numbers are probably also higher than reported by Comscore.
Citysearch has now been around for more than 10 some-odd years. As cited elsewhere, they’ve built a 100 million dollar business (annually) around local. And, now they extended that local experience to more than 75,000 cities. I think Yelp more and more is something people only are talking about in ‘hip’ cities - where the press is covering it. Citysearch continues to evolve - and I agree they should take a nod from Yelp on some of their UI stuff. And, it looks like they have.
Can’t wait to see someone dig into the how they handle reviews and how they make there money. Having been at Citysearch - I know those are tough, tough battles. And knowing Citysearch - they made some mistakes along the way. But, they’ve now figured out that dance of how to best serve one of the 15 million brick-and-mortar businesses
(got cut off ) … and serve the user experience.
I like the more local sites for the smaller towns. My town Greenville, NC has a site at http://www.abetterguide.com
This seems to attract more of the locals for cities less then say 150k population.
How is Yelp monetizing their traffic? Citysearch may not have the traffic but I know they have a very agressive advertising pitch.
How are they monetizing their traffic? Really? If that’s a serious question - they sell advertising - between $300 to $1000 a month for between 1500 and 10,000 “impressions” that run across the site on competitors profile pages and search results. Just impressions - not clicks. It’s a VERY expensive CPM ($200 CPM) with lackluster if not ‘not compelling’ results. It’s also a site fortified with a demographic that is, lets say, a bit cynical to “advertising”.
Mike, can you keep bullying Google to allow companies to publicly publish their Google Analytics numbers?
You used to chide them quite a bit, and the other services (Compete, especially) do seem to be way off base fairly often….
which is the better investment?
$30M put into Yelp
or
$3M put into CityVoter
As several other commenters have said, Yelp is asking you to compare apples to oranges. Everybody’s Google Analytics uniques are higher than comScore/quantcast/compete’s uniques. This is due to many factors, partly the fact that people delete cookies (which inflates GA’s numbers). I have seen public numbers that were 3 or 4 times off of internal GA numbers.
No matter the reason, is simply misleading to compare GA numbers from one site to comScore/quantcast/compete numbers from another site. Unless you get citySearch’s internal numbers, you shouldn’t consider this a Yelp win.
It is not that hard to game ComScore’s numbers…I’ve helped a company move up 23 positions on ComScore within 2 months. Google Analytics numbers are much more accurate. Any onsite web analytics program is going to be.
when assessing a company, don’t forget to look at growth. on compete.com, yelp’s unique visitors quadrupled in the past year while citysearch stayed flat. http://siteanalytics.compete.c.....?metric=uv
and by providing a service close to a transaction, i’m sure yelp has and will find many ways to profit, as opposed to front pages on the web http://tinyurl.com/5fkmlo
AFAIK Google Analytics counts uniques on a daily basis and sums these daily results to build a monthly number, eg, a visitor coming to your site Nov 1st that returns again Nov 2nd gets reported as 2 uniques when looking at the whole month. Comscore, Nielson, et al, define that visitor as 1 unique (as they should). Sites with many visits/unique will therefore show significantly higher uniques from Analytics.
fyi, i believe Jeremy’s last name is Stoppelman (only one ‘l’)
see http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremystoppelman or http://www.crunchbase.com/person/jeremy-stoppelman
(yo henry: when’s the CrunchBase spellcheck feature shipping?
test comment post… quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog?
The Truth likely lies somewhere between ComScore and Yelp’s internal analytics. Also, Yelp’s ad package allows a business to pick out one user-written review to place at the top of the list, and it’s marked as having been selected by the business owner. After that it’s just chronological order. But if the selected review is a long one and you have a small monitor, it’s possible that the rest of the reviews might fall “below the fold”. So it’s possible that the controversy could be all smoke and no fire.
Outside of the reviews, Yelp does a great job with user recognition features. Having a stranger on the internet tell you “You’re Cool” or “You’re Funny” is a lot more gratifying than a thumb’s-up on your review. The way they handpick Elite Squad members and throw offline parties also goes a long way towards stroking members’ egos.
I like yelp, and I have tried citysearch in the past but felt the user experience was lacking. Looks like they have made progress in that area, as well as giving the ability to add more credibility to the reviews/ reviewer.
I have used yelp in a place i have lived for 15+ years (Denver Metro), so I know the area well (restaurants and bars). It is always to read the reviews for places that I’ve gone for years, worked at in college, and/ or know the owners. I have found yelp to be quite good (though I’m a cynic and still reserving judgment). In fact, my girlfriend was annoyed at a number of reviews on yelp for places she frequents being written by a bunch of whiners and she wanted to know more info about these people reviewing (eg. more credibility), for the opposite reason people above are questioning the legitimacy (eg. overly positive vs. overly negative)
Facebook Connect will just becomes table stakes, not a differentiator that is difficult to emulate. Open Social integration would be good as well; these are fairly simple integrations.
I don’t care about site analytics data for more than giving a qualitative view. CitySearch, I’m sure, is welcome to send Arrington their GA data. We’ll see if that happens.
Yelp wins on UGC hands down. UGC isn’t an exact science, but with so enough reviews, you’re guaranteed to get a general feel of what a venue has to offer–and that’s Yelps game, the law of large numbers. The other two sources of information (owner and editor) provide absolutely no value to a consumer…who cares what the owner or a single sample point has to say?
I worked for citysearch as well and couldnt wait to leave. They see yelp as a huge threat. The search algorithm is terrible, try going to citysearch right now and do a search for anything and see what results you get. They opened up their search to include reviews, if the word you are searching for is mentioned in a review it will show in the search return. They supposedly made all these great partnerships with big companies and used that to sell advertising but there is no association between citysearch and these other companies. They also fired all of their editors so the local content for all cities is coming from one editor in NY, not very local anymore.
Citysearch’s traffic all comes through google, there is almost no organic traffic at all. Heads up for advertisers, they have something called syndication. This is when you have a monthly budget to spend with them and you arent close to reaching it with a week left in your monthly cycle syndication turns on. Meaning you will reach your budget no matter what it is or what category your business falls under. Syndication is a running joke at citysearch, a business owner thinks all their “clicks” are coming from citysearch.com but 70% of them are coming from this garbage syndication network that isnt even localized. Ask your sales rep for a list of sites in syndication, you will get a good laugh.
This is ridiculous. I have it on good authority from business owners in SF that Yelp is running the anti-Google strategy.
I love to bash companies for violations of trust, but yelp has given me no reason based on reviews in my area (Denver). So, many people are disgruntled and/or backstabbing in SF/ NorCal and I have more trouble accepting them than the local reviews that I can mostly verify (I’ve been to most places).
If yelp fucks up, you can bet your ass I will bag them as fast as possible. I skeptical ofmost companies, and I come from the VRM mind-set.
There seems to be so many well informed people here. I would sincerely appreciate you evaluating our site that is very similar to City search and Yelp. Bringusadeal.com. We have spent the last 2 years with no venture capital and only 5 employees and we can do everything Yelp can do and So MUCH More. We built it with less than $250,000 and we are taking it globally January 1st 2009. Please anyone guide us with any knowledge you care to share. Im humbly asking for your help through your opinon. Thank you!
..wow just read your post and checked your site as part of some research…
….your site sucks -$250,000? How much less?? Looks like you spent 10 bucks on it, seriously.
well, you aksed for feedback. Why didn’t you get a pro-designer?
It seems as if Yelp! is doing something right. There sure a lot of comments about them. Small businesses are becoming smarter about where they put there money. They like tangibility and Yelp! is doing a good job of delivering this. It makes it easier for them to purchase. They, like others, will run into scalability issues with regards to cost. In the end it’s the small businesses who have to buy to make the site a financial success. Newspapers are trying to tackle local as well and are having a hard time justifying the cost of sending there reps out for a small ticket item. But they realize that it takes time to convince a small business to part with there hard earned money.
you cant charge small biz with $500/day in sales over $250/month and expect to have tons of customers but then again how are you gonna pay for a los angeles office like citysearch without that kinda money
I believe average rent in Nor Cal (Yelp) is higher than rent in LA
I posted several reviews, all but 1 positive. All the reviews are still in my profile but no longer public on the restaurant pages. Has this happened to anyone else? Anyway, my days of providing free content to Yelp have ended.
I, for one, am looking forward to Citysearch viably competing with Yelp. As an insider to the Yelp brand, I am all too familiar with the manipulative tactics Yelp uses in order to get businesses to advertise with them, even if there’s no good reason to do so. Yelp’s credibility - both B2B and B2C - is in doubt, and this is the perfect time for a competitor to swoop in and capitalize on Yelp’s rookie mistakes. What fun are monopolies anyway? There’s so, oh, anti-American, if you will.
More power to you, Citysearch.
I have researched Yelp, CitySearch, BackFence, Americatowns, and Smalltown. The largest problem with local, is getting the SMB involved with the site. The issue that all of the sites have is finding an interface that local SMB’s feel is easy to use and edit and has tracking built in to said interface. That being said that wonderful and quite possibly magical interface needs to make the business owner feel as though the site is on their side. The only site that seems to give control, or that “feel good feeling” part of UI is smalltown.com, but they only fill part of the void because while smalltown has wonderful edits and a replyback feature that is unrivaled; Smalltown has no tracking system that I am aware of. If yelp could combine their SEO with the SMB UI of Smalltown the site could obliterate Citysearch.
I will continue to Watch the hyper-local race…
I know this is months old, but it’s worth noting that their graph actually shows 97% of Yelp users to be college educated if you include those with a grad school education.
This is Mike. Click fraud?!? It is not the responsibility of the government to be involved in transaction between two private parties. Click fraud is a term created by private companies to have government create laws preventing it. Do you suggest we criminalize people to click on ads knowing that don’t want to buy it? That’s stupid. I click on ads all the time just to see what is up not to buy anything. In fact, I know most companies make money from click, so I helped them out by creating a script to click on all ads online!!! You going to arrest me? Charge me with the crime of click fraud?
If a business finds that the number of clicks don’t equate much to their bottomline, do they continue to advertise?!? Don’t think so. This is the best way to solve click fraud. If you don’t get sales from your advertisement, you don’t advertise at the establishment!
Seriously! Coming from insiders, that would be a VERY good question to delve into Mike.
Mike,
Look into citysearch syndication. I worked there for years, its such a scam that its a joke around the offices.
Someone mentioned they should change the slogan from “live like an insider”, well the employees have come up with a great new slogan, “Everybody caps out”. This is refering to the fact that no matter what kind of business you are or what your monthly budget or monthly cap is you will reach it. The sales team gets paid on billed revenue, if they have $75,000 in monthly cap and only $60,000 of that bills out they are losing a lot of money. This is where syndication kicks in, for example, a plumber may get 3 or 4 “clicks” per day for the first three weeks of thier monthly billing cycle, then in the last week all of a sudden there are hundreds of people looking for plumbers and they are getting 50 - 100 “clicks” per day and they reach thier monthly budget with a few days to go in their cycle, setting the account up for a nice upsell. This was the biggest obsticale to overcome, a merchant sees this hyge jump in “clicks” but zero people refer to citysearch in that week.