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Google In Discussions To Acquire Yelp For A Half Billion Dollars Or More
- brianobush 17y agowell, they have almost 22B dollars sitting in cash. from an investor's point of view, that is wasteful. Easy way to turn that cash into growing revenue streams is to purchase profitable companies. Though 500 mil is a bit steep to pay for yelp IMHO.
- sachinag 17y agoYelp is sitting on a massive store of local business data. That's useful for search quality. Yelp is in the first three results for the majority of businesses in their database. That's useful for search monetization. They also have a direct sales force calling on local SMEs. That's useful for Google Apps. I could go on.
- nudist 17y agoMore valuable than all that is the fact that Yelp is the de-facto real-world review site. Its brand is powerful, about as powerful as YouTube's was when Google bought them.
- natrius 17y agoA year or two ago, there were plenty of cities where Citysearch was more dominant than Yelp. I suspect this is still the case.
- sachinag 17y agoApparently, they've been neck and neck for about a year: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/yelp.com+citysearch.com+metromix.com/ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/yelp.com+citysearch.com+met...
- pmorici 17y agoMaybe in the bay area. I'd never heard of yelp until I visited the area.
- warfangle 17y agoAlso in NYC. Heck, it's even good for restaurant reviews when I visit home in NC.
- adatta02 17y agoI'm in Boston and I agree, Yelp is pretty much the de-facto real world review site.
- josefresco 17y agoI have to disagree. Unless you live in a city, your average person has never heard of Yelp. When Google bought YouTube it was a different story.
- steveplace 17y agofrom an investor's point of view, [excess cash] is wasteful. Noone was saying that 12 months ago.
- ShabbyDoo 17y agoDoesn't Yelp offer astro-turfing for $$$? I hope that this practice doesn't fall under the umbrella of "don't be evil."
- tdoggette 17y agohttp://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/10/yelp_reviewers_paid/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/10/yelp_reviewers_paid/ This seems like they paid people to write reviews, but I see no suggestion that they instructed paid reviewers to be biased. More content is better for everyone, as far as I can tell. Another Register article (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/19/yelp_pitch_revisited/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/19/yelp_pitch_revisited...) seems to be at most an accusation of unethical ad sales tactics, and it includes the CEO flat-out denying that they'd ever manipulated reviews for money.
- seldo 17y agoGoogle's don't-be-evil policy bit the dust as soon as they bought DoubleClick, as far as I'm concerned. Their new policy can be accurately summed up as "be less evil than Microsoft", which has understandably given them a lot of headroom to expand.
- houseabsolute 17y agoNot a fair representation of Google's operations.
- seldo 17y agoThe accusation much more frequently levelled is that they extort business to pay to have negative reviews hidden: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/eastbay/yelp-and-the-business-of-extortion-20/Content?oid=1176635 http://www.eastbayexpress.com/eastbay/yelp-and-the-business-... It's not lying -- the good reviews that remain come from real people -- but it's certainly misleading.
- eli 17y agoThat article isn't exactly airtight in the evidence department.
- malbiniak 17y agoyou'll never, ever, ever hear me say this ever again: i thought scoble made some interesting points (when he talked about facebook acquiring yelp). http://scobleizer.com/2009/03/26/facebook-is-lucky-it-missed-buying-twitter-and-now-should-eat-yelp/ http://scobleizer.com/2009/03/26/facebook-is-lucky-it-missed... but what does google have to gain? extend google maps/local? aren't they already scraping reviews and ratings? screw the "don't be evil," what's in it for them...especially at $500M? and as a random peanut gallery jab, it kills me how "past the term sheet stage" indicates an 80% probability. isn't anything past .01% "past the term sheet stage?"
- liquidcool 17y agoI really like Yelp and I think it's a great service, but I don't contribute because of the complete lack of data portability. Even their RSS feeds are heavily truncated. I'd contribute significantly if this changed. For instance, automatically posting my Yelp reviews to my blog would be a big incentive.
- willwagner 17y agoThis seems like a good marriage to me (or is it an adoption?). More and more on google, I see adsense results that are local in nature, and with more focus on android, this is a perfect addition to get more ad real estate that is location based. I use a lot of iphone apps, but more often than not, when I have my wallet out, I use the Yelp app to purchase food or drink. As a user, I'd be much more reluctant to utilize an admob ad on an unrelated iphone app or game as opposed to clicking on an ad when I'm trying to find a good thai restaurant somewhere in the midwest.
- jsm386 17y agoThis would actually perfectly compliment the new PlaceRank effort in which Google is sending out all of those QR stickers - Think foursquare for check in + Yelp userbase/content + locally targeted adwords, and throw in AdMob. About the stickers: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/16/check-in-google-foursquare-loopt/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/16/check-in-google-foursqu...
- aresant 17y agoTo max out profit Google may as well own the top 10 listings they display under major search terms (Knol) and long-tail local search (Yelp). That should cover 50% of profitable searches yes? Toddling monopoly?
- leej 17y agoi wonder if msft allows google to grab yelp too.