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well, 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
by brianobush 17y ago
well, 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.