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Yelp Plans to Go Public, Despite Booming Private Market
- leot 16y agoHopefully they are not IPO'ing because of a negative long-term outlook ... ... among those I know, trust in Yelp has fallen a fair bit. Writing fake reviews seems to have become a standard business practice. And whereas in the past Yelp seemed to do a great job of identifying the best spots, now it seems to be happy if the top-ranked businesses are "good enough". I worry that the need to meet quarterly targets will only make Yelp worse.
- kongqiu 16y agoDespite being the clear leader in location reviews, there's still a TON of room to improve the location review and recommendations space.
- donofrip 16y agoInteresting. Could it be that they are looking to raise equity to make it easier to acquire competition? Makes sense to me that they need to diversify their model to compete with some of the new ventures in the market. It might make more sense of Yelp to acquire the platform and the product knowledge than build it in-house. If they have equity in the market, it might be easier to acquire these companies with stock than through a private cash acquisition. Not sure if that's true, but I'm throwing it out there for debate.
- rhizome 16y agoThe smart money IPOs just before a market transition, and the retail-aid market is s-t-a-l-e for change. We've got the various players all lined up, but where it goes is anybody's guess. Yelp is preparing to do something, whether it's Groupon or GoDaddy remains to be seen, and an IPO would fund it much more easily than what they have now.
- martinshen 16y agoAt the end the day, Yelp is a review site to vet places you plan to visit. There's still room for city guides I think.. Maybe Yelp can acquire them. With that said, with Groupon's purchase of Whrrl.. wouldn't a lot of companies be interested in purchasing city guide websites like UrbanDaddy?