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>YellowPages, the original driver of traffic for offline commerce, is estimated to do 22 billion in revenue in 2015. Think on that for a second. 2015. Yellow Pa
by will_brown 14y ago
>YellowPages, the original driver of traffic for offline commerce, is estimated to do 22 billion in revenue in 2015. Think on that for a second. 2015. Yellow Pages. Still going to do 22 billion in revenue
The difference is all listings in Yellow Pages are paid - FourSquare allows businesses to be listed for free. At the end of the day businesses must make money, not rely on outside financial injections.
I think FourSquare is in a unique position to create a new feature that could significantly drive traffic, create closer relationships with businesses and generate serious revenue - I have one in mind so I think lack of innovation is the problem.
- jasonlbaptiste 14y agoYep, but I think that's due to the print nature. Google is a mix of paid and free.
- will_brown 14y ago>Google is a mix of paid and free. Right that paid part is key. At this point Google's search engine is ancillary to their advertising business - admittedly one could not exist without the other and search came first. So you may be right that FourSquare's check-ins are ancillary to their driving offline traffic, but it appears they have not found sustainable revenues to justify their undertaking - if the value was there businesses would pay. Again I think FourSquare just needs a little innovation, by way of new feature(s), to generate the revenue and significant revenue by my estimates.