Yelp - A Human's Best Friend

: Image via CrunchBase

by Veena Krishnan

Yelp.com was founded in July 2004 by two young entrepreneurs: Jeremy Stoppelman, and Russel Simmons who had worked together at PayPal. They initiated concept of an online city guide with Web 2.0 functionality, allowing “real users” to write “real reviews” about almost any type of business — from restaurants to dentists, bars to clothing stores. Launched in the Bay Area, the site has since spread to around 40 states covering many major metropolitan areas — including Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Boston, Las Vegas, and Seattle — as well as England and Canada.

Yelp creates a page for individual businesses, including address and phone number, like a directory. Then, any person who signs up for a free Yelp account can write a review of the business and rate it on a five-star system. Yelp is a fun and easy way to find, review and talk about what’s great around your locality. Yelp collects and organizes users’ recommendations in one single platform. Additionally Yelp also offers plenty of social networking features: the ability to add friends, groups, events, forums or message contacts. The inspiration behind this system is that users would trust their friend’s reviews more than anybody else’s.

Yelp provides online local search capabilities for its visitors. A typical search includes what the user is seeking and the location from which the search is to be performed, a specific address, neighborhood, city state combination, or zip code. Each business listing result contains a 5 point rating, reviews from other site visitors, and details such as the business address, hours, accessibility, and parking.

Popular reviews are featured on the site in noticeable spots and in local newsletters to help motivate contributors. Yelp also brings in a “First to Review” reward system to create a competition among contributors. Over 10.6 million people access the Yelp web site each month, putting it in the 72^nd position and worldwide at 342nd.

There had always been controversies surrounding Yelp.com that it manipulates user reviews to coerce small businesses to advertise with the site. That’s what many business owners in the US are claiming whereas Yelp denies these allegations and says its sales staff does not have the power to either move or delete reviews. One of the biggest complaints was that aggressive sales people would offer to remove the negative reviews appearing at the top of a business’ profile page on Yelp. Another complaint identified by the Express said that negative reviews would begin to appear at the top of their business’ page after they declined to advertise with Yelp.

Because they were often asked to advertise soon after receiving negative reviews, many of these business owners believe Yelp employees use such reviews as sales leads and even suspect Yelp employees of writing them. Indeed, Yelp does pay some employees to write reviews of businesses that are solicited for advertising.

Whatever be the case, today, Yelp draws more than 16 million unique visitors to the site each month, according to Yelp spokeswoman Stephanie Ichinose lately. More than 4.5 million reviews have been written so far, and the company has raised $31 million in funding to date.