Comment by incongruity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by incongruity | Hacker News Reader

Yelp seemingly stopped innovating years ago – really, there's very little in the way of new experiences with them to keep the attention going. I say this as a former Yelp Elite user for 5? years, but no longer, though still an active user with ~350 reviews.

As a result, they've squandered their early advantage.

Ideas off the top of my head:

- Imagine all that they could have done to help small businesses gain deep(er) insight and understanding into their existing customers and/or potential markets.

- A (pay for use) tool that let prospective business owners size markets and get feedback from real, local "expert" consumers (aka: yelp elite users?) – all for a fee (and maybe a small pay-off to yelp users?)

- Revenue sharing to verified, top reviewers or test marketing that allowed reviewers to get something back for all their engagement

- Product reviews (really, can Amazon be the only one to own this?) Review anything with a UPC mark.

- A Yelp branded credit card – discounts/cash back for reviewed experiences (this allows: 1) Deeper consumer intelligence, 2) Prompting for reviews 3)Truly verified experiences/more reliable reviews

- Brokering partnerships between complementary businesses – e.g.: free Lyft rides between the dinner and movie/music/museum venues for consumers for special events, etc.

Well instead it went the ol' fashion way of bullying small businesses.

TBH at this point I'm not sure what can they sell, their user share might be a worthy investment however anyone which will be interested in acquiring Yelp e.g. Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. already probably owns most of Yelp's user base via other means anyhow.

And as far as Google goes Yelp (Ireland) has given them quite a bit of trouble in the EU in the anti-trust case against Google (heck they've spearheaded the "public" campaign against Google).

This pretty much leaves Amazon and Facebook to buy them, and I'm not sure any one of those will want to do it. I have a strong feeling that Yahoo will end up buying them which will result in another flop at the end. If not them then maybe one of the emerging Chinese companies like Baidu or the Alibaba Group (I'm actually thinking that it would make quite a bit of sense for Jack Ma to go after them especially they want to expand to the US and EU markets since they own tons of site that provide C2C and B2C services, heck this might be even more likely than a "US" tech company since Ali has a metric ton of money to spend these days)

That said I'm not sure if on the tech side Yelp is worth anything at this point, my personal view on that companies is that the main reason if not the only reason why they kinda dwindled and never really exploded is that they didn't find any clever use for their data which means they don't have some amazing IP to sweeten the deal for potential buyers.

The most likely buyer will be Tripadvisor or Priceline. They both are flush with cash and Tripadvisor has been aggressively getting into the restaurant review space and has much broader penetration abroad in all the places Yelp isn't at. Tripadvisor also bought reservations tool LaFourchette and Yelp could be a way to get more into the US game.

Priceline owns OpenTable and Yelp could be an interesting way to build out more reviews and get more restaurants using OpenTable.

That makes quite a bit of sense also, tho restaurants only make a small fraction of Yelp's total reviews, yes they are the biggest single category but they are not anywhere close to being a majority. I still think that it makes more sense for a C2C/B2C group to buy them which aren't focused on specific industries, and i do see Chinese and Indian tech/business giants aiming to own western companies a core strategy for their future.

I'm not sure if they are more than 50% but restaurant reviews are definitely way more than a "small fraction".

TBH at this point I'm not sure what can they sell, their user share might be a worthy investment however anyone which will be interested in acquiring Yelp e.g. Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. already probably owns most of Yelp's user base via other means anyhow.

Not to mention that people moved from Citysearch and their ilk quite easily on their own. People want Yellow Pages and will find a new site to satisfy that demand if the old one ain't doing it for them anymore. It's not like an upstart would have much trouble getting a list of businesses from tax or business registrations.

I honestly just wish the filters worked. Half the time I set a $ or distance filter the results come up random and wrong, even including things I've explicitly filtered out.

Hard to innovate when your main business idea is to scam money out of small businesses in the name of demoting negative reviews.

That's how they chose to monetize but it wasn't the original vision for the site – they just horked the business model and didn't think deeply about it at all. Not that they're alone in that.

That's not what they do.

It would seem small businesses disagree with you.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/17/complaints-against-yelps-ex...

http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/04/yelp-stock-falls-as-...

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus-20140404-colum...

What does one do to actually become a yelp elite member? Why did you not continue?

Just be an active user. There is no clear definition, whether it's volume of reviews or rate of writing reviews.

The problem is that you have to manually re-apply every year and your Elite membership can be revoked due to inactivity.

I was elite for several years, but stopped caring because Yelp seemed to stopped innovating. I wrote all these well thought out reviews, but my Elite status didn't really mean anything. I was still on the same level as your stereotypical shitty Yelp review that marks a steak house for not having a vegan option. Why can't Elite users down vote bad reviews by non-Elite users. Nor did my Elitenes ensure that I got personalized search results based on my review profile. Yelp should be doing what Netflix does and recommend good new places. Yelp still does not support private ratings, which I think really hurts the quality of their aggregate score. There is also only one level of Elite, but I think it should be tiered so higher Elites can become mods. I follow a lot of people on Yelp and this is also another completely missed opportunity for them.

And then there's the app, which basically hasn't changed except to push a new product initiative.

It's all just fucking basic, and I just don't really know what Yelp is doing with all its engineers all these years.

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