Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Yelp

Yelp Is Now Valued At Nearly $1.5 Billion

Amit Chowdhry — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 19:35:55 +0000

Reviews website Yelp.com is now valued at almost $1.5 billion since going public earlier this week. Yelp was received well by Wall Street during their first day as a publicly traded company. Yelp closed at a price of $24.58 per share, which is up 63% from their $15 IPO price. Yelp hit as high as $26 per share and never fell below the $22 opening price.

Wall Street seemed to embrace Yelp.com better than Zynga, which dipped below their IPO price within the first few minutes of their stock market debut in December. Zynga was extremely profitable at the time of their IPO, but Yelp is still not profitable. Same case with Groupon. Now that Yelp is public, Wall Street will determine how great they really are on a quarter-to-quarter basis. Best of luck on the road ahead Yelp. I use your website every single day.

Yelp Soars 73% During IPO Debut

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 17:15:25 +0000

The stock price of user reviews website Yelp.com has soared 73% in their first day of trading after they started selling shares for more than planned in an IPO. Yelp raised $107.3 million in the IPO and they priced the shares at $15 each. At the time of writing this article, Yelp’s shares are trading at $24.59. Yelp is trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “YELP.”

Yelp had offered 7.15 million shares, aiming to raise $107.25 million. The deal is believed to be heavily subscribed. Yelp’s revenues in 2011 was $83.2 million, which is up 74.6% from $47.7 million in 2010.

In 2011, Yelp hit 65.7 million monthly unique visitors for the year, which is up from 39.3 million in 2010. Yelp users left 24.8 million reviews in 2011, which is up from 15.1 million in 2010.

Yelp Sees $16.9 Million Loss In 2011

Amit Chowdhry — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 19:11:06 +0000

Yelp is the popular user-generated review website that filed for a $100 million IPO in November 2011. The company has reported a wider loss in 2011 due to an increase in spending to attract more reviewers and make the website easier to use. Yelp reported a $16.9 million loss last year compared to a $9.74 million loss in 2010 according to a regulatory filing.

Marketing and product development spending has increased over 50%. Yelp plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange with the symbol “YELP.” Goldman Sachs will be leading the company’s IPO. Citigroup Inc., Jefferies & Co., Allen & Co., and Oppenheimer & Co. will help manage the deal.

Yelp’s sales and marketing expenses had increased 61% to $54.5 million and product development costs increased 77% to $11.6 million according to their filing. The good news is that company revenue surged 74% to $83.3 million with local advertising accounting for the largest portion. Unique visitors to Yelp increased 67% to 65.8 million in 2011. Reviews increased 64% to 24.8 million.

Foursquare Is Getting Into Yelp’s Territory By Releasing Recommendation Engine

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 21:50:17 +0000

Mobile check-in app Foursquare launched a feature called Explore last year. Explore uses algorithms to suggest restaurants and places to visit nearby based on the check-in history of that specific user and his or her friends. Today Foursquare is launching a recommendation engine for the web.

“The focus until now has been about mayorships and badges,” stated Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley. “We’re getting to the point where we can flex our data and tell you, ‘We think you’ll like this place.’” Foursquare has recently hit 1.5 billion check-ins and 15 million total users over the past three years. This data will be utilized in the new feature.

Users will be able to filter results based on places that they have not yet been and places that their friends have visited. When using the recommendation engine, they will also be able to benefit from the entire Foursquare community. For example, when searching for “tapas” in Barcelona, a list of places that their friends recommend and places that are popular among the Foursquare community will be listed.

[NYT]

Yelp Goes Live In Australia

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 22:43:27 +0000

Yelp is a website that allows you to review almost every local service. This includes restaurants, bars, doctors, dentists, spas, hotels, pet stores, real estate agents, etc. Today Yelp has launched in Australia. Yelp will focus initially on Melbourne and Sydney and will expand to other cities from there. You can visit the Australian version of Yelp at Yelp.com.au.

“It’s easy to forget how much of an impact local businesses have on our day-to-day lives. Be it an auto mechanic, dentist, hair stylist or dry cleaner, we rely on them to help make life easier and more colorful,” stated Yelp CEO and co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman. “The most interesting finding for us has been that, regardless of geographic boundaries, people seem to have this altruistic desire to share their great local business experiences with others. We look forward to seeing what Aussies think of the site.”

Yelp Files For $100 Million IPO

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:02:55 +0000

Yelp is a local business review website that has filed for a $100 million IPO. Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Jefferies are working as the lead underwriters. However the San Francisco based company has not selected an exchange to be traded on. Yelp is using multiple classes of shares for the public offering.

It is believed that Yelp will seek a valuation of between $1 and $2 billion. Like Groupon, the daily deals website that recently went public, Yelp turned down an acquisition offer from Google. Yelp turned down a $500 million offer from Google in 2009.

Yelp reported a $7.6 million net loss for the first 9 months of 2011 on about $58 million in revenue. Yelp also reported an $8.5 million loss on $32 million in revenue during the year earlier.

Yelp raised $56 million in venture capital funding from Bessemer Venture Partners, Elevation Partners, Benchmark Capital, and Max Levchin. Yelp founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman owns 11.1% of the company.

[Fortune]

Yelp Is Not Getting Out Of Daily Deals

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 20:57:41 +0000

Several publications are speculating whether Yelp. This was based on a rumor without substance. Yelp updated their company blog to confirm that they are staying in the daily deals market. Yelp wrote that it can be beneficial for businesses to sell daily deals to “connect online marketing to offline customers in the door.”

“Well, contrary to popular belief Yelp is not killing Deals (gasp!). We did take a 30 person team that was selling daily deals and local ads and made it a 15 person team focused solely on daily deals (note: no salespeople were harmed in the making of this announcement. All are still doing great as part of our 400+ member sales team),” said Yelp.

Yelp will continue e-mailing out Deals that they find to users. Businesses will still be able to instantly post a deal to their Yelp page. In the past two months, several hundreds of thousands of businesses have posted deals.

[Yelp Blog]

Yelp Adds A Hipster Category

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 21:39:21 +0000

Yelp.com is a reviews website that focuses on bars, restaurants, coffee shops, etc. It lets you filter venues based on categories such as trendy, intimate, classy, etc. Now they have added a new category: hipster. Some of the hipster spots include Roberta’s in Bushwick and Freemans on the Lower East Side. [Gawker]

Yelp CEO Does Not Want Their Reviews Appearing On Google Places

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:35:41 +0000

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman is not happy the way that Google uses reviews from his website on Google Places for local businesses. Google told him that if he does not like it, then he can choose to remove his website from Google entirely. This is not an option since Yelp heavily depends on being at the top of Google search results.

“We are unhappy with the way Google uses our users’ review on its Places page. However, there is no solution to the problem… Google’s position is that we can take ourselves out of its search index if we don’t want them to use our reviews on Places…. But that is not an option for us, and other sites like us – such as TripAdvisor – as we get a large volume of our traffic via Google search…We just don’t get any value out of our reviews appearing on Google places and haven’t been given an option other than to remove ourselves from search, how to improve this situation.”

Back in 2009, it was rumored that Google was interested in buying Yelp for $500 million. Yelp is considering an IPO instead of going the acquisition route. Yelp currently has about 16 million published reviews. There are also company reps working across the U.S. encouraging people to leave reviews in exchange for prizes.

[Telegraph UK]

TripAdvisor, Yelp, CitySearch, and WebMD Not Thrilled By How Google Displays Links

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 20:57:19 +0000

When you search for a local venue, hotel, information about a city, or even a health condition on Google.com, you may find a result from Google.com itself at the very top. TripAdvisor, Yelp, CitySearch, and WebMD are not happy with the way that the links are displayed. With Google.com being the top result, it makes it even more of a challenge for the aforementioned websites to compete for ad revenue.

“There is no denying that today Google is competing [with many websites] for the same Web traffic and the same advertising dollars,” stated CityGrid CEO Jay Herratti. Traffic to TripAdvisor.com has been dropped by about 10% on a seasonally adjusted basis since mid-October due to the shift in Google’s displayed links. These complaints also showcase how much Google search is important for almost every business online. I can empathize with some of these businesses since about 55% of our visits are from search engines.

The European Union is now working on a formal investigation on whether Google is manipulating search results for their own advantage. Google said that they have never intentionally intended to hurt competing services. They also said that the complaints to the EU were led by companies with ties to Microsoft.

[WSJ]