Yelp Is Exploring a Sale | Hacker News Reader

Yelp Is Exploring a Sale

wsj.com

101 pointsprostoalex90 comments

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".

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.

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...

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.

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.

Yelp is the worst company. I'm not saying that just because of the small business owner bullying that I was subjected to, or the frivolous one-star review that they refused to remove, or the horrible customer service I was subjected to when I paid for their premium advertising plan. I say that because Yelp provides a platform for businesses to work against each other. Unscrupulous business owners that see a local competitor on Yelp will write bad reviews to lower their Yelp rating and write fake positive reviews for themselves.

The ideal replacement for Yelp in my mind would be a service that allows customers to state positive and negative aspects of their experience, and a Foursquare-like search that lets you easily see on a map which businesses are operating in your area. Business owners should be able to address the negative aspects, and consumers should be able to vote up/down positive and negative aspects of business to combat frivolous statements.

How would your suggested replacement prevent unscrupulous business owners from writing fake reviews?

Perhaps some way that Yelp independently verifies the identity of the reviewer (maybe some two-factor authentication such as an SMS message), but keeps the reviewer's identity anonymous from the public to prevent harassment of honest reviewers.

This identity would also include some additional checks such as business affiliation and location, so for example a restaurant owner in a given zipcode can't post reviews on other restaurants within a certain radius of their business premises.

Not sure how scalable or workable all this would be though.

Yeah, what's to stop somebody from just lying about their business affiliations?

i'm not sure that having to provide PII to make a review is a good idea. Maybe if yelp is able to provide a kind of "reviewer's score" based on the reviewer's online activity then people will be more likely to trust reviews for being genuine.

The key here is developing good points of convergent measures - not all of which would have to be valid for any one review to be weighted (think a Bayesian scoring approach?)

- Age of account

- Account engagement (patterns matter too)

- Check-ins via a mobile device at the business

- Check-ins at other near-by businesses (patterns matter too)

- Partner with a Credit Card company to offer Yelp-reward bucks to encourage reviews, track usage and validate reviews (and reviewers) [Use this to feed into the engagement score, above]

- Partner with OpenTable (they do this) & prompt reviews after attendance (they do this) – weight these reviews more heavily. [Use this to feed into the engagement score, above]

- Let me actually identify myself to Yelp or to the world (or to just business owners, ONLY if I want to [Use this to feed into the engagement score, above]

- Reviews of similar businesses (e.g.: I like thai food) -- patterns matter here. Do I rate all competitors poorly, etc? Did I post all reviews in one day, etc?

- Do my reviews vary significantly in a systematic way from others in a category? (This shouldn't be enough on its own, but variance might mean something)

- Do I post photos of the place? (Factor into engagement score, above -- but if it's only for one business, it might be a flag)

etc., etc.

Really – a statistical model shouldn't be that hard to do -- maybe processor intensive, but hard? It doesn't feel hard, given all the data they're sitting on...

I'm pretty sure the review filter (that everyone loves to hate) works this way.

I've assumed it's something like that - but it shouldn't be too hard for them to be a little more forthcoming to explain their methodology a little bit without compromising the value of it.

Work has been done on this. Apparently you can detect fake reviews to some degree using text features alone:

http://www.cs.uic.edu/~liub/FBS/fake-reviews.html

While that would certainly stop Eddie down the street from posting 0 or 1 star reviews about my restaurant, you'd never be able to tell that he's started flooding the site with 2 star reviews to dilute me down from 3.7 stars to 3.4 so that his 3.5 star restaurant gets more foot traffic than I do.

You don't need real identity verification to prevent fraud, you just need mods, which already exist (Elite) if only Yelp would get their head out of their ass and make Elite mods. They need a karma system. You need karma to write reviews that count towards the rating. I generally ignore reviews by people without friends. But in the current system, AFAIK, their vote still counts and it's the same as mine (Elite).

I feel like this self regulating system could work, just like fake profiles on Facebook don't work.

My guess is the problem is solvable with a little ingenuity.

See also: Yelp's review filter.

Because the quality of a business would be more accurately represented by its positive and negative factors, which users could vote up/down based on their relevance to their decision to use or not use that particular business.

The problem with yelp is that I don't trust other reviewers.

Too many bad reviews are docking a business for things I don't care about, or the reviewer went in with drastically different expectations than I have, or they are simply trying to extort the business.

A buyer like facebook could have some interesting abilities to fix this problem. Filtering to only reviews from people I know would drastically reduce the noise. Additionally, I theoretically know a few things about the reviewer - what their tastes are, what their level of expertise is, etc. That added context seems like it would add a lot of value to the review. In a sense, it becomes more of a recommendation than a review, which is what I really wanted in the first place.

I've always wanted a "friend circle" yelp where It showed you recommendations from friends of friends/people you know so you could temper the rating with what you know about the person reviewing.

I believe Google+ actually does this.

Foursquare does this. Explicitly shows you your 4sq/Swarm friends' relationships to the place (have they been there? saved it to a list? said they 'like it' or 'dislike it'?), and then in the list of tips/reviews surfaces the stuff your friends have left before others.

When searching, you can even filter for "only show me places my friends have been".

I always wish I could filter out vegetarians, and I'm sure they feel the same way about me.

I'll go to a vegetarian restaurant, but only if non-vegetarians say it's good.

And Sushi. Unless the fish is literally rotting on the plate, Americans will pretty much give high marks to just about any Sushi hut.

Where in the USA are you referring to? You can find better sushi in New York City than you can in Tokyo (and the reviews reflect that fact).

[citation needed]

I've seen 5 star reviews with LOOKS COOL IM GOING NEXT MONTH, like, WTF?

Reviews across the Internet have a problem of all averaging out to 3.5-4.5 stars. There needs to be some serious innovation in review/recommendation engines for user submitted reviews to be valuable to other users.

Something like a system that lets people say "This restaurant is better than that restaurant" or some other simple way to establish a partial ordering?

> a problem of all averaging out to 3.5-4.5 stars

This is not a problem, it's sampling bias. If you went to restaurants randomly, then your average rating would be lower. But if you purposely select restaurants that you tend to like, then the average must be higher. Same for books, music, and everything on Amazon.

If the reviews fail to provide an accurate assessment of the product's value to the potential consumer considering the purchase, then it's a problem. Sampling bias would be the root cause of that problem.

This is where Netflix ratings really shine. The Big Lebowski on my Netflix profile shows as five red stars. On my wife's, it's two red stars. Netflix guesses that I would really like the movie, while they don't think my wife would enjoy it much at all. And that's completely true. However, they give her a rating of five red stars for Masterchef, a show she actually loves. They give me four red stars, because I've rated other reality shows and other cooking shows lower in the past.

So if Yelp had that kind of thing, this person rated McDonald's highly, they'll probably like Burger King. This person liked Subway but hated McDonalds, so they'll probably like Jimmy John's but not Wendy's. Even more specifically, this person liked Wendy's spicy chicken sandwich, they'll probably like Subway's sriracha buffalo chicken sub.

That's the kind of investment and innovation that drivers user interaction.

I've gone to highly regarded famous restaurants that should have easily been 5 star.

The 2 and 3 star complaints? Trivial crap.

"Sure the food is great, but other restaurants also have great food, 3 stars."

"There is this other restaurant on <other side of the country> that has food as good at this restaurant, and my meal was $30 cheaper!" (for a $200 meal)

"I had to call ahead to get reservations, they couldn't just seat me, 2 stars"

Crap like that ends up with Michelin Star rated restaurants having equal "star" ratings on Yelp as the local Subway.

"Gave me extra cheese for free on my sub!" 5/5

Well, stars should be a function of both expectations and service, so I don't think it's wrong for both a Michelin Star restaurant to be rated equal to a Subway.

They're probably measuring the wrong things. Maybe they should have something similar to the AirBnB / eBay ratings, which measure a lot of categories.

Also the system is not consistent enough to really tell anything about the experience. There are reviews that had 4-5 stars that only had simple statements like "it was pretty good" to multiple paragraphs about how one tiny part of the meal not being satisfactory and had 1 star.

I feel like a lot of the people who write reviews on Yelp are not really qualified to do so(not that there's a lot at stake..)

I keep saying. Yelp needs private ratings, and it needs detailed rating for Elite reviewers. A bad review is a review that praises the meal, but gives 1 star because they couldn't accommodate 8 people in a timely manner. That's all over Yelp. You have to separate the food, the decor and the service.

There needs to be Netflix style predictive reviews: "Based on Yelpers with review histories like yours, our guess for your rating is 4 stars." And maybe a rottentomatoes-esque separate average rating using only ratings from "top Yelpers."

I don't trust them either, but I think that's OK. Just looking at pictures of the food on Yelp is a pretty big thing. But besides that, the comments can tell you things you otherwise might not know, like certain things are only available on some days of the week, or the house specialty is such-and-such, that sort of thing. It's good for facts, skip all the "We found ourselves peckish on a recent gloomy Thursday afternoon..." garbage.

My very first iPhone app was a Yelp client called Places. It launched on day one of the App Store. I worked closely with Yelp on the app, sending them screenshots, talking about API limits, etc. They never told me that they were also working on their own app. To my surprise the App Store launched with an app from Yelp that looked exactly like my app Places. Soon after they started limiting my API access and changed their terms of service to only allow access to 3 reviews per restaurant. They also injected text into my API responses telling my users to download the official Yelp app. In retrospect I should have known not to build an app entirely on a third party API, but the situation could have been handled more professionally for sure.

That's a little sad to hear.

I'd love for Google to buy them so I could trust them.

Pro-tip: if you have a credibility problem so severe that you need to put up notices saying that your site does not bias reviews, you probably should stop sorting and filtering reviews based on criteria so opaque that it is indistinguishable from bias.

I don't think Yelp selling to another company with an ad business is going to increase trust.

Yelp has a history of salesmen selling business the right to mess with their reviews [1] [2]. I don't love Google, but I'm confident they will end that. (Yelp claims to have ended it already, but they have already lost my trust)

[1] http://www.jwz.org/blog/2009/02/yelp-shakedown/

[2] http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/11/business/fi-lazarus1...

>I'd love for Google to buy them so I could trust them.

I don't, you can still retain some bit of anonymity on Yelp. Google would probably try to force you to use your real name. I don't know what Google's problem with real names are, but it needs to stop.

The last time I left a legitimate bad review for a restaurant on Google, I was harassed through both Google and Facebook. I blocked the owner, his wife, and others, but it made me extremely uncomfortable.

Sounds like real names have power, then, no?

If I know that you, as mawburn, are backing a review with your personal reputation, I'm going to believe it a lot more.

That should be his choice though.

(For myself, as an avid Yelp user, I don't care. It's mostly easy to pick up good vs bad reviews IME.)

I also don't have a lot of sympathy for "small business owners" wanting to fight bad reviews.

I don't need or want your pointless TripAdvisor style feedback. It's antagonistic, and likely to discourage good reviews. The playing field is level. That's all that really matters. So you get a few completely bogus, unfair reviews? So what. You're in the same boat as anyone else.

Give me anonymized data. And while some few businesses will suffer, the amount of reviews encouraged will serve a greater good.

At least that's my theory.

Why should it matter if it's my personal reputation or an online persona? A legitimate review, is a legitimate review. There are plenty of people out there writing legitimate things online under online personas, like mawburn.

If I read a review from Joe Bob, I don't know Joe Bob and I don't really care who he is. The fact that I can see his real name makes absolutely no difference to me as a user. All I care about is what he said. To me, his real name is no more different than if he was Joe B. or J. Bob or redneck69.

> A legitimate review, is a legitimate review.

To filter for legitimate reviews, real identity can be important. That turned out to be what set facebook apart. People transacted online as themselves, and they incorporated real life experiences into their profiles. Reviews that were verified to be by a person, with a verifiable identity, track record, and reputation can raise the signal to noise. If you simply need a valid email address, anyone can make as many reviews as they want with no stakes, which in turn, devalues everyones ratings in general.

This could be adjusted for other reviews a person does... a lot of fake review accounts don't have many reviews, and tend to lean towards all 5 or 1 stars respectively. It there's a variety of 2-4 star reviews, and actually insightful responses it adds weight even without anonymity. I really wish Amazon would add such weighting to reviews in terms of computing the average stars for a given product since they have this feedback data.

There's very little reason others can't do the same... extending location reviews to more than a "like" would go a long way towards helping too.

> Sounds like real names have power, then, no?

It does prevent honest feedback. What's the value in using your real name? As a user I get zero benefit/upside from it, and huge potential downside.

That's pretty much the entire point - the upside is that there's a downside for writing bad review (and by 'bad review' I mean from an objective perspective - terribly written content, content doesn't match rating, etc. Not a negative review of the restaurant).

Fortunately the legal protections seems to be strong. Harassment is probably the worst thing you will have to deal with.

I had the opposite experience: when I left a bad review at a delivery service, I had a call from the manager apologizing profusely and explaining the reason for the bad service, and he sent me a free delivery to make up for their mistake.

Glassdoor reviews have a notice that is almost word-for-word from Yelp's. Should Google buy Glassdoor to fix their credibility problem?

I've seen HR departments that write at least 2 five star reviews a week on Glassdoor. Glassdoor still hasn't noticed.

Geez, people really have it in for Yelp on here. I trust Yelp reviews more than I trust some shitty diner's owner complaining about the bad reviews. Overall I've found the ratings to be spot on.

In terms of preserving maximum value for shareholders, Yelp has no choice but to sell itself, and the sooner the better.

They're currently able to generate $10-$12 million in net income on $377m in sales. Their growth rate has slowed down drastically. Take their 52 week high (much less their all-time high), which is a roughly $6.4 billion market cap. Their best case scenario, ten years from now, is that they're worth ~$6.4 billion.

$200m in net income on that $6.4 billion market cap pegs them at a 32 PE (plausible, if not a bit rich, ten years out). To get there, they probably need - even giving them the benefit of expanded margins with scale - $2 to $3 billion in sales.

The only way they're going to exceed those types of numbers, is through using their equity on acquisitions.

Here they're sitting on a very rich stock market valuation, in one of the greatest bull markets the US has ever seen, and it's unlikely they're ever going to top their 52 week high. Selling is the obvious move.

Yelp could easily roll out "AdWords" and absolutely kill it. It's insane they've dragged their feet so heavily on this.

Kill it with SMB money? Business like Yelp have always had a hard time monetizing mom and pop shops, and keep them repeat customers. The real ad money is not Uncle Joes' Falafal Shop down the road.

I think it is. I had a small retail store and would definitely have advertised against [my retail category] + zip code. A no-brainer from my perspective.

Sometime in the last year I started to find myself exclusively using the reviews and filtering within Google Maps to search for restaurants, bars and other businesses. I can't say I've really touched Yelp at all in months.

It definitely seems like Google has devoted a lot of effort to improving these features as I remember a time when their review sections were a veritable ghost town. I won't be surprised if Google ends up buying them.

Why do I have a feeling Google, Apple, or Microsoft are going to buy them and then proceed to remove Yelp integration from each other's ecosystems...

Gonna chime in with a positive vote for Yelp. I live and die by Yelp reviews - I basically won't patronize a new business unless it checks out on Yelp. If you know how to interpret the reviews, they are incredibly useful.

But I don't have time for that when I'm hungry and swimming in a see of bad 4s and great 3s because Yelp is too stupid to implement recommendations and taste profiles. I'm an elite Yelper with a shit ton of data in Yelp, they should've been able to figure out how to automate this by now.

I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9467649

Public social networks are really starting to feel the squeeze from wall street as people are getting tired of giving social companies large multiples on the promise of massive revenues that are only a few quarters away.

By the looks of the intra day chart, people are excited about this news. Not really sure who would make a good acquirere however....

I know Yelp gets a lot of criticism (and some of it deservedly), but I always respected how they did their best to provide an honest platform for reviews. Compared to other competitor sites (Ex: CitySearch, which basically allowed & many times encouraged businesses to post their own fake reviews on their own companies), I think Yelp is very ahead of the pack.

I hear the Mafia is struggling to improve their relevance in a progressively technological world.

They would be perfect for each other. The things Yelp could teach the Mob about extortion and protection rackets... Oh, and computers, too. I hear they're also good at that.

(can you tell I boycott Yelp? what was your first clue?

Honest (and possibly stupid) question: Where do you go for your reviews, and how do you know that they don't do the same thing?

Amazon reviews have their own vulnerabilities, but Amazon makes money from ecommerce rather than selling ads to the owners of the products being reviewed.

Any suggested reading on Yelp's Mafia-esque extortion? A quick Google turns up a bunch of innuendo and vague allegations but nothing concrete.

> By 2009, Yelp found itself in talks about a possible takeover by Google for at least $500 million, the Journal reported at the time.

An interesting bit of history is that the acquisition offer was scuttled when Yahoo put in a competing bid that Google could not match. Supposedly the management team did not want to work with Yahoo, but the board had a fiduciary duty not to accept an inferior deal, so both offers fell through.[0] In retrospect, it was a good outcome for Yelp; the market cap is now several times higher than either of the acquisition offers.

[0] http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/01/the-ugliest-girl-at-the-dan...

Any guesses who would be the most likely buyer? Google, Yahoo, Apple, or Microsoft would be obvious candidates, maybe Facebook. I'd be interested to see Facebook buy them and get all those reviews and reviewers integrated into the graph. It would be amazing to be able to target Facebook ads at people based on how they reviewed specific businesses or categories of businesses.

I don't know if "amazing" is the first word that comes to mind when I think about my reviews of businesses being made available to advertisers in this way.

It would be amazing for Facebook and people who buy Facebook ads

Would be interesting to see who's interested in buying them given most of the negative comments about them here. Perhaps Yahoo can scoop them up like it did with other startups in a similar situation.

The Google argument is bullshit because if your site is worth visiting, people will always append "yelp" to the query; just like I routinely append "wiki" and "YouTube".

I hope before the buyer closes the deal they go to the last page to see the bad reviews about the company.

who leaked this info?

AngiesList should buy them

AngiesList's market cap is 350m, don't think they are in a position of buying anyone.

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