Valleywag
A recent piece on Yelp written for San Francisco magazine by one Karen Solomon roughs up the local-reviews website, but Solomon's critiques are mostly on target: The site's audience is insular and dominated by Bay Area residents; it has struggled to expand to other cities and define a business model. Just one small problem: San Francisco magazine reviews local businesses. In between throwing lavish parties, Yelp runs a website which lets its users do the same. So the two compete, at least in theory.
Solomon's claims would be more credible if they didn't appear in San Francisco, plainly a Yelp rival. Oh, and then there's Solomon herself: According to her resume, she makes a living writing reviews for other businesses that compete with the website — Zagat, CitySearch, AOL, SFStation, and so on. Neither conflict is disclosed anywhere in Solomon's piece. Not that a local city rag should be expected to uphold great standards of journalism. But such outlets are usually masters of stating the obvious.
Comments
This writer really knows her stuff! I love this comment. Does she know what bandwidth is you think?
"YouTube has revolutionized how people share digital media. And each of these sites costs so little to run that they all made serious money quickly. "
I think she knows what bandwidth is. Her site is totally web 2.0
ah, that's true. my mistake. I forgot they use virtual dollars in web 2.0.
I'm a recent Yelp convert, living in the Bay Area ...
Sure all of this stuff has problems, and until my browser gets anti-shilling extensions I'll have to read the reviews. I will say that if you read the reviews by the helpful scoring method it bears out better fruit, a la Slashdot.
she's right. selling ads is a totally iffy business model. particularly when slighted restaurants are dying to buy them and run them against more popular competitors. wtf? i agree yelp needs to break out in other cities the way it has in sf, but they have a pretty well defined a business model if they do. it's pretty much paid search as applied to the yellow pages. duh.
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