48 Facts About Yelp

Yelp Inc is an American company that develops the Yelp.

Yelp was founded in 2004 by former PayPal employees Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman.

Yelp grew in usage and raised several rounds of funding in the following years.

Yelp became a public company via an initial public offering in March 2012 and became profitable for the first time two years later.

Yelp raised $5 million in funding in 2005 from Bessemer Venture Partners and $10 million in November 2006 from Benchmark Capital.

Related searches

Yelp grew from 6 million monthly visitors in 2007 to 16.

Yelp introduced a site for the United Kingdom in January 2009 and one for Canada that August.

The first non-English Yelp site was introduced in France in 2010; users had the option to read and write content in French or English.

From 2010 to 2011, Yelp launched several more sites, in Austria, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands.

Yelp had a presence in 20 countries by the end of 2012, including Turkey and Denmark.

In December 2009, Google entered into negotiations with Yelp to acquire the company, but the two parties failed to reach an agreement.

In June 2015, Yelp published a study alleging Google was altering search results to benefit its own online services.

Yelp began a service called Yelp Deals in April 2011, but by August it cut back on Deals due to increased competition and market saturation.

In 2012, Yelp acquired its largest European rival, Qype, for $50 million.

Also in 2014, Yelp expanded in Europe through the acquisitions of German-based restaurant review site Restaurant-Kritik and French-based CityVox.

In early February 2015, Yelp announced it was buying Eat24, an online food-ordering service, for $134 million.

Later that year Yelp began experimenting in San Francisco with consumer alerts that were added to pages about restaurants with poor hygiene scores in government inspections.

Researchers at Columbia University used data from Yelp to identify three previously unreported restaurant-related food poisoning outbreaks.

On November 2, 2016, concurrent with its earnings report for Q3 2016, Yelp announced it would drastically scale back its operations outside North America and halt international expansion.

In early 2020, Yelp listed space at 55 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, for 235 employees as available for sublease.

In September 2021, Yelp announced that it was relocating its corporate headquarters to a smaller space at 350 Mission Street to be subleased from Salesforce.

In June 2022, Yelp announced that it would downsize its office in Phoenix and close three of its main offices in Chicago, New York, and Washington DC and switch to remote work models in these locations.

In March 2014, Yelp added features for ordering and scheduling manicures, flower deliveries, golf games, and legal consultations, among other things.

On February 14, 2017, Yelp launched Yelp Questions and Answers, a feature for users to ask venue-specific questions about businesses.

In June 2020, Yelp launched a COVID-19 section which enables businesses to update their health and safety measures as well as their service offering changes.

Related searches

Yelp added the ability for business owners to respond to reviews in 2008.

In 2014, Yelp released an app for business owners to respond to reviews and manage their profiles from a mobile device.

Originally a sponsored "favorite review" could place a positive review above negative ones, but Yelp stopped offering this option in 2010 in an effort to deter the valid criticism that advertisers were able to obtain a more positive review appearance in exchange for pay.

On June 5, 2020, Yelp launched a tool to allow businesses on the platform to identify themselves as black-owned, allowing customers to search for black-owned businesses they want to support.

Criticism of Yelp continues to focus on the legitimacy of reviews, public statements of Yelp manipulating and blocking reviews in order to increase ad spending, as well as concerns regarding the privacy of reviewers.

Yelp has a proprietary algorithm that attempts to evaluate whether a review is authentic and filters out reviews that it believes are not based on a patron's actual personal experiences, as required by the site's Terms of Use.

New York Attorney General Eric T Schneiderman said Yelp has "the most aggressive" astroturfing filter out of the crowd-sourced websites it looked into.

Yelp has been criticized for not disclosing how the filter works, which it says would reveal information on how to defeat it.

Yelp conducts "sting operations" to uncover businesses writing their own reviews.

In October 2012, Yelp placed a 90-day "consumer alert" on 150 business listings believed to have paid for reviews.

In 2013, Yelp sued a lawyer it alleged was part of a group of law firms that exchanged Yelp reviews, saying that many of the firm's reviews originated from their own office.

The lawyer said Yelp was trying to get revenge for his legal disputes and activism against Yelp.

In September 2013, Yelp cooperated with Operation Clean Turf, a sting operation by the New York Attorney General that uncovered 19 astroturfing operations.

In December 2019, Yelp won a court case that challenged the company's explanation of how its review recommendation software worked.

Many business owners have said that Yelp salespeople have offered to remove or suppress negative reviews if they purchase advertising.

Yelp staff acknowledged that they had allowed their advertising partners to move their favorite review to the top of the listings as a "featured review", but said the reviews were not otherwise manipulated to favor the partner businesses.

Several lawsuits have been filed against Yelp accusing it of extorting businesses into buying advertising products.

In February 2010, a class-action lawsuit was filed against Yelp alleging it asked a Long Beach veterinary hospital to pay $300 a month for advertising services that included the suppression or deletion of disparaging customer reviews.

In September 2014, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the dismissal, finding that even if Yelp did manipulate reviews to favor advertisers, this would not fall under the court's legal definition of extortion.

Many attendees expressed frustration with seeing Yelp remove positive reviews after they declined to advertise, receiving reviews from users that never entered the establishment, and other issues.

Related searches

Yelp has removed reviews of this nature and has tried to suppress their submission.

Each year members of the Yelp community are invited or self-nominated to the "Yelp Elite Squad" and some are accepted based on an evaluation of the quality and frequency of their reviews.

Yelp reviewers are not required to disclose their identity, but Yelp encourages them to do so.