Yelp’s CEO Jeremy Stoppelman deserves credit for trying to play nice with Google, even appearing onstage at the Social Currency CrunchUp with John Hanke, a Google VP of Product Management. As expected the tension was palpable, as Hanke and Stoppelman discussed Google Places and the goliath’s heavy reliance on Yelp’s content.
As an increasingly robust aggregator of local reviews, Google Places is turning into a formidable opponent. Several years ago, Google paid Yelp for access to their huge database of reviews; however, eventually Yelp terminated the deal. All was well until Google started crawling Yelp’s pages for unlicensed content to populate Google Places. Adding insult to injury, Google often pushes Yelp’s data to the bottom of its review areas, favoring instead licensed partners like Zagat. Oh, what a tangled web of reviews we weave.
Beyond the professional veneer, there’s no question that Stoppelman feels burned.
The recent developments, he says, were unexpected:
“Well I think we were surprised because we hadn’t participated in Place Pages over the years. Like we were in sort of the precursor to Place Pages back in something like 2006 and then we left because we weren’t really happy in the direction it was going and we thought OK we’ll just show up in organic results and everybody is still happy. And then yeah, we found our content was showing up there and it is ranked dead last right now. I don’t think that’s sort of a permanent situation from what we gather from talking to Google, they are sort of headed in a new direction that which hopefully will be more positive.”
Yelp, of course, is not always the victim. The site has been criticized for ripping Foursquare’s techniques, with this year’s introduction of check-ins, leader boards, badges and the not-so-subtle “dukedom” honor. Now, Yelp is tiptoeing near Groupon’s turf, as it tests limited deals in cities like Sacramento. During our post-panel video interview, we got a chance to talk to Stoppelman about Google Places and Yelp’s budding rivalries with Foursquare and Groupon. See full video above— below are a couple key highlights:
On Check-Ins
-Android has been a particularly strong platform— the number of Yelp downloads grew 40% week over week for about a month. Now, its growing 15% week over week.
On Limited Sales
-Yelp will eventually roll out a product that will capitalize on its strength as a destination for time sensitive searches. “We have all this traffic, we have 35 million monthly visiting the site and so what could we do for people that are actually looking for a massage right now versus you know alerting them hey there’s this deal is available. So are there some interesting twists on just the Groupon model that we can apply because we’re Yelp.”
Yelp (NYSE: YELP) connects people with great local businesses. Yelp was founded in San Francisco in July 2004. Since then, Yelp communities have taken root in major metros across the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Singapore, Poland and Turkey. Yelp had a monthly average of 86 million unique visitors in Q4 2012*. By the end of Q4 2012, Yelpers had written more than 36 million rich,...
Jeremy co-founded Yelp Inc. in July 2004 with former colleague and friend Russel Simmons. Prior to Yelp, Jeremy was the VP of engineering at PayPal. He left PayPal in the summer of 2003 to attend the Harvard Business School. Upon completing his first year at HBS, Jeremy joined an incubator started by Max Levchin (co-founder of PayPal) for a summer internship. It was there that he was reunited with his old colleague Russel Simmons and the two teamed up to...
John leads product management for Google’s geo products, which include Maps, Earth, Local Search, Transit, Street View, SketchUp and special initiatives such as Google Ocean and Sky. He came to Google in 2004 through the acquisition by Google of his company, Keyhole, whose technology was the basis of Google Earth. Long committed to global access for geo information, since joining Google he has overseen the global roll-out of Maps, Earth and Local. Prior to joining Google, John was an entrepreneur...
Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company’s extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing...
Foursquare is a geographical location based social network that incorporates gaming elements. Users share their location with friends by “checking in” via a smartphone app or by text message. Points are awarded for checking in at various venues. Users can connect their Foursquare accounts to their Twitter and Facebook accounts, which can update when a check in is registered. By checking in a certain number of times, or in different locations, users can collect virtual badges. In addition, users...
Groupon features a daily deal on the best stuff to do, see, eat, and buy in more than 565 cities around the world. By promising businesses a minimum number of customers, Groupon can offer deals that aren’t available elsewhere. Groupon brings buyers and sellers together in a fun and collaborative way that offers the consumer an unbeatable deal, and businesses a large number of new customers. To date, it has saved consumers more than $300 million and claims it...
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Berlin, Germany
San Francisco
