It’s not a perfect system, but without it, the site becomes useless. And so then they are convinced that if they had paid, those 13 reviews would have stayed up. And so what happens? Well, all those reviews get filtered. But that’s also extremely biased, and if every business could do that, the site wouldn’t be useful. What don’t they understand?Ī So, a typical case history might go like this, “OK, I got a call from Yelp advertising” - because we call pretty much all the local businesses, so everybody gets a call - and so that business owner declines advertising that time, looks at the site and then sends out lots of e-mails to their friends and family members and preferred customers, and they say, “Hey I found out about this Yelp thing it’s great review me.” And it’s a success, they get 15 reviews up on their page. Q In responding to the lawsuits against Yelp, you’ve said there is a misunderstanding about how the site works. I’ve talked to various public companies’ CEOs as we were thinking about what’s our process - Are we going to do a private equity deal, or are we going to think about trying to go public sooner rather than later? - talking to these folks you find 30-plus percent of their time is soaked up just talking to investors, whereas now I might spend a few hours a quarter preparing for our board meeting and having our board meeting. You’re on sort of a quarterly mantra, you lose your flexibility, so you have to make promises to Wall Street and if you’re off by a penny, your stock can get hammered. The conventional wisdom within the valley is that being public is not necessarily fun, and it’s a huge burden. Q What did you gain by keeping your independence and turning down the bid from Google?Ī I think what’s happened is there has been a change of perception, and there’s been real change, around what it takes to be a public company. we have a nice footprint in the UK, and Ireland and Canada, and we’d love to extend that first to Europe and then beyond. But at the same time, we have a huge footprint in the U.S. We’ll certainly do as many of these markets as we can. I don’t feel necessarily it’s winner-take-all across the globe, where there has to be one local guide for the entire world. It’s not like a viral video that can spread across the world in a matter of minutes, so as a result, each market is almost an island unto itself. If somebody writes a review of a dry cleaner, that piece of content is not wildly viral. Q With Yelp going into France and other European countries, can it become a global brand?Ī We’re going to keep expanding market by market, city by city, that’s always been our roll-out strategy, and I think local is inherently local. In a recent interview with the Mercury News in Yelp’s sunny offices near the Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco, Stoppelman talked about how Yelp plans to stay local as it spreads globally, why turning down a half-billion dollars from Google has him “fired up” about coming to work each day, and why those who charge that Yelp’s business model is based on “extortion” don’t understand how the site works. But recent months have also brought some harsh scrutiny in the form of several class-action lawsuits from small businesses who say the company’s sales representatives told them they’d get better reviews, or fewer bad ones, if they advertised with Yelp. Yelp turned it down, instead accepting a private equity investment from Elevation Partners. Yelp is a hive of social engagement that Google reportedly tried to acquire last year with a $500 million bid. Since he helped found Yelp in 2004 amid the wreckage of the dot-com bust, Jeremy Stoppelman has relentlessly expanded its footprint from San Francisco, building communities of writers who have penned more than 10 million reviews of restaurants and other businesses across North America, Britain, and now, France.
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