2. What do they do?
Publishes crowd sourced reviews about local
businesses
Restaurants
Coffee shops
Parks / Hiking trails
Dentists / mechanics / bicycle shops
5. What’s hot
Strengths
Yelp is the place to go for quality reviews
Revenue growth
Monocle feature
6. What’s hot (cont.)
Challenges
Competition with Google
Mobile app adoption and engagement
Accusations for unfair ratings
Competitors
Yelp’s ranking
7. Secret sauce
Dedicated community of reviewers
Pervasive in all major metropolitan areas in U.S.
Implementation of a social system
Goals
Roles
Rewards and incentives
Norm
8.
9. Tell a story
Marin Headlands, San Francisco Bay Area
11. Personal opinion
Yelp will continue to thrive
Offers underlying value to consumers
It can operate on it’s own, but it’s better off
being acquired.
Needs a new revenue stream like OpenTable,
delivery.
My name is Robert Wang. My unique ID is rswang.
I’ll be presenting on Yelp.
The name "Yelp" comes from a friend of the founders who simply liked the word. But it also serves as a contraction of "yellow pages”
Founded in 2004, 10 years ago
Headquartered in San Francisco, CA
Founded by former PayPal employees: the core of which Jeremy Stoppelman, Rusesel Simmon, and Max Levchin
Goal: Capture part of $100 billion that's spent every year on local advertising.
Yelp has an active community of reviewers called Yelpers*** who have completed 4.5 million crowd sourced reviews
Each month Yelp receives 132 million monthly visitors to it’s website
Business are rated on a scale of 1-5 and a has shown that each "star" in a Yelp rating affects the business owner's sales by 5–9 percent.
How Yelp’s done for it’s shareholders
IPO’s in 2012 at $15 per share; currently it’s at ~$57
In the past two years the stock price has appreciated 136.33%
Today Yelp is $4.33 billion according to it’s market cap
This chart is supposed give some idea of revenue vs. profit
2009: $30 million 2013: $232.98 million
Over the past five years, on average they had a 50% per year revenue growth
For the first time this year, Yelp became profitable
Yelp’s current customer base represents less than 0.3% of all U.S. local businesses, a figure that offers significant room for growth.
Analyst predict over the next three years, compound revenue growth rate of 48% and an earnings per share growth rate of 65% over the next five years.
Strengths
People go to find new places
Like I said before, 50% revenue growth is astonishing
Monocle: Augmented reality platform that works on your smartphone by visually superimposing data about business around using your GPS location.
Challenges
Google prioritizes Google reviews over Yelp’s
Google’s results gets shown first / users are more likely to click on them
This is problem for Yelp because 50% of traffic come by way of Google’s search engine suppress Yelp’s local content
Mobile app: weakening in both adoption and engagement of the Yelp mobile app. (1) Unique devices using Yelp, (2) deceleration of clicks to call businesses.
Challenge is accusations of unfair ratings
Business owners often feel their reviews are unfair, and accuse others of fraudulently writing negative reviews on their own business, or accuse Yelp of manipulating reviews.
This accusation is not without merit. A Harvard professor estimated that 20% of reviews are fake reviews.
Yelp own review filter identifies 25% of reviews as being suspicious.
Yelp uses proprietary a algorithm to evaluate which reviews are authentic and adjusts it’s ranking of search results accordingly
Personal feeling is that some of these problems comes with the territory, if people have an incentive to cheat they will. Best you can do is subordinate the likely cheats and elevate the performers
Community of reviews: Prestige / place to be cool
Implement of a social system. These are extremely hard to do right / Some notable exceptions: Amazon and Glassdoor.
How do you get people to contribute?
Why do they contribute?
What happens when a norm is broken?
How does one design an interface that supports various stakeholders goals?
I believe Yelp’s ability to create an dynamic community represents, in Warren Buffet’s words an economic moat. An economic moat is a business' ability to maintain competitive advantage over its competitors in order to protect its long-term profits and market share from competing firms.
I believe that Yelp holds a strategic position in online reviewing that will make it a valuable piece of property operating on it’s own or as a merger partner.
Juxtapose Yelp’s profile with Google’s profile. As you can see there’s not as much metadata on Google that gives you the boundedness that Yelp offers.
This is my evidence:
Even if Yelp isn’t performing it’s own algorithm, you can to evaluate if a Yelper is trustworthy.
As you can see, Yelp provides a variety of metadata that helps a fellow Yelper*** evaluate if a reviewer is trustworthy.
# friends
# of reviews
Are they a regular contributor? Do you they a history of writing helpful reviews Elite status
Rating distribution
What’s their location? Do they live in the same city as the review
How do they express their reasoning for their reviews
How long have they had an account open?
Marin Headlands
Lived in San Francisco Bay Area for 25 years, but Yelp showed me things I didn’t even know about.
I was curious and I wanted explore San Francisco a bit.
Went to the Yelp and searched San Francisco: applied filtered based on highest ratings of Active Life: Marin Headlands came up as #1,
Never heard of it, look at the photos, looked the reviews, I thought good enough
And when I went it was just magical. It had pristine views, rolling hills, it was an old fortification which includes artillery canons, bunkers, and a radar dome
If I had not used Yelp, I may never have would have had that experience, and be able to share it with my family.
People want interactive systems to give you an experience which is what Yelp does.
- Make reservations through its platform
- Online reservations platform
- Online delivery platform
Yelp will continue to thrive
Offers underlying value that people come back for
It think it will be fine by itself. They need to do something creative to find new revenues streams other than just advertising.
I think that someday will be attractive to a suitor who will pay a premium to acquire it. They are the park ave of the Monopoly board.
If Facebook or Microsoft bought Yelp, that would mean Google would have to go through a competitor. Defensive of offensive.