Comments on: Yelp Gets a Boost http://staging.blog.biakelsey.com/index.php/2008/02/27/yelp-gets-a-boost/ LOCAL MEDIA WATCH. The Nexus of All Things Local Mon, 01 Jun 2015 22:23:47 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.39 By: Joel Brazil http://staging.blog.biakelsey.com/index.php/2008/02/27/yelp-gets-a-boost/comment-page-1/#comment-168703 Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:50:15 +0000 http://blog.kelseygroup.com/index.php/2008/02/27/yelp-gets-a-boost/#comment-168703 I’m a little late to this, but regarding Jon’s comment, am curious why it matters where the traffic comes from as long as they find value in site/content, and consume ads?

]]> By: Jon Carder http://staging.blog.biakelsey.com/index.php/2008/02/27/yelp-gets-a-boost/comment-page-1/#comment-158264 Tue, 04 Mar 2008 19:33:39 +0000 http://blog.kelseygroup.com/index.php/2008/02/27/yelp-gets-a-boost/#comment-158264 A good question to ask Jeremy would be how many of their visitors come from the search engines versus how many come direct to the site. If you look at their “most prolific in the last month” report they only have 20 – 100 or so active members writing reviews in most major cities http://www.yelp.com/browse/people/reviews?term=monthly(except San Fran and a couple of the largest cities where they have over 500). So even though the traffic numbers seem large the actual members who contribute reviews on a regular basis is very small. My estimate (based on their report) is that they have around 2500 – 7500 active members writing reviews every month out of their 7 million uniques. Thats a very small percentage and leaves me to believe most of the traffic is coming from the search engines.

I run a similar local search company (albeit much smaller) and can attest to the difficulty of engaging traffic that comes from the search engines. There are many local search and IYP sites that get millions even 10’s of million of visitors from the search engines every month. The true tests of local search sites traffic is how many organic (or direct) visitors it has every month.

I think Yelp has done the best job to date on building a social local search. Yelp now has one serious problem, given they’ve raised $30 million in VC can they really attain the value needed to earn the Venture Capital investors a 10x return? That type of price tag eliminates a lot of potential suiters and narrows their exit options.

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