Yelp facts for kids
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Screenshot
Yelp.com homepage
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| Type of business | Public |
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| Traded as |
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| Founded | October 2004 |
| Headquarters | 350 Mission Street,
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U.S.
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| Owner | Jeremy Stoppelman (6.3%) |
| Founder(s) |
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| Key people | |
| Industry | Local search, business ratings and reviews, online food delivery, local homeowner services |
| Products | Online advertising |
| Revenue |  US$1.34 billion (2023) |
| Operating income | US$79 million (2023) |
| Net income | US$99 million (2023) |
| Total assets |  US$1.01 billion (2023) |
| Total equity | US$750 million (2023) |
| Employees | 4,872 (2023) |
| Native client(s) on | iOS, Android, Windows |
| References: | |
Yelp Inc. is an American company that created the Yelp.com website and the Yelp mobile app. These platforms let people share reviews about businesses. Yelp also runs Yelp Guest Manager, a service for booking tables at restaurants. The company's main office is in San Francisco, California.
Yelp was started in 2004 by Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman, who used to work at PayPal. Since then, it has become a top place for users to share their opinions and ratings about businesses.
Yelp grew a lot and received money from investors in the years that followed. By 2010, it made $30 million and had about 4.5 million reviews. From 2009 to 2012, Yelp expanded into Europe and Asia. In 2012, Yelp became a public company, meaning its shares could be bought and sold by anyone. Two years later, it made a profit for the first time.
As of December 31, 2021, Yelp had around 244.4 million reviews on its business pages. In 2021, 46 million people visited its desktop website, and 56.7 million visited its mobile sites.
Some people have raised concerns about Yelp's practices. For example, some businesses claim Yelp might show more negative reviews if they don't pay for advertising. There have also been reports of fake reviews, where businesses try to make themselves look better or their competitors look worse. Yelp has worked to stop these fake reviews.
Contents
How Yelp Started and Grew (2004–Present)
The Beginning of Yelp (2004–2009)
Yelp was founded in 2004 by Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons, who both used to work at PayPal. They started Yelp at a business support center called MRL Ventures. The idea for Yelp came when Stoppelman was sick and couldn't easily find a doctor's recommendation online.
Max Levchin, a former colleague and founder of MRL Ventures, gave them $1 million to start. David Galbraith, another co-founder, suggested the name "Yelp." Stoppelman said they chose "Yelp" because it was "short, easy to remember, simple to spell, and sounded like 'the help' and 'yellow pages'."
At first, Yelp was an email-based system, which was a bit confusing. Investors weren't interested, and only friends and family used it. But then, they noticed users liked the "Real Reviews" feature, where they could write reviews without being asked. After Yelp was redesigned in late 2005 with its unique Burst logo, its popularity quickly increased.
Yelp received $5 million in funding in 2005 and another $10 million in 2006. The number of reviewers grew from 12,000 in 2005 to 100,000 in 2006. By mid-2006, one million people visited the site each month. In 2008, Yelp got another $15 million. By 2009, the site had 4.5 million reviews. By 2010, Yelp's income was about $30 million, and it had 300 employees.
Yelp as a Private Company (2009–2012)
Yelp launched its website in the United Kingdom in January 2009 and in Canada in August of the same year. The first Yelp site in a language other than English was launched in France in 2010. From 2010 to 2011, Yelp expanded to Austria, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands. By the end of 2012, Yelp was available in 20 countries, including Turkey and Denmark. Yelp's first site in Asia opened in Singapore in September 2012, followed by Japan in 2014.
In December 2009, Google tried to buy Yelp, but they couldn't agree on a price. Reports said Google offered about $500 million, but the deal fell apart.
Yelp started a service called Yelp Deals in April 2011, but they reduced it later due to strong competition. In September, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) looked into Yelp's claims that Google was using Yelp's content without permission. To avoid a lawsuit, Google agreed in 2014 to let services like Yelp choose if their data could be used on Google's websites.
Yelp as a Public Company (2012–Present)
Yelp's shares started trading publicly on the New York Stock Exchange on March 2, 2012. In 2012, Yelp bought its biggest European competitor, Qype, for $50 million. The next year, CEO Jeremy Stoppelman lowered his salary to $1. Yelp also bought SeatMe, an online reservation company, for $12.7 million in 2013.
In 2012 and 2013, Yelp moved into its new main office in San Francisco. The company became profitable for the first time in mid-2014. This was partly because more businesses bought ads and because of changes in Google's search rules. In 2014, Yelp launched websites in Mexico, Japan, and Argentina. It also expanded in Europe by buying German and French review sites.
In early 2015, Yelp announced it bought Eat24, an online food-ordering service, for $134 million. Then, in August 2017, Yelp sold Eat24 to Grubhub for $287.5 million. This deal also created a partnership to add Grubhub food delivery to restaurant profiles on Yelp.
In late 2015, Yelp added a "Public Services & Government" section. Government agencies, like the Transportation Security Administration, started creating official Yelp pages. Later that year, Yelp began showing alerts on restaurant pages in San Francisco if they had poor hygiene scores from government checks. Studies have shown that Yelp reviews mentioning food poisoning often match restaurants with poor hygiene.
In November 2016, Yelp announced it would greatly reduce its operations outside North America. This meant letting go of many international employees in sales, marketing, and other departments. Overseas staff now mainly work in engineering and product management.
In March 2017, Yelp bought the restaurant reservation app Nowait for $40 million. In April 2017, Yelp also acquired Turnstyle Analytics, a Wi-Fi marketing company, for $20 million.
In early 2020, Yelp had to reduce its office space. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, searches on Yelp dropped a lot, and company income fell. On April 9, Yelp announced it would lay off 1,000 employees and reduce pay for others.
In September 2021, Yelp moved its main office to a smaller space in San Francisco. On June 1, 2023, Yelp closed its offices in Phoenix, Arizona and Hamburg, Germany, because very few employees were using them. Yelp had already closed its New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. offices.
As of mid-2023, Yelp has only one office left in the United States, which is in San Francisco. It also keeps offices in Toronto, Canada, and London, United Kingdom. These office closures are expected to save Yelp about $27 million each year. As of February 2024, Yelp's website listed reviews for businesses in 32 countries.
What Yelp Offers
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The homepage of Yelp's iPhone app.
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Type of site
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Local online reviews |
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| Available in | 15 languages |
| Owner | Yelp, Inc. |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Optional |
| Users | 142 million unique visitors per month |
| Launched | 2004 |
| Current status | Online |
| Written in | Python, Java, and a custom framework |
Yelp.com is a website where people can find and review local businesses. It's also a social networking site. Each business has its own page, like for restaurants or schools. Yelp users can write reviews and give a star rating from one to five stars. Businesses can update their contact information, hours, and add special deals. Besides writing reviews, users can react to other reviews, plan events, or chat about their lives.
About 78% of businesses on Yelp have a rating of three stars or higher. Some negative reviews can be very personal. Some reviews are written in a funny or creative way. Users can give a "thumbs-up" to reviews they like, which makes those reviews appear more prominently.
About 72% of Yelp searches are done from a mobile device. The Yelp iPhone mobile app was launched in December 2008. In August 2009, Yelp updated its iPhone app with a hidden feature called Monocle. This allowed users to see Yelp information about businesses through their iPhone camera. "Check-in" features were added in 2010.
Yelp users can book restaurant reservations through Yelp Reservations, a feature added in June 2010. This service was later combined with others into "Yelp Guest Manager." Yelp's reservation features use SeatMe, which Yelp bought in 2013. In 2013, Yelp also added features to order and deliver food. Users could also see hygiene inspection scores and book appointments at spas. Yelp's content was also added to Apple Inc.'s Siri "virtual assistant" and Apple's map app in 2012.
In March 2014, Yelp added features for booking things like manicures, flower deliveries, golf games, and legal help. In October 2014, Yelp worked with Hipmunk, a hotel search site, to add features for booking hotels through Yelp.
Yelp started a cash-back program at some U.S. restaurants in 2016. This program gives users 7–10% cash back on their purchases.
On February 14, 2017, Yelp launched Yelp Questions and Answers. This feature lets users ask specific questions about businesses.
In June 2020, Yelp added a COVID-19 section. Businesses can use this to share their health and safety measures and changes to their services. Starting January 2021, users can give detailed feedback on the health and safety measures a business has put in place.
Tools for Businesses on Yelp
Yelp added a way for business owners to reply to reviews in 2008. Businesses can send a private message to the reviewer or reply publicly on their profile page. Sometimes, users who had a bad experience change their reviews to be more positive after the business tries to fix their problem.
A business owner can "claim" their profile on Yelp. This lets them reply to reviews and see reports about how many people view their page. Businesses can also offer discounts to Yelp users who visit often using a "check-in" feature. In 2014, Yelp released an app for business owners to manage their profiles and reply to reviews from their phones. Business owners can also report a review if it breaks Yelp's rules.
Yelp makes most of its money by selling ads and sponsored listings to small businesses. Advertisers can pay to have their business appear at the top of search results. They can also show ads on the pages of their competitors. In 2016, income from advertising grew by 30% compared to the year before. Yelp only allows businesses with at least a three-star rating to sign up for advertising.
On June 5, 2020, Yelp launched a tool for businesses to say if they are black-owned. This helps customers find and support black-owned companies. There were over 2.5 million searches for black-owned businesses on Yelp between May 25 and July 10, 2020. In August 2021, Yelp added a feature to let users filter businesses based on their COVID precautions.
How Yelp Affects Businesses
A study from Harvard Business School in 2011 found that each "star" a business gets on Yelp can change its sales by 5–9%. Another study in 2012 found that if a restaurant's rating went from 3.5 to 4 stars on Yelp, its chances of being fully booked during busy times increased by 19%. A 2014 survey of 300 small business owners found that 78% were worried about negative reviews. Also, 43% felt that online reviews were unfair because there's no way to check if the review is from a real customer.
The Yelp Community
Most people who write reviews on Yelp, sometimes called "Yelpers," have good intentions. They write reviews to express themselves, improve their writing, or be creative. Some also write reviews to complain about businesses they don't like. Reviewers might also be motivated by special badges or honors, like being the first to review a new place. They also like getting praise from other users. Many reviews are written in an entertaining or creative way. Users can give a review a "thumbs-up" rating, which makes it rank higher. Each day, a "Review of the Day" is chosen based on user votes.
Yelp encourages reviewers to use their real names and photos. Each year, members of the Yelp community can be invited or apply to join the "Yelp Elite Squad." They are chosen based on how good and how often they write reviews. Members can also suggest other reviewers for elite status. To be part of the Elite Squad, users must use their real name and photo on Yelp. They also cannot own a business. The Yelp Elite Squad has thousands of members. Yelp doesn't share exactly how Elite members are chosen. Elite Squad members get different colored badges based on how long they've been elite.
The Yelp Elite Squad started with parties Yelp threw for members in 2005. In 2006, it became an official program. The name came from a joke about active reviewers being the "Yelp Elite Squad." Members are invited to special opening parties, get gifts, and receive other benefits. As of 2017, there are over 80 local Elite Squads in North America.
As of 2017, Yelp had over 80 community managers. These managers organize parties for active reviewers, send encouraging messages to reviewers, and host classes for small business owners. Yelp reviewers don't have to show their identity, but Yelp encourages them to do so.
Images for kids
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Yelp's company logo
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The Yelp.com homepage
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The homepage of Yelp's iPhone app
See also
- Crowdsourcing
- Reputation management
- You're Not Yelping
