Yelp thought ‘no one’ would write reviews — now it has 100 million
By Hayley Tsukayama The Washington Post
Yelp has logged 100 million reviews on its site — something that
chief executive Jeremy Stoppelman said he couldn’t have dreamed of when
he started the company as a clunky email recommendation service.
The option to write your own review for a business was an
afterthought in the original version of Yelp, which had users seek
suggestions for the area’s best doctor or a reliable plumber from
friends over email.
“The first idea was a service asking friends for recommendations,
and buried in there was this option to write your own review,”
Stoppelman said.
After all, it was 2004 — there were no check-ins, no social media
updates and no smartphones — and there was certainly no assumption that
you could depend on the wisdom of the crowd to find a good lunch spot.
Besides, Stoppelman thought, why would anyone take the time to write up
a review for strangers?
“I really had this conviction that no one was going to write reviews
for the heck of it,” Stoppelman said.
Boy, was he wrong about that.
Eleven years and 100 million reviews later, Yelp has somehow managed
to take one of the most intimate interactions, the personal
recommendation, and make it the foundation of a global $1.6 billion
company. Along the way, Yelp has also benefited from some of the tech
industry’s most disruptive trends, such as the growing importance of
location data amid the shift to mobile devices. Perhaps most of all,
Yelp benefited from the realization that — for better or for worse —
people really, really love to share their opinions about everything online.
That includes, of course, Yelp itself. In its pursuit of growth, the
company has formed a complicated relationship with business owners. Some
love the visibility Yelp gives them. Others have gone so far as to
accuse the site of manipulating results for various reasons — though no
judge or regulator has ever found concrete evidence to back up those
accusations. The company also was recently and publicly criticized via a
scathing review from a now-former employee who lost her job after
criticizing Yelp for paying employees salaries that are too low for San
Francisco, and for not giving employees enough chances to move up the
ladder.
That uproar particularly took the company by surprise, given that it
has tried to maintain a workplace culture that reflects the democratic
nature of its site. Stoppelman, for example, famously doesn’t have an
office, just a desk among other Yelp employees.
“Our team thinks every day how to get people to where they want to
be. It’s top of mind for us all the time,” said Erica Galos Alioto,
senior vice president of sales at Yelp, who said the company works hard
at retention and often tries to shuffle employees around to find a good
job fit. “Given that, it never feels good to hear that somebody’s
experience or perspective is counter to that. That being said, it’s also
important to recognize that you can’t keep 100 percent of people happy
all the time — that’s something we tell business owners as well.”
Looking ahead, Stoppelman said, Yelp will evolve to focus more on
enabling transactions through the site itself rather than simply acting
as a guide. That way, if you want to book a handyman, you can search for
a good one on Yelp and then request a quote straight from the site.
“There will be more of that delivering the interaction with the
business owner,” he said. “Then it’s up to you to engage with that
business.”
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Duane Whittingham - N9SSN - Fort Mitchell, KY
(ARES/RACES, EmComm, Skywarn & Red Cross)
http://www.radiodude.info
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