Yelp

Yelp Inc. is an American company that develops the Yelp.com website and the Yelp mobile app, which publishes crowd-sourced reviews about businesses. It also operates Yelp Guest Manager, a table reservation service. It is headquartered in San Francisco.

Yelp was founded in 2004 by former PayPal employees Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman. It has since become one of the leading sources of user-generated reviews and ratings for businesses. Yelp grew in usage and raised several rounds of funding in the following years. By 2010, it had $30 million in revenue, and the website had published about 4.5 million crowd-sourced reviews. From 2009 to 2012, Yelp expanded throughout Europe and Asia. In 2009, it entered unsuccessful negotiations to be acquired by Google. Yelp became a public company via an initial public offering in March 2012 and became profitable for the first time two years later.

As of December 31, 2024, approximately 308 million reviews had been contributed to Yelp. In 2024, the company had over 76 million desktop unique visitors on desktop and mobile. Yelp estimates that over 50% of its audience has an annual household income of more than $100,000.

The company has been accused of using unfair practices to raise revenue from the businesses that are reviewed on its site – e.g., by presenting more negative review information for companies that do not purchase its advertising services or by prominently featuring advertisements of the competitors of such non-paying companies or conversely by excluding negative reviews from companies' overall rating on the basis that the reviews "are not currently recommended". There have also been complaints of aggressive and misleading tactics by some of its advertising sales representatives. The company's review system's reliability has also been affected by the submission of fake reviews by external users, such as false positive reviews submitted by a company to promote its own business or false negative reviews submitted about competing businesses – a practice sometimes known as "astroturfing" – which the company has tried to combat in various ways.

Two former PayPal employees, Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons, founded Yelp at a business incubator, MRL Ventures, in 2004. Stoppelman and Simmons conceived the initial idea for Yelp as an email-based referral network, after Stoppelman caught the flu and had a difficult time finding an online recommendation for a local doctor. Max Levchin, the co-founders' former colleague as founding chief technology officer of PayPal and founder of MRL Ventures, provided $1 million in Angel financing. MRL co-founder David Galbraith, who instigated the local services project based on user reviews, came up with the name "Yelp". Stoppelman explained that they decided on "Yelp" for the company's name because "it was short, memorable, easy to spell, and was familiar with 'the help' and 'yellow pages'".

According to Fortune, Yelp's initial email-based system was "convoluted". The idea was rejected by investors and did not attract users beyond the cofounders' friends and family. Usage data showed that users were not answering requests for referrals, but were using the "Real Reviews" feature, which allowed them to write reviews unsolicited. According to The San Francisco Chronicle, "the site's popularity soared" after it was re-designed in late 2005 with the distinctive Burst logo. Yelp raised $5 million in funding in 2005 from Bessemer Venture Partners and $10 million in November 2006 from Benchmark Capital. The number of reviewers on the site grew from 12,000 in 2005, to 100,000 in 2006. By the summer of 2006, the site had one million monthly visitors. It raised $15 million in funding from DAG Ventures in February 2008. In 2010, Elevation Partners invested $100 million. $75 million was spent on purchasing equity from employees and investors, while $25 million was invested in sales staff and expansion. Yelp grew from 6 million monthly visitors in 2007 to 16.5 million in 2008 and from 12 to 24 cities during the same time period. By 2009, the site had 4.5 million reviews. By 2010, Yelp's revenues were estimated to be $30 million and it employed 300 people.

Yelp introduced a site for the United Kingdom in January 2009 and one for Canada that August. The first non-English Yelp site was introduced in France in 2010; users had the option to read and write content in French or English. From 2010 to 2011, Yelp launched several more sites, in Austria, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands. International website traffic doubled during the same time period. An Australian website went live in November 2011. It was supported through a partnership with Telstra, which provided one million initial business listings, and was initially glitchy. By the end of 2012, Yelp was publishing reviews for establishments in 20 countries, including Turkey and Denmark. Yelp's first site in Asia was introduced in September 2012 in Singapore, which was followed by Japan in 2014.

In December 2009, Google entered into negotiations with Yelp to acquire the company, but the two parties failed to reach an agreement. According to The New York Times, Google offered about $500 million, but the deal fell through after Yahoo offered $1 billion. TechCrunch reported that Google refused to match Yahoo's offer. Both offers were later abandoned following a disagreement between Yelp's management and board of directors about the offers. In June 2015, Yelp published a study alleging Google was altering search results to benefit its own online services.