The Yelp Phenomenon

Yelp.com is an online community dedicated to reviews of local business. The company was founded by two former PayPal employees. The site is popular among a young adult, more educated, more affluent, slightly more female than male audience. Yelp.com serves as a social platform for sharing our personal experiences in a way unrivaled by any other Service. With the internet, the world becomes even small and our local region smaller still. There are no shortages of websites that promote local businesses and services. The most prolific of which seem to be the likes of Yahoo, Google, and Craigslist. There’s a newcomer to the scene: Yelp.com, a review site for all things local (in major cities across the US).

With 4 million reviews written and 15 million visitors a month, Yelp is a growing force in the food-obsessed corners of the Web, where life is all profiteroles. According to Web traffic counters like Alexa, Nielsen Online and Google Analytics, Yelp is growing much faster than its closest rival, Citysearch, and has either surpassed it in page views or is on the verge of doing so.

Every day thousands of consumers discuss local businesses on Yelp.com, and until few months it has been difficult for business owners to constructively participate in the conversation and now Yelp.com, the leading local business review site has launched "Yelp for Business Owners" (http://biz.yelp.com), a suite of free features that allows business owners to be an integral part of Yelp's vibrant online community.

All of this user-generated content on local businesses, combined with the Yelp search engine, also provides great inventory for Yelp to sell local businesses contextual advertising. Searches bring up local businesses based on your zip code and include paid advertising above reviews. Yelp puts the power of real customer reviews back into the hands of users in an open environment featuring user moderation, voting, recommending, discussions, private messaging, and city focused forums where real locals mingle and organize social events. The simplicity of Craigslist mashed together with the Yahoo & Google API, photo sharing, and oftentimes brutally honest or witty reviews previously reserved for personal blogs.

Yelp also makes money from advertising. Advertisers can pay to have their businesses featured more prominently in Yelp search results, and the ad will link to that business’s page on Yelp, complete with reviews, maps and other information. Advertisers can also pay to move favorite reviews to the top of search results. And the site runs banner advertising.

With the widespread use of Yelp, chances are that users are already actively reviewing and mingling in your locality. At current, Yelp offers review directories for major cities including Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, and New York among others. Point your browser towards Yelp and register your free account or take the tour. I can almost guarantee that once a few reviews are read, your desire to voice your own opinion will undoubtedly present itself. How can you resist with checking out a service which offers “Make me Yelp” underwear?