Portal:San Francisco Bay Area/Selected article/103

Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founder and CEO of Yelp

Yelp is a multinational corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California. It develops, hosts and markets Yelp.com and the Yelp mobile app, which publish crowd-sourced reviews about local businesses. Yelp also trains small businesses to respond to reviews responsibly; hosts social events for reviewers; and provides basic data about businesses, such as hours of operation.

Yelp was founded in 2004 by former Paypal employees at startup incubator MRL Ventures. It was initially an unsuccessful email-based referral service, but was re-launched on the basis of unsolicited online reviews. It grew quickly and raised several rounds of funding. It had $30 million in revenues by 2010 and had collected more than 4.5 million crowd-sourced reviews. From 2009–2012, Yelp expanded throughout Europe and Asia. In 2009 it entered negotiations with Google for a potential acquisition, but a deal was never reached. Yelp became a public company in March 2012 and became profitable for the first time in 2014.

As of 2014, Yelp.com had 132 million monthly visitors and 57 million reviews. The company's revenues come from businesses being reviewed on the site choosing to advertise.

According to BusinessWeek, Yelp has "always had a complicated relationship with small businesses." Yelp has had conflicts with business owners reviewed on the site, who often feel their reviews are unfair, fraudulently write reviews on their own business, or accuse Yelp of manipulating reviews. (Full article...)