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Facebook is testing a new rating and review service, and that has Yelp investors twitchy:
Facebook wants to tell you about local businesses, including ratings and reviews from your friends and others who have taken advantage of their offerings. If you're thinking, "That sounds a lot like Yelp," you're not alone.
Yelp Inc. shares dove as much as 9.2% Tuesday after Search Engine Land detailed Facebook Inc.'s new desktop Services offering, which appeared with no announcement or fanfare from the world's largest social network.
"We're in the early stages of testing a way for people to easily find more Pages for the services they're interested in," a Facebook spokesman said in an email.
The push to direct its more than 1 billion users toward local businesses is nothing new for Facebook, which launched a service called Places in 2010 with a similar aim. The difference now is the amount of data Facebook has after years of allowing users to check in and rate local businesses, a wealth of info that has been hard for other Yelp rivals to amass. "With 50M Facebook Business Pages, and a global monthly active mobile user base of $1.5B+, Facebook represents a formidable competitor for anyone in local, especially given the ~60%+ engagement of mobile daily active users," Yelp bull Darren Aftahl, of Roth Capital Partners, wrote in a note Tuesday, as reported by Barron's.
[More After the Break]
Facebook is far from the first to challenge Yelp. Alphabet Inc., then operating as Google, attempted to acquire the company years ago, then instead acquired Zagat and put now-Yahoo Inc. Chief Executive Marissa Mayer in charge of building a direct competitor, which now is part of Google's dominant search and map offerings. Angie's List Inc. has focused on local services and managed to go public, while startups like Foursquare have challenged Yelp in other areas.
Related: California Outlaws Contracts that Forbid Consumer Reviews
Yelp Will Provide Information in a Defamation Suit
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 16 2015, @02:33PM
Yelp killed itself for me.
I know a lady who owns a restaurant. Some guy decides he wants a free meal for him and his group at a decent high end restaurant. He takes his dog into the place, they obviously ask him to put the dog outside. Starts yelling that he is being treated badly. That he is a ex service man and needs the dog for seeing. Ended up in the paper. The yelp brigade got on there and started bashing the place (even though they had never stepped foot in the place). Turns out he is not an ex service man, does not need help seeing, and this was the 4th time he had pulled this stunt and was arrested several weeks later for playing the same stunt somewhere else. However, the reviews on yelp remain. The only saving grace is someone else put up a yelp review that contradicts guys whole story. It was someone else in the restaurant on the same night.
Yelp is a poor judge of if a place is good/bad. The reviews are either 5 star (ie paid for) or 1 star (my server didnt bring out my straw and my perfectly planed night was ruined and let me tell you every detail). You can get some good idea of what a place is like. But the reviews read like the most narcissistic of people. It is like the tumblr people do not have enough room on their site to bitch.
For example one restaurant that I went to and got pretty bad service. I went on yelp to see if it was just me. Not really. But the reviews were from 2-3 years ago. That is a lifetime in a restaurant (probably a whole changeout of management and servers). How is a review from 2-3 years ago helpful *at* *all*.
Then when I found they were blackmailing restaurants with good/bad reviews. The bad reviews stay up but the good ones come down unless you pay. Yelp killed itself for me.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday December 16 2015, @07:55PM
How is a review from 2-3 years ago helpful *at* *all*.
That depends a lot on the restaurant. One of the places that I go to regularly has been in the hands of the same family for decades. A few waiters change every few months, but the core of the staff (including the head chef) have been there since long before I moved to the area.
Yelp is a poor judge of if a place is good/bad
The core issue is that there's no real reputation system for reviewers. If I go and buy a book of restaurant reviews, then there's typically an established brand that's associated with the reviews and, if they're inaccurate, that brand is damaged and it's costly (i.e. they won't sell many of the next edition). If a reviewer on Yelp is bad, there's just a username associated with it and no easy way of checking whether that username is associated with bad reviews. Yelp, explicitly, doesn't take responsibility for the accuracy of the reviews on their site, but implicitly they're betting their reputation on that accuracy.
sudo mod me up