Today at TechCrunch’s Cruchup in Palo Alto, CA, Jeremy Stoppelman
, Yelp’s CEO and John Hanke, VP of Product Management at Google talked about the strain that is building up between Yelp and Google Places.
According to Stoppleman, Yelp is doing very well, now with 12 million reviews, 35 million uniques per month and 2.5 million uniques between its Android and iPhone apps.
Asked if Yelp is like the yellow pages, Stoppleman said that, “Yellow pages are boring, so I don’t know if we want to be that.” Google’s Hanke said that, “The Web [as a whole] is the yellow pages.”
Henke believes that, “The areas that Google can help [in local search] are data and monetization. Over 4 million business are feeding the Places API. The other part of the strategy is monetization.” Henke said that there was a lot of local-focused startups that failed because there, “wasn’t an advertising platform for local-focused startups,” and Google aims to fix that.
“We sell ads, we have 100 sales people – on mobile we haven’t done any monetization there – but we could just add in our search ads,” said Stoppleman. “Our most valuable data is our reviews, which are longer than other sites’ reviews,” continued Stoppleman. He also noted that, “check-ins have been awesome” for Yelp.
Google Places vs Yelp
Talking about how Yelp’s content shows up on Google, “Our primary concern is what is best for the user. I think there is a real tension [between Google Places and Yelp]. I think Google has to be very careful that they don’t block the best content,” said Stoppleman. Later he said, “That can be difficult for a company like Google to swallow.”
“If the best content on the web is Yelp or the New York Times, we’re [Google] going to show it,” said Henke. Earlier he had said, “The competition isn’t between Google and Yelp or anyone else – the real competition is getting local businesses to advertise in the first place.”
I think it’s great to be able to be competitive against Google. Being an internet marketer for SMBs, it becomes very annoying of the changes in Google’s local search. I also find it rater odd that Google has been calling and asking about some of the SMBs I represent. They say they are just making sure the listings are correct. Sounds like they are up to something..
google are a dolphin in giving away free stuff and empowering open web, and a shark as they have shareholders who demand profit margins, so they are forced to cannibalize their openness, squeezing a lot of other companies at the same time….
Google seems to be acting pretty evil to me!
There is a difference between being an aggregating and stealing! Yelp created a valuable collection of millions of reviews by providing a good interface and promoting its use. Google should not be able to come along and steal value from Yelp by providing an a Google branded way to search the same data in essentially the same way.
THAT IS NOT FAIR USE. IT provides benefits only to GOOGLE and not to the public.