HN Explorer

Ask HN: Why Did Yelp Fail?

5 points by michaelteter ↗ HN
Yelp was once _the_ source for reviews and sometimes photos (for restaurants).

Then something happened, and then it seemed to just fall away.

? Was it Google Maps (with reviews)?

? Was it disputes about reviews, or questions of financial influences or censorship of reviews?

It's been long enought that perhaps some insiders can share details without risk...

10 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 87.2 ms ] thread
mikequinlan
There were multiple issues, One of them was that they hired aggressive ad sales people who would blackmail businesses into paying for ads in return for removing bad reviews. Yelp claims to have fixed this but the stench lingers.
jollyllama
> One of them was that they hired aggressive ad sales people who would blackmail businesses into paying for ads in return for removing bad reviews.

Indeed. Once people catch on that you're doing this, your credibility tanks. They thought they could get away with it, but it caught up to them.

andrei_says_
I love Corey Doctorow’s term “enshittification” because it perfectly captures the process of a service corrupting their own offering.

Yelp started by offering (somewhat) trustworthy crowdsourced reviews for local businesses - free to the businesses.

Then their purpose changed to extracting as much profit as possible from small business owners - at the expense of everything else.

throw9away6
Essentially this, their brand was built on trust and they lost it. The same thing I think is going to happen to Air B&B unless they change course. eBay surprisingly cleaned up quite a bit so it is possible to do
codegeek
Pretty much. As a consumer, I never trust Yelp reviews and stopped clicking on their links.
hifromLA
Can anyone comment on how this quid pro quo worked? Were sales people making database updates? Was there an internal tool? Or just an internal escalation process to expedite review removal?
billconan
I used to use it often before the covid. Then after the covid, the restaurants hiked the price by a lot. I went out to eat a few times, and each time, the bill made me want to cook for myself.
rabidonrails
I agree with your sentiment that Yelp seems to have fallen out of favor with many, myself included but, I'm not sure I'd define the company as having failed.

YELP currently has a market cap >3B and trades at a p/e of 74.54 which is a definitely a "growth level" multiple.

leet_thow
It's valued at 3bn in the public markets. You make it sound like they just announced bankruptcy.
altdataseller
If having 3b market cap is considered failing, I sure would love to fail as many times as possible