For those of you who did not catch the memo yesterday - Yelp have now made their way over to the UK. Unfortunately (depending on how you look at it) there are already many start-up review community sites in the UK and London.
From Brownbook.net, to TouchLocal.com, to Tipped and - the well-funded - Qype, the arrival of Yelp seems to have pushed the War of Local into BRING IT ON MOFO mode.
The CEOs of the companies above all gave Mike Butcher of TechCrunch their response to the launch of Yelp UK, and, for the most part, they all sounded pretty upbeat. Some starting listing features that they have that Yelp don't, some took a few jabs, and others like Mark Livingstone of TouchLocal declared that:
"It is becoming clearer by the day it’s the well backed, access to capital companies that will survive and win."
Really? I may not be a business know-it-all or know as much about start-ups and VC funding as Sarah Lacy - but from what I heard at Le Web and straight from the mouths of many an entrepreneur - a financial downturn like this is actually a good time to be a start-up.
Not ideal, not fantastic - but good.
I was under the impression that it wasn't a case of "the strongest will survive" or, as Mark is saying, "those with Capital will survive" - but that those who adapt the best will be the ones still standing when the economic dust settles.
Joel Brazil from Tipped explained that the well-funded sites like Qype, Yelp (and TouchLocal as they're also a funded company) are essentially "the Starbucks" of the local review sites in the UK - and it seems that Tipped is now positioning itself as your hip and independent coffee house next door.
While Livingstone may believe that it's the companies with funding that will "win", Brazil clearly disagrees, as in his response, he stated:
"We don’t think it takes a massive amount of capital to build a great product and a great community."
Booya!
Surely, there's a formula to success, and Yelp certainly seem to have figured a bit of that formula out. However, because Yelp have VC funding, they can afford to pay for reviewers - which apparently they're now calling "Scouts". Doesn't that make the reviews less authentic? Less real?
The Register brought up this issue today, saying that Yelp, “as usual" have "already paid an unspecified number of people to seed the new site with reviews.”
A spokeswoman for Yelp told The Register that the paid reviewers are - as a matter of fact - no longer actually writing reviews, and that they’re just “scouts” now:
"We're available across the UK, but our initial efforts are focused on London, and that's where we had a scouting program set up. There scouting badges are still on the site so users can see who's who."
What Ichinose would not say how many of their "temporary contract workers” there were or how much they were getting paid.
Last year there was a big stink about Yelp putting ads up for people to write “witty and insightful reviews” and then “getting your well-written friends (and their friends) to join Yelp” in cities like Atanta, Austin, Tex., San Diego and Washington. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman responded to The Register in 2007 by saying that,
“A negligible number of reviews have been written by consultants and we only use these people for new markets and for short periods of time (2 months) when little-to-no community exists. Within the next 48 hours all consultants will have identifying badges, I want to make sure everyone understands we're not trying to trick anyone.”
I wonder how long these "Scouts" or "Consultants" have done or will remain writing paid reviews for Yelp in London and the UK?
I understand Yelp needing content up on their site before launching in a new country and new cities. I can also understand hiring a certain number of people, who genuinely believe in upholding the standards and authenticity of the site to write reviews for them.
But when they boast to be about “Real People. Real Reviews” and then pay, what we’re assuming to be a large amount of people, to review a bunch of different establishments in a city – with a teeny tiny “Scout” badge to identify them as such – it all seems to be in the name of quantity of content rather than quality of content.
Sure, unfunded sites like Tipped may have less reviews up than Yelp – but I would feel better knowing that the reviews that are up on a smaller site were written with a different intent than the Scout posts on Yelp.
I want to read posts that were written by somebody who was so happy/unhappy with an establishment that they were compelled to go online and share with others what they experienced there. Not by someone who wrote up a review because they were motivated by eight dollars and a free set of Make Me Yelp knickers.
Figures and funding aside – you simply cannot buy an authentic, thriving online community. So, even if the folks like Qype and Yelp “win” because they have backing and can spring for Scouts and essentially hundreds of reviews, I’d much rather hang out in a real community, with reviews that were written out of genuine interest the site.
There is always a need for an alternative to big sites like Yelp, it’s just a matter of who can adapt quickly and position themselves as such.