Why isn't Yelp really making an effort to capture the market in other countries? There are many [0] "Yelp for Country X" clones out there. Billions of people outside the USA want to find food, attractions, shopping, etc. All it takes is one clone to take off in a country, and the window of opportunity is gone.
A friend showed me how to use Dianping (the Yelp of China) which has no english UI or reviews, and very little use of iconography in the category selection. Once a friend showed me how to sort by avg review, price, distance, etc, just browsing pictures I was able to find somewhere I was interested in going in a few minutes.
Probably it's just to expensive to defend from litigation on the user generated content business when it's about reviews for other business... i'm taking that out of my butt as i have no idea. but i sure as hell was infuriated when i couldn't use yelp to check places not protected by the NSA.
now i use foursquare in the US, even though the reviews are less abundant, the paid reviews (just read _any_ mechanic review in yelp!) are almost nowhere to be found.
yelp is just blind trying to monetize US and digging it's grave.
To be fair to the China scenario, Yelp is barely used even in other English speaking countries. And my guess is that the most relevant reviews would be in the native language instead of English. Anyways, I was expecting more usage in Canada and London but reviews are sparse and anecdotally few people actively use it as much I do in the U.S. I suppose one barrier is the need to build a sales team to get businesses onboard to customize their data and promoting the use of Yelp for reviewing their business.
Comments
Why isn't Yelp really making an effort to capture the market in other countries? There are many [0] "Yelp for Country X" clones out there. Billions of people outside the USA want to find food, attractions, shopping, etc. All it takes is one clone to take off in a country, and the window of opportunity is gone.
A friend showed me how to use Dianping (the Yelp of China) which has no english UI or reviews, and very little use of iconography in the category selection. Once a friend showed me how to sort by avg review, price, distance, etc, just browsing pictures I was able to find somewhere I was interested in going in a few minutes.
[0] http://www.quora.com/Asia/Is-there-a-Yelp-for-Asia
Probably it's just to expensive to defend from litigation on the user generated content business when it's about reviews for other business... i'm taking that out of my butt as i have no idea. but i sure as hell was infuriated when i couldn't use yelp to check places not protected by the NSA.
now i use foursquare in the US, even though the reviews are less abundant, the paid reviews (just read _any_ mechanic review in yelp!) are almost nowhere to be found.
yelp is just blind trying to monetize US and digging it's grave.
To be fair to the China scenario, Yelp is barely used even in other English speaking countries. And my guess is that the most relevant reviews would be in the native language instead of English. Anyways, I was expecting more usage in Canada and London but reviews are sparse and anecdotally few people actively use it as much I do in the U.S. I suppose one barrier is the need to build a sales team to get businesses onboard to customize their data and promoting the use of Yelp for reviewing their business.