
Yelp Plans to Go Public, Despite Booming Private Market - ssclafani
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/04/26/yelp-plans-to-go-public-despite-booming-private-market/
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leot
Hopefully they are not IPO'ing because of a negative long-term outlook ...

... among those I know, trust in Yelp has fallen a fair bit. Writing fake
reviews seems to have become a standard business practice. And whereas in the
past Yelp seemed to do a great job of identifying the best spots, now it seems
to be happy if the top-ranked businesses are "good enough". I worry that the
need to meet quarterly targets will only make Yelp worse.

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donofrip
Interesting. Could it be that they are looking to raise equity to make it
easier to acquire competition?

Makes sense to me that they need to diversify their model to compete with some
of the new ventures in the market. It might make more sense of Yelp to acquire
the platform and the product knowledge than build it in-house. If they have
equity in the market, it might be easier to acquire these companies with stock
than through a private cash acquisition.

Not sure if that's true, but I'm throwing it out there for debate.

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rhizome
The smart money IPOs just before a market transition, and the retail-aid
market is s-t-a-l-e for change. We've got the various players all lined up,
but where it goes is anybody's guess. Yelp is preparing to do something,
whether it's Groupon or GoDaddy remains to be seen, and an IPO would fund it
much more easily than what they have now.

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martinshen
At the end the day, Yelp is a review site to vet places you plan to visit.
There's still room for city guides I think.. Maybe Yelp can acquire them. With
that said, with Groupon's purchase of Whrrl.. wouldn't a lot of companies be
interested in purchasing city guide websites like UrbanDaddy?

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kongqiu
Despite being the clear leader in location reviews, there's still a TON of
room to improve the location review and recommendations space.

