Almost everybody who thinks about local thinks about daily deals, but companies like OpenTable and Zillow and Yelp are all getting their money from the local market.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Yelp has been in this business since it really became something worth thinking about in 2004, when the transition started happening from the world of the Yellow Pages to the world of searching online for local information.
The market for local advertising is in the billions.
When you read reviews on Yelp, you get a good sense of what's going to happen when you walk in the door of that business. The challenge is that there are fifteen million businesses in the U.S., and its very hard to communicate with all of them about how Yelp works, and why it works the way it does.
I'm a normal consumer but try to do the best I can. I try to buy locally, and I mostly avoid supermarkets.
I think daily deals are a good idea. Any ad people view as content is a good ad, and that's true for daily-deal ads too.
Traditional local advertising is not what retailers want. They want not just for you to see an ad - they want you to come into the store, to be a repeat customer and to spread the word.
The market is good when the local people are in it and believe in it and support it. That's what I want.
That is - the reason for that is that home prices are only going to go up. Now, they've never gone down nationwide in our - since we've been keeping track of this.
I think that a lot of companies are still amazingly price sensitive.
There are so many businesses that are succeeding on Yelp that don't pay us a dollar, and we're really excited about that.