Department of GCIS Yelp

Department of GCIS Yelp

Yelp is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California. It develops, hosts and markets Yelp.com and the Yelp mobile app, which publish crowd-sourced reviews about local businesses, as well as the online reservation service Yelp Reservations.

The company also trains small businesses in how to respond to reviews, hosts social events for reviewers, and provides data about businesses, including health inspection scores.

Yelp was founded in 2004 by former PayPal employees Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman. Yelp grew quickly and raised several rounds of funding. By 2010 it had $30 million in revenues and the website had published more than 4.5 million crowd-sourced reviews.

From 2009 to 2012, Yelp expanded throughout Europe and Asia. In 2009 it entered several negotiations with Google for a potential acquisition. Yelp became a public company in March 2012 and became profitable for the first time two years later. As of 2016, Yelp.com has 135 million monthly visitors and 95 million reviews. The company’s revenues come from businesses advertising.

According to BusinessWeek, Yelp has a complicated relationship with small businesses. Criticism of Yelp focuses on the legitimacy of reviews, public statements of Yelp manipulating and blocking reviews in order to increase ad spending, as well as concerns regarding the privacy of reviewers.