I mean this with no snark at all: Yelp has been screwing over not just restaurants, but small businesses in general, since the moment their first sales representative had a friend leave a negative review to someone who didn't pay up. Mafia tactics are core to their business.
Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
111–120 of 300 posts
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#112I think that this practice of Yelp is pretty malicious. I did have a shower thought the other day, though:
Individual restaurants often run their own websites. Plenty of those offer a phone number for you to call them through, and they frequently encourage you to do so because it saves them on order fees typically accrued by Yelp, GrubHub, Seamless, or any other order system.
In order for that site to show up first in a Google search, they need to be better at SEO than, say, Seamless. This might not be a super hard problem in general, but if you're running your own restaurant, the cost of building and maintaining a website with good SEO can be relatively high. Seamless, on the other hand, does nothing but focus on problem areas like building SEO-optimal landing pages for restaurants. Plus, they just have to figure out a good SEO strategy once in order to be able to apply it broadly (and they aren't themselves busy cooking food, prepping orders, and waiting tables).
In general, restaurant websites appear higher than their online ordered alternatives, but what's to stop Seamless (for example) from winning the SEO race against a non-trivial chunk of small restaurant websites? This would mean that there are plenty of cases in which you search for a restaurant and end up on Seamless, even though that's not the "right" search result.
I don't really have any answers here, but I'd love to know if there's anything in place to prevent situations like this, or if I'm ignorant about how SEO works.
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#113Apple's use of Yelp in Apple Maps is the one reason I can't uninstall Google Maps completely from my devices.
It's a pretty lousy partnership, and getting more details on a business from within Maps means installing (and using) the Yelp app.
Right, which I absolutely refuse to do. I'm actually pretty surprised that Apple enables this and depends on Yelp so heavily. Like the other commenter said, I look forward to Apple creating their own service for this.
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#114"The question is, is there a path to independence?” Stoppelman said. “Distribution is always the centerpiece. If you create a great product or service, how do you get it in the hands of the people? The problem with Big Tech is they control the distribution channels. Distribution is the key. If [company x] is the starting place for all of the people...to the extent they get in front of consumers and block them from fi…
I have personally never seen much value in Yelp. Most people use Google as a starting point when searching anything, and the Yelp page that is returned is not very helpful to me. At best, it contains menus, pictures, hours, phone number, and reviews. At worst, it has none of those and is effectively an ad for the Yelp app. Either way, Google shows me all of that before I click anything else. Google absolutely tries t…
Yelp as a social network is actually pretty cool, if you get their elite status for the year you get invited to some pretty fun free events, and I know they've done socially distanced ones since the pandemic, I heard about a murder mystery somewhere. Now that I don't participate in that I don't really use the platform often.
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#115I think that this practice of Yelp is pretty malicious. I did have a shower thought the other day, though: Individual restaurants often run their own websites. Plenty of those offer a phone number for you to call them through, and they frequently encourage you to do so because it saves them on order fees typically accrued by Yelp, GrubHub, Seamless, or any other order system. In order for that site to show up first i…
> Yelp, GrubHub, Seamless
Interesting choice of examples! Grubhub owns Seamless and bought Yelp's delivery service (formerly Eat24). Grubhub also owns AllMenus and MenuPages. So an individual restaurant has to compete with 5 different sophisticated offerings from one company for SEO position.
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#116I mean this with no snark at all: Yelp has been screwing over not just restaurants, but small businesses in general, since the moment their first sales representative had a friend leave a negative review to someone who didn't pay up. Mafia tactics are core to their business.
Yeah...I never use Yelp, because it's so obviously gamed and I know I'm getting bad info at every turn. And that's without talking to small businesses owners in my area, all of which have a tale of shady Yelp practices.
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Either way, Google shows me all of that before I click anything else. All seeded from Yelp. When Yelp complained google shrugged their shoulders and said they could remove them from their search index entirely if they liked. Being the world's no. 1 search destination gave them carte blanche to rip off IP all over. Google was a parasite on Yelp. It's not really surprising that Yelp is now like "fuck it, parasitic bus…
If users would hit yelp.com and searched for a restaurant and somehow google intercepted that then they'd be a parasite. The way I see it it is a symbiotic somewhat relationship, at least in theory. Yelp is a parasite on businesses though, they attempt to extort money and give no value in exchange, often times unsuccessfully. Here's an older anecdote I posted about yelp [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=247909…
While there are definitely anecdotes about this kind of behavior, I have yet to see evidence of systemic or corporate-sponsored effort to do this. I believe this is more a question of possibly poorly-incentivized sales people rather than an intentional strategy on behalf of Yelp. I think this is backed up by a number of lawsuits that haven't gone anywhere. I might be mistaken; if there is a source showing this is really systemic, I'd be very interested.
Either way, Google now does many of the same things that Yelp does (reviews, photos, metadata management) - but it doesn't really care about the space, apart from being good enough to beat its competition. While today maybe they're motivated to build better products to compete with Yelp for eyeballs, overtime I think this means the reviews space will stagnate. That's unfortunate.
I think this is the core Google problem: They have so much top-of-funnel traffic that they just have to do things "good enough" to crush entire industries of competition. The bar to be sufficiently better enough than "good enough" to build a meaningful competitor to G in any vertical is so high it stops many potential competitors from even trying. The only companies that manage it are ones that have entirely different & massive profitable business models like Apple.
Everywhere Google is, the sector stagnates: Search! RSS readers (with a bit of a renaissance since Google Reader died). Email. Calendars. News lists. Increasingly, reviews. Fortunately MSFT pushes them in docs and hopefully Apple continues to do so in Maps and browsers.
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have personally never seen much value in Yelp. Most people use Google as a starting point when searching anything, and the Yelp page that is returned is not very helpful to me. At best, it contains menus, pictures, hours, phone number, and reviews. At worst, it has none of those and is effectively an ad for the Yelp app. Either way, Google shows me all of that before I click anything else. Google absolutely tries t…
As far as I recall, Yelp predates Google having any of those features at all. So in one sense, the "value in Yelp" was in being successful enough to get Google to emulate their feature-set directly within the search results. Which doesn't really speak well to Yelp's continuing value, though.
ding ding ding
Value propositions without a moat (durable competitive advantage) will be swallowed by vertical integration of their feature set.
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#119I think that this practice of Yelp is pretty malicious. I did have a shower thought the other day, though: Individual restaurants often run their own websites. Plenty of those offer a phone number for you to call them through, and they frequently encourage you to do so because it saves them on order fees typically accrued by Yelp, GrubHub, Seamless, or any other order system. In order for that site to show up first i…
> In general, restaurant websites appear higher than their online ordered alternatives
They do, in the case where people are looking for a specific restaurant.
What about the now-increasingly-common case where people are looking to see what's open and doing delivery nearby? Looking through a dozen restaurant's websites to hunt down all that info (and hoping it's current) is a pretty miserable experience. Yelp makes it trivial to filter on a map.
Restaurants have two SEO problems: their particular restaurant and the generically hungry searcher. Yelp and co only have the latter. They are, as you say, outclassed.
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have personally never seen much value in Yelp. Most people use Google as a starting point when searching anything, and the Yelp page that is returned is not very helpful to me. At best, it contains menus, pictures, hours, phone number, and reviews. At worst, it has none of those and is effectively an ad for the Yelp app. Either way, Google shows me all of that before I click anything else. Google absolutely tries t…
> The Yelp page that is returned is not very helpful to me. At best, it contains menus, pictures, hours, phone number, and reviews. Menus, pictures of food, and honest reviews aren't helpful to you? I think most people get a lot of value out of Yelp. Yelp's review system is among the hardest to game, so it has the most trustworthy reviews for service-based businesses. That said, that's largely besides the point of th…
Completely disagree. Reviews generated by "give a good review and we'll give you a prize" and "I'd hate to see you hit with a bunch of bad reviews because you didn't pay us more money" are completely worthless and are the core of Yelps business model. It's the definition of easy-to-game and untrustworthy.