Primitive (and perhaps misleading) estimates on effective ROI have driven many local publishers up the wall. During Yelp’s IPO period, one analyst suggested that it cost pizza shops almost a hundred dollars in advertising on Yelp for every pizza sold.
To combat such mistakes and show how local ad dollars are really working, Yelp has come …

Yelp launched its local review site in Australia today and cofounder Jeremy Stoppelman traveled to the country for the occasion. Since 2004 the company has accumulated a database of more than 22 million reviews, none of which has included Australian businesses until now.
Yelp’s revenues have come from the sale of online ads on its review …

Google’s march into local reached another milestone today with the acquisition of Zagat, a major international provider of high-end restaurant and lifestyle reviews in 100-plus cities.
Zagat remains a major player in a reviews space it pioneered in 1979. In addition to hosting its patented “30 point” reviews from some 350,000 “surveyors,” Zagat has a print, …

Facebook and Yelp are downsizing their separate deals initiatives after launching them with some fanfare. Facebook is now limiting its deals to users who check in to businesses, and Yelp is sharply reducing the number of deals it features, while continuing to support self-serve efforts that are integrated with other Yelp ad products.
Are these …

As we keep saying, mobile will represent “Act II” of the exploding deal space. We even have an entire segment of our Deals 3D conference next month devoted to it. It kicks off with a session of heavy hitters including Foursquare, Loopt, Shopkick and Yelp.
We’ve been getting excited because over the past few weeks, three …

    
Just in time for holiday search, shop and feast, both restaurant recommendation site Urbanspoon and local reviews hub Yelp are ramping up their mobile efforts.
Urbanspoon’s updated iPhone application adds a new layer of recommendation capability by allowing users to not only rate and review restaurant locations, but also actual menu items. Reviewers can snap, upload …

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, in his opening keynote at ILM:10, noted a general frustration with Google’s apparent de-emphasis of Yelp’s content, but said he sees major opportunity in mobile app access as a workaround of Google.
Stoppelman showed an example of a 2007 search that showed the vast majority of results coming from Yelp. “We loved …

Angie’s List, the premium ratings and review service for home and medical services, has announced that it has raised $22.5 Million from institutional investors as it prepares for an IPO within 18 months. Investors in this round include some public funds managers, including Wasatch Funds.   The company previously raised $48 million, making for a grand …

Restaurants are among the top categories for group buying deals. Now OpenTable, the restaurant reservations service, is getting in on the game. On its blog today, OpenTable announced that it is launching a weekly “Spotlight” offer that provides diners with $50 of dining for $25 at a featured restaurant, which must be an OpenTable …

Yelp has added to its international portfolio, following up on its May launch in France with a launch in Germany. Berlin and Munich are Yelp’s first German markets. Fifteen additional German markets have been seeded with “scout” reviews, but won’t be fully turned on for a bit.
These markets include Bielefeld, Bonn, Bremen, Dortmund, Dresden, Duisburg, …

As my colleague Mike Boland has reported, OpenTable has opened its network a bit, allowing registered Yelp users to directly make reservations from Yelp — whether they have registered with OpenTable or not. Users who have registered with both services will automatically get the benefits that OpenTable provides (i.e., dining credits). But they don’t have …

Local/social leaders from Facebook, Yelp and Twitter took the stage at IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Carlsbad, California, this week to discuss what IAB President Randall Rothenberg called “the mobile/social local real-time medium that does not have a name.”
Facebook’s Tim Kendall, director of monetization, said Facebook has essentially introduced “marketing on the social graph” by …

Next month, BIA/Kelsey will hold its annual Marketplaces 2010 Conference in San Diego. As always, it will have a focus on evolving local online business models and vertical segmentation. Much of the attention throughout the conference will be on the related opportunities for mobile content distribution and advertising.
In addition, we’ll have a dedicated mobile focus …

Yelp has been on a roll, and is now reporting that it gets 29 million unique visitors a month. Given that, the company’s immediate challenge is to move beyond its core base of restaurant and shopping reviews and dive deep for Yellow Pages-arena services reviews, as well as reviews for classified categories, such as autos …

Bono and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman
As widely reported last week, Yelp has confirmed that it will receive a $25 million investment from Elevation Partners, which is widely known for the involvement of U2 frontman Bono among its seven partners.  Elevation, which manages $1.9 billion, will also seek to increase its total investment to $100 million …