Yesterday was a great day for Yelp, a San Francisco based user generated review company. Yelp acquired their rival Qype for a total of $50 million. This is Yelp’s first publicly announced acquisition. Both Yelp and Qype are into the same business areas – generating user reviews for restaurants, hotels, museum, mechanic shop, stores etc. Both the companies primary source of revenue are local advertisements on site. Yelp is the market leader in the US while Qype is a leading player in Europe.

Yelp was launched in Poland two weeks ago and in countries like Finland, Norway, and Denmark earlier this year. This acquisition of Qype will give Yelp the market share / entry into UK and German markets.

Qype, founded in Hamburg in 2006 and with operations in Germany and the U.K., has about 2 million user reviews of local businesses, 15 million unique visitors every month in 13 countries. While on the other hand, Yelp has 30 million user reviews and 78 million unique monthly visitors. This joint power is definitely going to accelerate growth for Yelp.

Things are looking good and moving on the positive note for Yelp.

Earlier this year in June, Yelp and Bing agreed to display Yelp results in Bing searches. Yelp reviews used to appear in Google Places search results as well; however, Google acquired restaurant review leader Zagat and since then started displaying Zagat’s reviews to power its local search.  In the recently launched iOS 6, Yelp reviews are deeply integrated with the newly launched Apple Maps.

So, there are lot of action and traction happening in Yelp. However, this is not so good news for players in the similar segment of business – Google Places, Four Square (the ‘Tips’ section is nothing but user generated reviews), Mojo Street, Trusted Places, Touch Local, Tipped, Streetlife.

It is going to be interesting to see what the search giant Google is going to do to Google Places to gain traction. Will the most expected Google Glass give a huge facelift for Google Places? We have to wait and watch.

Image credit: bloomfieldmichael.wordpress.com

Author: Karthick Prabu