Help Yelp!

What do you think is the best way for Yelp to monetize the reviews and content they’ve generated, going forward? How scared should Yelp be of Google Hotpot and what should they do to maintain/grow their position?
 
Yelp! has a tough decision to make.  In order to monetize the options were to charge readers or hire a salesforce to enroll businesses to increase ad sales.  The former goes against the free "culture" of the service, the latter is expensive and increased revenue generation is highly uncertain.  I don't believe the case made a very compelling argument for either option.  In addition, the print business is supposedly still the dominant medium for "local" searches as of 2005 - with a 1300% ROI.  I have doubts about the size of the print market in 2010 and could not find any credible footnotes referencing research or surveys that point to it's demise by 2010 (notes 74 and 78)  The article for Business Week had no citations either - and 5 years is an eternity in the online world.  In that same time frame, physical CD sales lost over 50% of it's market value:

I assume the print business, even if still profitable, can be leap-frogged by a better subscription-based model.  Companies that can cite increased sales as a result of the online marketing channel would be excellent references.  These companies would tend to be small, the ones that don't have "$1Billion marketing budgets" A subscription model would not interfere with the Yelp! culture or brand, which seems to be it's most significant source of value.

I have not heard of Google Hotpot before, but absolutely Yelp! should be concerned.  Google's trove of data they can access about a customer (through other Google services) can provide extremely relevant, location-based, local searches.  It can proactively seek the best "reviewers" using analytics and intelligence.  As you can read here the few can have massive influence on the many (think PageRanking your Twitter "score").  Finding these people has gotten easier and can often be counter-intuitive. Recently Verizon used linear regression to discover that the 1% of their main "influencers" were people who received many short messages / calls around 5pm on Fridays and Saturdays - the idea being that people contacted them to see what was going on for weekend entertainment. They were part of the "in" crowd that had massive influence on purchases.


Yelp! Might offer a partnership with Google to combine their brand and Google data mining techniques to stave off what could be crushing competition from the search giant.