DISQUS

Darryl · 1 month ago

Yeah, except that Yelp might get you attacked by an owner angry at your bad review:
http://valleywag.gawker.com/5396122/yelp-fights...

Yeah, except that Yelp's restaurant star ratings all tend to be 3-5 making them functionally useless to the consumer. (Sure the reviews are fun to read and of course let them sell more advertising, but when you're just *trying to find a restaurant in an unfamiliar neighborhood FAST with a hungry wife and two hungry kids*, better differentiated star ratings would be helpful.)
http://valleywag.gawker.com/5380645/on-yelp-eve...

Yeah, except it's apparently easy to buy yourself a good Yelp rating:
http://valleywag.gawker.com/5349846/the-new-res...

I actually like reading reviews on Yelp, but as I say, they're not always the most useful way to actually quickly find a place to eat. But maybe that's not the point of Yelp, or Zagat, for that matter.

Brad · 1 month ago

Zagat has the quality advantage of having a generally higher-quality group of reviewers in its core group that (I assume) it is paying to do the job - just like newspapers have the advantage over your average blog. Unfortunately that advantage costs money.

Yelp is community-sourced which is great for a lot of things, but you have to wade through the lower quality stuff and the inevitable spam coming from owners/affiliates of the reviewed establishments. $2/month is probably way too much to pay for something 99% of the real audience won't use more than once per month (if that much) so they need a better pricing model. They need to be part of some large subscription model so that they get paid for the audience they actually supply. Advertising is one way to do that, but in most of my experience it doesn't pay and in all of my experience it is annoying to the end user. Yelp could probably tap into this first if they have a way to pay their best reviewers - maybe they do already.

erlichson · 1 month ago

Zagat does not pay its reviewers. I think its just interested volunteers, most of whom traditionally purchased the book. I agree that professional reviews from people paid to be impartial have their place, but even there, advertising is probably the best way to pay for it provided the review is of broad enough interest. If not, then you have to go the subscription route. But, I would argue that if restaurant reviews are your thing and the audience for your reviews is so narrow that you think you need to charge, then the reviews are not that good or useful.

I believe most of the problems having to do with people trying to game the system, owners reviewing their own restaurants, etc, can be solve through reputation systems and identity. On social networks, for example, nearly everyone travels under their own name. Hence, reviews are not anonymous and if you are the shop owner and write one, people will realize this.

Zagats should have made the site free in 99 and and encouraged wider participation. If they had, yelp might not have gotten traction. They under invested and worked to protect a legacy business. Their short term thinking led to long term disaster.

At this point, they should sell themselves to opentable. Open table is getting into the review business and Zagats has a nice dataset that would help bootstrap their process. Of course, OpenTable is only white table cloth restaurants and Yelp is much broader than that.