Google and Yelp are in advanced acquisition negotiations that is supposedly at least $500 million! Techcrunch has confirmed confirmed from multiple sources that, while the deal isn’t yet finalized, it isvery likely to close.
Yelp was founded in 2004 and allows users to leave reviews on local businesses. I can say that, personally, I use refer to Yelp almost exclusively when looking for new restaurants, moving services, etc.
Comscore estimates worldwide traffic to be approximately 9 million monthly unique visitors and Yelp has whispered that 2009 revenues will be around $30 million. Yelp is estimating 2010 revenues to be near $50 million.
This deal has many, many implications. Google has been heavily focused on their own network of localized business data via Place Pages. In terms of advertising, however, this would provide Google with a tremendous opportunity for contextual placements and correspondingly increased revenue.
Something else to consider – Bing is leveraging a lot of data from Yelp in their local own local listings. It will be interesting to see how this is affected should the Google deal go through!
What are you thoughts?
