The success of Yelp (which is very popular, if not profitable), has drawn attention to the local user-generated review site as a potentially viable business model. Indeed, with millions of small businesses looking for new customers (and presumably willing to advertise), accurate, comprehensive and trustworthy local directories are invaluable services for companies and customers alike.
So when Yelp introduced its London site in January, it signalled its intention to attract advertising from a chunk of the city’s 300,000 local businesses. Other similar sites were already active in London, and now one local competitor, TrustedPlaces, is trying to outflank Yelp before it gains traction.
With today’s redesign, TrustedPlaces, which has close to 1m unique visitors a month, is also announcing two new features.
The first is a bit of a marketing gimmick. Any user who refers a business to sign up for a premium account (which costs £199 a year), gets £50. While not terribly creative, this may be a way to boost TrustedPlaces’ badly-needed premium subscriptions, which now number just under 2,000.
The second change is more significant, and other local sites, including Yelp, are bound to take note. TrustedPlaces will join TouchLocal, another London local review site, in allowing users to post reviews from their mobile devices.
The new “Quick Reviews” service is an explicit nod to the success of micro-blogging site Twitter. In an email, TrustedPlaces cofounder Sokratis Papafloratos, said: “Twitter is changing the way we communicate and we want to make it as easy as possible for people to share their opinions on local business and their favourite hangouts with friends.”
Yet while on-the-go, off-the-cuff reviews may encourage more user interaction, they may not be the best thing for the quality of the site. Yelp chief executive Jeremy Stoppelman has told me that despite the popularity of his company’s iPhone application, which is among the most popular free downloads from Apple’s App Store, Yelp is for now not allowing users to post mobile reviews. He fears that the shorthand lingo and impulsive quality of mobile communications would dilute the quality of typical Yelp reviews, which tend to be more like blog posts than text messages – well thought out and generally well written.
Still, where one tech startup goes, competitors often follow. London sites such as TrustedPlaces and TouchLocal may have taken the lead with mobile reviews. It remains to be seen if Yelp, the leader of the pack right now, will follow its smaller London rivals in allowing mobile reviews.
