A Quick Look at the Consumer Review Landscape

In light of the news that Yelp is closing in on an additional $50M in financing, presumably in an effort to get to IPO, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the consumer review landscape.

Here is a slide that I presented at a recent RateItAll Board meeting

RateItAll's traffic numbers are pulled from our own logs.

Here are my brief comments on each property:

Yelp: The monster of our space.  Brand recognition that goes beyond early adopters.  Massive amounts of quality content in a number of markets.  Awesome SEO, strong mobile presence.  With the rumored Elevation round, Yelp will have raised $81M in funding.  Now taking on Gowalla and Foursquare.

TripAdvisor: The top travel review site. Owned by Expedia.

Flixster: The top movie review site.  Flixster recently purchased Rotten Tomatoes, and is very strong on Facebook and MySpace.  $7M in funding.

Epinions: Acquired long ago by Shopping.com, which was then acquired by eBay.

InsiderPages: Owned by CitySearch (which also has user reviews, but is known more for their editorial reviews of local businesses).

ViewPoints: Privately held, out of Chicago.  $5M in funding.

UrbanSpoon: Acquired by IAC.

Buzzillions / Power Reviews: Privately held out of San Francisco.  $26M in funding.

RateItAll: Privately held out of San Francisco.  $1.4M in funding.

LivingSocial: Privately held out of DC.  Moving aggressively into collective buying, taking on Groupon, Townhog and others.  Strong on Facebook.  $10M in funding.

AngiesList: Privately held out of Indiana.  $66M in funding.  Traffic apparently in free fall.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Will Customer Opinion Overtake Search? (socialmediatoday.com)
• Google Looks Beyond Review Sites: Now Aggregates Posts from Local Blogs on Place Pages (readwriteweb.com)
• As Online Reviewers Grow, Businesses are Listening (online.wsj.com)

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