Sexy Widget

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)

New Blog: LocationMeme.com

I'm authoring a new blog with my friend and location expert Chad Catacchio - the blog is called Location Meme, and it will be our best effort to track and analyze what happens as location is increasingly added to the social media mix.

With devices and browsers getting better at detecting and communicating location, and more people choosing to live in public, we are on the cusp of big some big changes in how web meets world.

Here is our first post:

Hello World! There’s a new data point emerging in social media that promises to change the way that web meets world. Location.

Services like Gowalla, Foursquare, Loopt, Google Latitude, Yelp, BrightKite, Flook, Stalqer, MyTown, Rummble, and many more are racing to integrate location to provide deeper, richer, and more social services than what were possible before.

“Simply put, location changes everything. This one input—our coordinates—has the potential to change all the outputs. Where we shop, who we talk to, what we read, what we search for, where we go—they all change once we merge location and the Web.”

- Mathew Honan, Wired Magazine

LocationMeme will be our best effort at tracking and analyzing the companies, trends, data, devices, and entrepreneurs that are shaping our location aware future.

Ready or not, the web is becoming location aware.  Thanks for joining us as we explore this emerging space.

If this sounds interesting to you, please come over and take a peek at LocationMeme.

I will still be posting here from time to time - Long Live Sexy Widget!