Around the Net
Yelp's Change of Heart
- Tech Crunch et al., Monday, December 21, 2009 1:15 PM
"Something happened that made Yelp reconsider the deal," writes an incredulous TechCrunch. "Over the weekend they notified Google that they were not going to sell, say multiple sources."
Quoting the great Yogi Berra, Marketing Pilgrim writes, "'It ain't over 'til it's over,' and the deal between Yelp and Google is the latest proof of that."
Search Engine Land, which applauded the would-be deal on Friday, seemed at a loss to make sense of the plot twist. "Something apparently happened ... There was a frenzy of speculative coverage (including by me) that followed this initial report ... The NY Times appeared to independently confirm that Yelp was going to sell."
What was the Times saying on Monday? "Perhaps another big company approached Yelp," writes the Times Media Decoder blog, adding, "But there is little doubt that the local ratings service, which has precious, hard-to-come-by local content, will continue to be a sought-after prize."
TechCrunch, which knows of no other suitor seriously eyeing Yelp, is betting that someone -- "Apple, Microsoft, etc. -- came to Yelp with an offer for a strategic deal [sic] gave Stoppleman the confidence to say no to Google."
Search Engine Land, for its part, doesn't believe that Stoppelman could have made such a major decision independently. "If so it was in consultation with others, including VCs/board members ... This is not a decision that Stoppelman would make -- or have the authority to make -- on his own."
Conspicuously absent from the conversation on Monday was Om Malik, who late last week argued that a Google acquisition was clearly in Yelp's best interest, because "they're about to be disrupted by a whole new class of more real-time and socially contextual services," with regard to Twitter, location-based social network FourSquare, and others.
