$300 IN YELP ADS FREE

Yelp is reportly seeking to raise $100 million at a valuation of $1 billion to $2 billion. Dex One is down 94 percent.Ĭombined, those companies have a valuation of $145 million. SuperMedia is down 92 percent since it debuted. While it may work in the short term, as the stocks of yellow pages companies show, it’s not a long term proposition. Such services typically charge restaurants 10-20 percent of the value of orders they send.ĭespite ostensibly being an Internet company, Yelp’s business model is closer to that of yellow pages companies: sell a questionable value proposition to many who don’t understand what they’re buying. You only pay if someone uses the service to order and there’s no commitment. For a restaurant, a service like GrubHub makes more sense. I cannot think of any scenarios where I would advise businesses to advertise on Yelp at these rates.įor online advertising, I strongly recommend against commitments and impression-based advertising. A business could try it for a week, see if it performs and then decide.Įven as Groupon’s toughest critic, I can list scenarios in which it makes sense to run a Groupon. Yelp also offers 3-month agreements.) Even if Yelp doesn’t deliver your business a single customer, you’re on the hook for $3,600.įor comparison, Facebook only requires that you set your budget to $1 a day and does not have a commitment. (The representative offered this business higher rates for a six-month commitment. To make matters worse, Yelp requires a 12-month commitment for these rates. At the low end, that’s a still eye-popping $367 CPM - more than 10-times the rate of a Super Bowl ad. (Yelp’s rates vary based on category and demand.)Īt the high end, it’s a $600 CPM. But triple-digit CPMs are extremely unusual. It’s common for more targeted inventory, such as the type that Yelp provides, to command higher CPMs. $1100/mo – includes 3000 targeted ads per month $825/mo – includes 2100 targeted ads per month $540/mo – includes 1200 targeted ads per month

$300/mo – includes 500 targeted ads per month Note that these are general rates for Yelp, not specific CPMs for the advertisers shown: Yelp is currently in its quiet period while it is preparing for its initial public offering and did not comment for this story.Īccording to a rate card forwarded by a business solicited by Yelp, this is what the company is charging.

$300 IN YELP ADS FREE

That’s a page where users are free to leave any kind of review for the business, including ones that trash it. In this scenario, the ad goes to the advertiser’s Yelp review page.

Now consider the types of local Yelp ads that small businesses buy: This ad unit works like most online ads: when someone clicks on it they are taken directly to the advertiser’s site or a specialized landing page. This is the type of ad a national advertiser would buy:Īccording to a source who has purchased this type of ad on Yelp, the rate is about $6 per CPM. Even when compared to its own ads for national advertisers, the company is charging a 100x premium. Yelp is charging small businesses 1,000-times the standard online CPM rates for local ads that appear on Yelp.

$300 in yelp ads