

The company has been accused of using unfair practices to raise revenue from the businesses that are reviewed on its site – e.g., by presenting more negative review information for companies that do not purchase its advertising services or by prominently featuring advertisements of the competitors of such non-paying companies or conversely by excluding negative reviews from companies' overall rating on the basis that the reviews "are not currently recommended". Over 50% of the company's audience has an annual household income of more than $100,000. In 2021, the company had 46 million unique visitors to its desktop webpages and 56.7 million unique visitors to its mobile sites. Īs of December 31, 2021, approximately 244.4 million reviews were available on its business listing pages. Yelp became a public company via an initial public offering in March 2012 and became profitable for the first time two years later. In 2009, it entered unsuccessful negotiations to be acquired by Google. From 2009 to 2012, Yelp expanded throughout Europe and Asia. By 2010, it had $30 million in revenue, and the website had published about 4.5 million crowd-sourced reviews.

Yelp grew in usage and raised several rounds of funding in the following years. Yelp was founded in 2004 by former PayPal employees Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California. It also operates Yelp Guest Manager, a table reservation service. is an American company that develops the website and the Yelp mobile app, which publish crowd-sourced reviews about businesses. Local search, business ratings and reviews, online food delivery, local homeowner services
