There is another German startup in the local review market gearing up for launch: Qype.com…you can find out more about it at their blog “Qype Vibes” (in German).
In essence, you can expect to see a site focused on reviewing local businesses with the help of its users, becoming what he calls a “bottom-up interactive city magazine”, local content for local users by local users. And yes, you can leave your email address to be notified of the launch.
There is a number of related players in the US trying to eat Citysearch’s lunch such as Yelp.com, Judysbook, Zipingo (Intuit) and InsiderPages. Also, there is another company that will probably launch soon here in Hamburg by the name of ICS who I wrote about previously.
BV Capital is not an investor in any of these companies, but I do think that it’s a very interesting market, especially given the emerging pay-per-call business model. And I personally did find Yelp to be a great resource when I lived in San Franciso. Can’t wait to see the German sites launch…and good luck to all of these guys!
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Hi Christian,
Qype and ICS will be faced with the cost of building a new brand or destination on the Web, at least if the experience of Germany’s Goyellow.de is anything to go by. It is different than Qype, in the sense that it is based on yellow pages phone listings (with visual search (maps) and pay per call), but it can also be called a local search site.
Any thoughts on it? It is owned by Varetis (publicly traded) so the information about how much it has invested is all online. Traffic exceeds that of its direct rival, Deutsche Telekom’s yellow pages, but sales are practically non-existent.
Do you think it will make any return on its relatively large investment, which is at least €24M and counting….
Greetings from Zurich
Valerie
Valerie: I do not really want to comment on Goyellow, but there are more efficient ways out there to gain traction online than nationwide tv advertising.
It is all a question of how fast you want to reach awareness (goyellow wanted to be very fast), how different the quality of your service and how viral your product is. (Yelp has been proven to be relatively viral, others in the US less so).
Greetings from Hamburg
Stephan
Hi Valerie, I am sorry to be late to reply but glad that Stephan beat me to it, and thanks for both your comments…for one, I agree that local search/directories are a very crowded market. Goyellow as well as many others, inculding the recent launch of local services by web.de, are competing in thie market. And finally, the “Gelbe Seiten” (Yellowpage) brand has been built over many decades and at least the brand aspect should carry over relatively nicely to the web.
Yet, I do believe that there is room for new entrants provided they position themselves in a sufficiently different manner. No one of the existing players (to my knowledge) really uses a strong community aspect and thus changes the site’s feeling from that of a impersonal directory lookup to that of a more personal experience, where you get a feeling for what other people like, maybe see what other things they recommend etc.
I know the comparison is far fetched, but before del.icio.us there were already tons of ways to keep and manage your bookmarks online - the single user problem had been solved. Yet, del.icio.us added community, the ability to see what others are doing and maybe benefit from their bookmarks if you realize you share their interests, as well as deriving value from the aggregate statistics (e.g. del.icio.us/popular)
While I am not sure whether it is possible to build such an intensive community here in Germany (Yelp is doing fine at it in the US), there definitely is value in community here even if it is a less social experience (see insiderpages.com). We’ll see how much space is left next to the big players…in short, I don’t think the existing services really add enough value beyond pure lookup, and while I just discussed the community aspect above I believe there is a variety of things to make the service more valuable, and through that increase customer retention/lifetime value (more repeat visits…) as well as reduce customer acquisition cost (virality…).
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