Yelp Is Growing 80 Percent A Year, While Citysearch Remains Flat

Say what you will about the quality of the reviews on Yelp or the lengths it will go to get verboten features into its iPhone app, it has made the jump from Web 2.0 darling to a mainstream service. by the past year, Yelp has nearly doubled its U.S. audience, while incumbent CitySearch has remained flat. In July, Yelp had 8.6 million strange U.S. visitors, up 80 percent from a year ago. Citysearch, on the other hand, literally had zero growth, staying at 15.4 million uniques, although it bottomed at 13 million in April and has come back up since next (comScore).

Yelp additionally has the No. 1 travel app on the iPhone (it is No. 26 overall). Whereas Citysearch’s similar iPhone app is not even in the top 20 travel apps.

Yelp’s pageviews and average moment spent per user on the site are plus up 150 percent and 22 percent, respectively. In fact, the 3.3 average minutes per visitor on Yelp is above Citysearch’s 2.3 minute average. But comScore shows a steep drop in both pageviews and average instance spent starting in May, with a leveling off in July. Citysearch experienced similar drops. (See charts below). It’s hard to say what is causing these drops. It could be that humans are not finding what they are looking for, or the opposite, that they are finding what they need faster due to better site design. I suspect it has something to do with the latter. For instance, a much-improved Citysearch redesign went site-wide in March and Yelp is constantly tweaking its site.

I asked Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman about the pageview situation,

and he sent me an internal Google Analytics chart pasted at bottom of that post). “As you can see we’ve continued to grow pageviews smoothly all through the summer,” he says, “so it looks like the effect Comscore is reporting is spurious.” There is definitely a discrepancy there. Stoppleman additionally says that worldwide Yelp did 157 million pageviews in August (although he thinks that is becoming a less a meaningful metric as Ajax redesigns reduce the need for page refreshes) and more than 25 million strange visitors. (The comScore numbers cited above are only for the U.S.)

Yelp came out with a major update for its iPhone app in April, right about the duration the pageviews started to allegedly decline. But Stoppelman doesn’t think that is it either. There might be some shift by to mobile, but he’s seeing the following trends:

Mobile usage for us is lowest early in the week and climbs all through, peaking on Saturday. Desktop web usage (especially contributions) tends to be highest on Monday or Tuesday (though Yelp.com reader traffic sometimes peaks on Fridays as society plan their weekend in the office ;).

No matter which way you cut the numbers, though, Yelp is gaining fast on Citysearch.

Average Minutes Per Visitor

Total Pageviews

Yelp’s Daily Pageviews (Google Analytics)

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