Thursday, January 3, 2008
Yet another entry into local search popped up last year (wow its 2008 now) without a lot of press coverage. Santa Monica Burbank based YellowBot bills itself as "yellow pages meets del.icio.us". And while the local search space is incredibly crowded (hence why we gave a relatively harsh review of mojopages), YellowBot has a fairly attractive implementation that makes me think they have a good chance.
One of the things I really like about YellowBot is that they are self funded. They've gone nearly a year building their product without taking on major investment capital and thats no easy task. Besides that their implementation is really attractive, as its simple, sleek, and clean. Also because their reviews are very 'tag centric' they are well positioned for good SEO. According to Compete Metrics, they are closing in on a half a million visitors a month (and according to their own numbers they are doing over a million users a month), which means they are definitely gaining traction. Of course, only a small portion seem to be contributing as they don't have many of their own reviews. Most are aggregated from citysearch and other sources. So, that begs the question, can Yellowbot get to the point where they can compete with Yelp and Citysearch/Insiderpages? I'm not sure, because as we've said before, getting critical mass with user generated content is hard, but from the growth trends YellowBot is showing so far, they seem well on their way.
2 Responses to YellowBot has good potential amongst the sea of local search
Thanks for the review; glad you liked the site! :-) You are right that one of the neat things about our business is that we're self-funded - mostly because it gives us much more flexibility with how we want to grow and what direction we're taking (no VC with a 3 year timeframe here!)
We're doing really well with traffic and we've added a Google ad on some of the pages which is covering our expenses and then some.
We hit a million visitors a month some time ago.
http://blog.kelseygroup.com/index.php/2007/07/26/you-have-how-much-traffic-bs/
:-)
Btw, our office is in Burbank, not Santa Monica.
- Ask (YellowBot CTO)
Thanks for the input Ask. The article, has been updated appropriately. Look forward to seeing how you guys continue to progress.
Something to say?