Yelp? Like the site, don’t really care about the IPO…
This WSJ article sums it up for me…. likely a short term pop, then a fizzle.
Furthermore, I feel the same way about this one as the Facebook IPO when it comes to how well those who purchase on the secondary market will do, compared to the underwriters and insiders.
Furthermore, with these smaller social network sites, I don’t see many of them being around 10 years from now; they’ll undergo the same M&A consolidations which took place with some of the larger dot-com properties during that bubble. Something like Yelp could survive (just like how Yahoo is surviving) because it has international brand recognition, but I’m having a difficult time seeing long term growth and profitability unless it enters into strategic partnerships with the top tier sites.
The thing is this, social networking today is just a continuing evolution of what first started as the online BBS (bulletin board systems) where online communication and interaction occurred albeit in a much more confined fashion; that evolution with what currently exists will continue so long as we humans, are social creatures. The point is that there used to be huge brand name players back in those days which are no longer around or are still around with brand name intact but far smaller than what they previously were; names like Exec-PC BBS, CompuServe, UUNET, AOL, and Prodigy just to name a few. A few of these morphed into ISP’s, a few went through mergers and acquisitions, a few just failed to adapt and went the way of the dodo bird.
Just a few years ago, MySpace was the big thing and leader until Facebook came around. That’s one of the biggest cons with sites like this; people’s whims can change on a dime especially when something disruptive comes into play. Thus todays big names in SNS may not be the same ones a decade from now as social networking continues to evolve.
One Comment