Before this company came public, I plotted and schemed ways to get in on the IPO. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get access. I guess I wasn’t important enough. I bought the shares in the after-market in the low $20’s and rode it up into the high $20’s, only to see it crashing down into the low teens. At that low point in time, I lost a small fortune, but was still optimistic about the prospects for the company.
I loved the product and had faith in its CEO, Jeremy Stoppleman, but not anymore.
Over the past year, YELP has morphed from a cool upstart tech company into a high pressured boiler room, with goons assiged to extort restaurant owners. These monsters cold call until the midnight moon appears, threatening away, meanacing store owners with bad reivews and a little wink wink and an elbow to the ribs to let them know all could be well if they simply became a “preferred” member.
The Italian mafia would be very proud.
The result of this sales approach has led to continuous disaster and bad will amongst people who use the platform. The stock has gone straight down from highs in the $70’s to the low $20’s again, all the while insiders of the stock liquidate and jet set around the world like bank robbers.
About a year ago I sold the majority of my YELP shares (I kept a little for “just in case”), after listening to one of their conference calls thinking to myself “these people are retarded.”
Now I know those people are retarded, seeing its stock become a wasteland for naive shareholders who keep waiting for YELP to get their shit together.
If you like money, avoid shares of YELP as if it were a ski-masked goon running after you and your wallet.
If you enjoy the content at iBankCoin, please follow us on Twitter
This stock is TWTR’s ugly sister. Amazing how these stocks went from market darlings to pure surprise butsecks.
90% of shareholders underwater in these and not by a little.
You are exactly right. When obviously bullshit bad reviews appeared (from a competitor down the street) it was impossible to get it removed without becoming a paying Yelp member company. Great reviews seem to disappear for some reason and YELP would attribute it to some mysterious logarithm. Nobody takes them seriously anymore.
Sigh. Hate this piece of shit stock.
I made great money of out this stock after learning about it here, back in the day. I’m also a fairly intense user of the site and something has definitely gone wrong in the past year or so. It’s like the people running it have lost interest. They had managed to establish “Yelp” as an internet verb almost on the level of “Google” but that’s apparently been squandered now.