Yelp will focus on more on quality deals, with a new dedicated team

Aug 31, 2011 15:11 GMT  ·  By

Daily deals are one of the most recent popular trend on the web. But online trends only last for a few months these days and, already, some of the companies that flocked to the model are backing down, or getting out completely.

The latest to the list is Yelp, which, while not dropping daily deals completely, will be focusing on fewer, better quality ones. This comes after Facebook got out entirely, just four months after it launched its daily deals product.

The site has been running Yelp Deals, a fairly run-of-the-mill daily deals service, for about a year.

It came a little late to the party, Groupon was already raking in hundreds of millions by that point (while spending even more, it must be said).

But daily deals are a good fit for Yelp which is a local business directory of sorts at heart.

In fact, Yelp says it believes there is value in the product, it's just that the way it's been going about it, thought it's hardly the only one, has been wrong.

For one, 50 percent off deals are unsustainable for many businesses, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman believes.

"We've also heard consistently from certain categories of businesses (very popular ones I'm afraid) that daily deals are uneconomic for them," he said.

"The space faces some real challenges... while consumers love it when you can offer them a great deal nearby, they're not so stoked when you email them a restaurant deal for a place in Berkeley, CA when they live across the Bay in San Francisco," he added.

However, that doesn't mean there isn't value in the space, if handled correctly. Which is why Yelp is creating a smaller dedicated team for daily deals alone.

"We did take a 30 person team that was selling daily deals and local ads and made it a 15 person team focused solely on daily deals," he explained, combating rumors that Yelp was getting out of the daily deals space altogether.