Qype gets funding - How to generate revenues?
Qype today announced a financing round, led by Advent and Partech International. Established by Internet-Entrepreneur Stephan Uhrenbacher in 2005, qype is a user-generated recommendation platform for any locals needs, i.e. Restaurants, Hotel, services, etc.
Takeway: Without any question, there is an increasing trend away from standard old-fashioned yellow pages, towards UGC sites for local information and interest. The US-based companies such as Insiderpages, Yelp or Judy’s Book, have all been trying for quite some time now to establish UGC sites in these special interest topics. However, how to make money with this content still remains one of the big open questions. Some have been trying to tap into the local advertising market by literally calling up SMBs/SMEs directly. To date, apparently with limited success. Although US SMBs seem to be more open towards internet-based advertising compared to their European counterparts, the big internet related spending still goes directly into paid searches a la Google. It remains to be seen which money-making route Qype will go down in the near future. Paid Google advertising should clearly not be the only way to generate money.
October 5, 2006 at 2:21 pm
Just read at TechCrunch that Yelp the US Qype (or vice versa
) has taken $10 million in Series B funding.
>>Local review site Yelp.com announced tonight that it has taken $10 million in Series B funding from Benchmark Capital. The company received as much as $6 million in a previous round from Bessemer Venture Partners.