Traffic Up at Yelp and Insider Pages

Posted on March 2, 2007

Traffic to local social networking sites like Yelp and Insider Pages has climbed over the last six months. Traffic to Judy's Book, a local shopping site, has not jumped. These websites all combine local information with user reviews.

This week Insider Pages was acquired by the Citysearch division of IAC. Hitwise data shows that the market share of US visits to Insider Pages was up 34% in the past 6 months (August 2006 vs. February 2007). The market share of visits to Yelp, another user-generated local review site, was up by an impressive 91% in the same period. Judy's Book did not show an increase, although traffic jumped in September and October 2006 when it received a substantial increase in traffic from Local.com, suggesting a content deal that was turned off.

Hitwise also looks at traffic to Local.com, Yahoo! Local and Live Local Search in the post and finds that traffic for these sites has not been growing. So the growth in this categry has mostly been occuring at social local sites like Yelp and Insider Pages.