A Yelp executive said that neither Google or Facebook pose any threat to the user-generated review site.
Instead, Yelp's rivals are traditional media, according to AppleInsider. "Today, we're really competing with print, radio, and television," Geoff Donaker, Yelp's chief operating officer, said Tuesday at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom conference.
However, Donaker said that Yelp will likely have to fight off the tech titans at some point for advertising dollars in the future, likely in the next 10 years, he said.
Right now, Yelp is taking aim at those businesses still using traditional media, such as the Yellow Pages. So far, the site has 1 million business accounts and 40,000 buy ads to appear at the top of Yelp results.
And none of that relies on Google or Facebook searches.
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It's an interesting point of view, especially since Yelp has a history with Google, including when it walked away from a $500 million offer in 2009. Since then, Yelp has been critical of the search engine, accusing it of stealing its reviews -- odd since Yelp relies on user-generated reviews which it receives gratis.
