Yelp, one of the world’s pioneer restaurant reviews and recommendations site, has just announced that it has launched its service in Japan. It is now accessible at yelp.co.jp.
According to tech blog Tech in Asia, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman formally announced the launch of the website at the New Economy Summit 2014 in Tokyo yesterday.
“It has been many years in the making. So many people back at Yelp headquarters this morning were so excited to flip the switch and turn on the site and for the apps that we’ve been building for so long,” said Stoppelman.
For those unfamiliar with Yelp, it is a multinational corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California, that operates an “online urban guide” and business review site. Founded in 2004, Yelp has grown to one of the pioneers and leaders in the review space, and it entered the Asian market via Singapore in September 2012. Its Japan site is the second country in Asia for Yelp.
To give you an idea of the scale of Yelp, it had an average of approximately 120 million monthly unique visitors to the site in Q4 2013. Yelpers have also written over 53 million local reviews. This is a big contrast with japan local websites Tabelog, which only boasts of 5.2 million reviews, followed by Gurunavi with 4 million. The abundance of reviews on Yelp also showed that there is a strong community supporting the whole website.
Available on iOS and Android too, Yelp also features a Yelp Weekly, which brings locals updates on the latest restaurants in your country, including Singapore. With the launch of Yelp in Japan, locals can now search for the best restaurants and dining outlets, along with all the community reviews on it.
Also read: The Ultimate Guide to restaurant discovery sites in Singapore
