Qype

» see qype.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

A local review site is only worth opening in a city where enough people already wrote in it. That single fact is the entire business, and it is the reason Qype got to exist as a separate company at all. Yelp had San Francisco covered and Qype had Hamburg covered, and neither one could be typed into the other's search box and produce a restaurant.

The company was registered in Hamburg at the end of 2005 and the site went live in the spring of 2006, built by Stephan Uhrenbacher with money from Partech Ventures in Paris and Advent Ventures in London. Germany and the UK came first and the rest of western Europe followed, along with an outlying Brazilian operation that never made much sense to anyone. Every one of those markets had to be filled by hand, one review at a time, because there was nothing to import.

By August 2012 it was working. Around twenty million people a month were coming through, generating twenty five million visits with four million of those from the mobile app, and users had written 2.8 million contributions covering more than 860,000 places across Europe. In Germany it was not a challenger to Yelp. It was the incumbent, and Yelp was the American company trying to get in.

Turkey was never a Qype country and there is no version of this story where it becomes one. The site's map had a hard western edge and every address I might want to look up sat outside it. Whatever reviews got written in Turkish in those years went into places with Turkish names, run by people who understood that a review site is a local newspaper with a different revenue model. The distance here is not that Qype was hard to reach from Ankara. It is that reaching it returned an empty page.

~ the record ~

~ the density problem ~

Nothing about a review site translates. You can localize the interface in an afternoon and it buys you nothing, because the value is entirely in whether somebody who ate at the place down the street bothered to write two paragraphs about it last month. A city with forty reviews is not a smaller version of a city with forty thousand. It is a different product, and mostly a useless one.

This is why the mid-2000s produced a separate local-review company in every major market instead of one global winner, and why the consolidation when it came was so brutal. Whoever got to critical mass in a city owned that city outright, and the only way for an outsider to take it was to buy the company holding it. Yelp did not buy Qype for its code or its team. It bought a decade of German and British people typing.

~ fifty million dollars ~

The deal closed in October 2012 for fifty million dollars in cash and stock, and Yelp ran the site for another year under the name Qype, a Yelp Company. Reviewers were told their work would carry over. That part was honored: when the merge happened, users could attach the reviews and photos they had written on Qype to a Yelp account, and a large share of the content survived into Yelp's own database.

The end came on 30 October 2013 at one in the afternoon, which is an unusually precise time for a shutdown and suggests somebody flipped it during a normal working day rather than at four in the morning. From that moment qype.com and qype.de returned a redirect to Yelp and never returned anything else. They still do it now, thirteen years later, which means every link anyone ever posted to a Qype review resolves to a homepage.

The postscript is the part worth keeping. In November 2016 Yelp laid off 175 people from sales and marketing and pulled back sharply from its international operations, having spent four years failing to make Europe behave like San Francisco. It bought the continent's local knowledge and then largely stopped selling against it. The density Qype spent seven years accumulating is still in the database, under somebody else's logo, in cities its new owner had already decided not to fight for.

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