Claim: Yelp existed in public.

Yelp is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Francisco , California . It develops , hosts and markets Yelp.com and the Yelp mobile app , which publish crowd-sourced reviews about local businesses , as well as the online reservation service Yelp Reservations and online food-delivery service Eat24 . The company also trains small businesses in how to respond to reviews , hosts social events for reviewers , and provides data about businesses , including health inspection scores .   Yelp was founded in 2004 by former PayPal employees Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman . Yelp grew quickly and raised several rounds of funding . By 2010 it had $ 30 million in revenues and the website had published more than 4.5 million crowd-sourced reviews . From 2009 to 2012 , Yelp expanded throughout Europe and Asia . In 2009 it entered several negotiations with Google for a potential acquisition . Yelp became a public company in March 2012 and became profitable for the first time two years later . As of 2016 , Yelp.com has 135 million monthly visitors and 95 million reviews . The company 's revenues come from businesses advertising .   According to BusinessWeek , Yelp has a complicated relationship with small businesses . Criticism of Yelp focuses on the legitimacy of reviews , public statements of Yelp manipulating and blocking reviews in order to increase ad spending , as well as concerns regarding the privacy of reviewers .