Yelp expands European presence with Cityvox purchase

The deal comes less than a week after Yelp bought German review site Restaurant-Kritik

Yelp may have the easiest acquisition strategy to figure out of any big company this year. It has only made two purchases, both within a week of each other, and both with the exact same goal in mind: European expansion. 

The online business review site announced on Tuesday that it has purchased Cityvox, a French online review site with a specialty in the restaurant and nightlife categories.  No financial terms of the deal were disclosed.

For Yelp, the acquisition is a way for the company to expand and establish itself in the European market quicker than it would on its own. 

"Cityvox has a local reputation for providing great consumer insights for businesses ranging from restaurants and brasseries to cinemas and clubs, basically any business falling into the restaurant and nightlife categories," Mike Ghaffary, VP Business & Corporate Development at Yelp, wrote in a blog post.

While it is not clear at the moment if Cityvox will remain as an independent  business, or if the team will  be coming to work at Yelp, it is clear that its content, including  both reviews and photos, will be integrated into Yelp. 

"The addition of Cityvox’s review and photo content will enrich the Yelp content in France, and hopefully attract yet more dedicated and committed Yelpers to the Yelp France community," said Ghaffary.

For Cityvox, Yelp's size and scale gives the company the ability to reach a wider number of users,  Thibaut Viort, CEO of Cityvox, wrote in a separate post.

"We believe meeting Cityvox and Yelp is the best way to achieve our goal to provide users with the most reliable and most useful content on places to go out and local businesses, thus creating the service I was hoping to develop since my arrival in the direction of Cityvox," he said. "Yelp allows people to travel around the world while using a single platform and interface to find places to stay, eat, drink or entertainment. We needed a partner to open our doors wider world."

Founded in 1999, Cityvox says it has over one million members, but does not list the number of businesses listed on the site. The company seems to have raised an undisclosed amount seed funding in 2000 from French entrepreneur and investor Fabrice Grinda, but there is no indication of it having raised any money after that.

For Yelp, this is its second Europe-based acquisition in as many weeks. Just four days ago it announced that it had purchased German restaurant review site Restaurant-Kritik. Back in 2012, Yelp bought Qype, Europe's largest local reviews site, for $50 million as well.

VatorNews has reached out to both Yelp and Cityvox for further comment on the acquisition, including the financial terms and Cityvox's future. We will update this story if we learn more. 

(Image source: redbubble.com)