Zagat vs. Yelp: A Restaurant Review 2.0 Showdown?
Randall Stross compared Yelp and Zagat in the New York Times on Sunday. While he correctly noted that Yelp now covers more restaurants than Zagat, and uses this as a launching pad to compare and contrast the two companies, he leaves out the most relevant points. Most notably, he completely whiffs on recent business goings-on in the world of user-generated restaurant reviews.
My first question is what do serious eaters think about both Zagat and Yelp?
And while you ponder that, here's what Stross should have pointed out in his comparison.
Stross interviews Zagat co-founder Nina Zagat, who correctly points out that Zagat was the pioneer of user-generated restaurant reviews. The company is about to celebrate its thirtieth birthday. But he fails to point out that Zagat's long headstart in this realm was wasted because:
a) Zagat has adapted poorly and slowly to the web 2.0 world. Though its paywall has generated revenue, it has also severely limited the Zagat traffic numbers. Zagat's failure to adapt to the web world fast enough has granted Yelp (and Yelpers) a huge advantage.
b) Because Zagat was started as a print vehicle by two lawyers 30 years ago, the customer base, by definition, is going to be significantly older and less web-oriented-and-savvy than Yelp, which was built from the get-go in 2005 as a younger-skewing web community. Again, this gave Yelp a tremendous leg up in terms of building traffic.
c) Perhaps most egregiously, Stroess fails to mention that in the last year Zagat tried and failed to find a buyer at what was reported to be a wildly inflated asking price. Zagat has now, apparently, taken itself off the market. Many observers think that Yelp's emergence is one of the principal reasons Zagat couldn't fetch anything close to the asking price. The real question here—do we live in a Yelpized world where Zagat's time has passed? The Zagat guides will continue to stay relevant and useful to older restaurant-goers, particularly in New York, where they have something of a print stranglehold on the market. But going forward, it's hard to see how Zagat will compete effectively with the Yelps of the world.
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11 Comments:
Absolutely - Zagat is done for. They could have done something with their brand 5-8 years ago when it still had a semblance of legitimacy and relevance, but now it just concurs images of a dusty brown cover sitting somewhere in your apartment gathering dust.
We live in an age where the restaurant scene, especially NY, is largely influenced and driven by the web. New restaurants are blogged about before they're open, chef gossip is instantly reported from last nights party, everyone with a camera and a computer is a critic, and reservations made, traded, and bought on opentable/craigslist, etc.
Yelp is part of this new scene and as imperfect as it is, I would gladly visit yelp before venturing into my zagat book or website.
fascfoo at 10:38AM on 09/08/08
Agreed that Zagat is pretty much irrelevant at this point, not only because of Yelp but because of any number of restaurant review/general food blogs out there. Chowhound, etc. Zagat has no way of keeping up - why buy it when you can get it for free online?
sarahlucy at 11:13AM on 09/08/08
I find that the Zagat is a bit more reliable, only because it's slower. Yelp is okay, but I don't trust 90% of the reviews. Most people don't know jack and are just mad that they had to wait 5 minutes for a table, etc.
mrgreenfur at 12:07PM on 09/08/08
They both suck. Zagat is stuck in the past and isn't broad enough. Yelp is too broad and run by monkeys -- seems like every other review on there reads something along the lines of "the restaurant was great! my friends and i got pretty drunk and had a great time, besides my boyfried was telling really funny jokes that night so it was an AMAZING NIGHT!" -- totally irrelevant blather that has nothing to do with the actual restaurant in question. Feels more like Facebook than a restaurant review site.
I tend to use Menupages more than anything. It allows me to find a restaurant by location (with a great google enabled mapping feature -- not just "Midtown West") or cuisine or both, and i can quickly scan the menu to see if it's to my liking and if the prices are reasonable (not just "$$$"). And on the same page is a smattering of reviews that are usually pretty spot-on, relevant to the actual restaurant, and tend to differentiate between delivery and dining in, since this is originally meant to be a delivery menu site. Good to know that the restaurant has quite possibly the best arepas in the northern hemisphere, but you wouldn't want to take a date there (for example).
mh330 at 1:34PM on 09/08/08
Rumors of Zagat's death are greatly exaggerated. Lots and lots of people buy, use, and obsess over the printed guide. Zagat can make money. And I think it's a great deal - about the price of a few Sunday Times. Most importantly, I find the ratings to be pretty accurate reflections of the experience. Zagat has earned trust.
Yelp is nice for locating eats by location or genre, but no, your clever haiku about the Red Hook Ball Fields is neither helpful nor humorous. Most of the reviewers are insipid hipsters, and the really sharp reviewers often get drowned out in the noise.
jraphs at 2:35PM on 09/08/08
The beauty of the web is that you can play catch-up. It's premature to say a company is "done for" unless they really are too stubborn to make more money. Pay-walls just don't work this day in age.
Last time I saw Zagat's site behind the pay wall, they seemed to have done a good job with the site. If they would unleash that to the web and utilize web advertising...
Really, I'm surprised other sites like urban spoon hasn't taken off more. True, their site sucks a lot more than Yelp. And at this very moment, Michael Jordan's Steakhouse is ranked #1. Seriously?!?
foodinmouth at 3:04PM on 09/08/08
with all that said, i used to use citysearch. whatever Zaget is, it's nowhere near as bad as citysearch.
foodinmouth at 3:05PM on 09/08/08
I usually use a combination of Yelp, Chowhound, menupages.com and Zagat. Yelp and Zagat gives you good ideas to start with, their search by neighborhood feature is pretty good. I agree that most of the descriptions are written by people who don't take the time to write a good review. Yelp is especially good around non-metropolitan areas where Zagat/Chow/menupages have no coverage. I then do a Chowhound search with my findings from yelp to see if anything intelligent has been written on the restaurant. Lastly I use menupages to look up the menu and the price range of the restaurant. The only downside to menupages (at least in new york) is that they don't have a vast selection of outerborough menus.
mepm231 at 5:06PM on 09/08/08
If you want to get your free Zagat, just register and vote.
mepm231 at 5:08PM on 09/08/08
Zagat seems totally obsolete to me at this point. I second mepm231's recommendation of using a combination. I rely on Yelp and Chowhound for reviews. You do have to take the good and the bad with a grain of salt because some people get a bit enthusiastic when posting either exaggerating the positive or the negative, but if there are at least 4-5 reviews and some comments, I think using the user-generated reviews from Yelp and Chowhound yields better dining satisfaction than Zagat.
apronistas at 5:31PM on 09/08/08
We are naturally a progressive society which means the internet will progressively steal market share wherever it can compete with an offline product. Every business owner will need an internet marketing plan.
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master1980 at 8:33PM on 09/13/08