Yelp Buys Restaurant-Kritik To Expand Its Presence In Germany

Yelp has boosted its presence in Europe after announcing the acquisition of Restaurant-Kritik, a restaurant review service in Germany. Restaurant-Kritik claims to have over 330,000 reviews of more than 94,000 restaurants across Germany.

The US firm has not revealed how much it paid for the Hamburg-based startup, but it says it will begin integrating content from the service into its German site soon. Already, however, a notice at the bottom of restaurant-kritik.de explains that the company is “a project of Yelp Ireland Ltd.”

“The addition of Restaurant-Kritik content to the Yelp family will see us further expand our depth of content in one of our core European markets,” Mike Ghaffary, Yelp’s VP Business and Corporate Development, wrote on the company blog.

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Ghaffary said that users of Restaurant-Kritik have “long been asking” for some kind of integration between the two services, although it remains to be seen how they will feel about the prospect of losing the service altogether.

(Update: Yelp has since clarified that “this does not imply they have been been asking for an integration with Yelp specifically, just the opportunity to be part of a wider, international community beyond Germany” — though it will be interesting to see if there is any blacklash to the deal.)

Yelp is available in 29 countries worldwide, giving it far greater reach than a Germany-only service, so it stands to reason that many Restaurant-Kritik users opted for the smaller platform over Yelp, but were happy to see some content shared between the two sites.

It is perhaps early to begin reading the signs, but some users have speculated that the move signals Yelp’s win in Germany:

While others are bemoaning the loss of Restaurant-Kritik:

It’s been a busy week for Yelp, which announced a partnership with Hipmunk that will allow people to place hotel and travel bookings from inside its site, although its stock took a hit when it revealed its latest financials. Yelp’s share price dropped 15% after the company forecast lower than expected revenues for the final quarter of the year.

The company’s Q3 revenue came in at $102.5 million — a big jump on $61.2 million a year earlier — while profit of $3.6 million was a turnaround on the $2.3 million loss it posted in Q3 2013, but growth in the next quarter is set to be more modest than analysts expect.

Also this week, Yelp got a little extra competition after Groupon introduced Pages, an online directory that will give businesses their own home page on Groupon’s site, where offers, news, user reviews and other information will live.