Yelp co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman and then-brand manager Nish Nadaraja wanted to reward the site's most prolific reviewers and spur them to continue to draw traffic - without, of course, actually paying them. The Elite tribe was founded in 2005, a year after Yelp's inception, to gain influence over the restaurant business and encourage user-generated content.
"These people are beyond just hobbyists." Says industry analyst Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group, a San Francisco market research firm: "They're the new Zagats." "It's a huge force to reckon with," says Brandon Arnovick, the owner of Mission Minis, a San Francisco cupcakery. Together, this restaurant-reviewing mafia has the power to build up businesses -and take them down. Louis to Lyon -students in their twenties, marketers in their thirties, housewives in their forties, engineers in their fifties, venture capitalists in their sixties, and one 89-year-old great-grandmother living in Los Angeles. It's a motley crew of tastemakers from St. Yelp also refuses to divulge the total number of Elites worldwide, but industry estimates put the figure in the low thousands.
Says Andrea Rubin, Yelp's vice-president of North American marketing: "We don't share how it's done." Adding to its aura, Elite status is proffered by a governing body known as The Council, which is also shrouded in mystery. They're selected each year through a clandestine Skull and Bones-like process that evaluates the quality and extraordinary quantity of their review writing and their popularity among the San Francisco-based company's millions of users who rely on the site's recommendations to pick, among other things, a lunch spot, after-work bar, or client dinner joint. In the strange, exclamation point-laden netherworld of online restaurant reviewing, the Elite are a chosen people. It's an exclusive event honoring one of the foodie world's most influential sects: the Yelp Elite Squad, the search website's cognoscenti.
This so-called Sugar High soiree is not a child's birthday party.
#Become a yelp elite free
Inside, a throng of young professionals binge on free wine and brownies as they're feted by a man dressed as a cupcake and another as a gingerbread cookie. Outside the Project One gallery in San Francisco's design district, a young woman dressed as an ice cream sundae is standing beside the velvet rope.
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