Yelp this week denied that it will kill off its daily deals feature, but acknowledged that it trimmed the team working on deals and will focus on quality versus quantity going forward.
"Contrary to popular belief Yelp is not killing Deals (gasp!)," Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman wrote in a blog post. "We did take a 30 person team that was selling daily deals and local ads and made it a 15 person team focused solely on daily deals."
Yelp did not lay off any employees; they were shifted to other parts of the 400+ member team, he said.
Stoppelman insisted that daily deals have "been a hit with consumers" since they launched last year, but "it hasn't been all rainbows and unicorns." Consumers sometimes complained about receiving offers for deals that weren't particularly nearby, while some businesses said it didn't make much financial sense to offer daily deals.
That "does raise questions around the sustainability of '50 percent off' daily deals for these types of businesses," Stoppelman wrote.
As a result, Yelp will continue sending out deals, but "rest assured when it comes to quality vs quantity, we'll choose quality every time," he said.
Stoppelman also suggested that businesses take advantage of a feature that lets them instantly post a deal on their Yelp page. In the past two months, several thousand businesses have done this, and "we designed this new product to solve many of the issues plaguing daily deals providers," he said.
Yelp's announcement comes several days after Facebook killed its deals service. "After testing Deals for four months, we've decided to end our Deals product in the coming weeks," a Facebook spokeswoman said at the time. "We think there is a lot of power in a social approach to driving people into local businesses. We remain committed to building products to help local businesses connect with people, like Ads, Pages, Sponsored Stories, and Check-in Deals. We've learned a lot from our test and we'll continue to evaluate how to best serve local businesses."
Not everyone is abandoning ship. Last month, through partnerships with LivingSocial, Gilt City, zozi, BuyWithMe, and AT&T Interactive, Foursquare started offering discounts, available via the Explore tab. Also last month, LivingSocial snapped up three deal sites in Asia and the Middle East and started a new service in the Netherlands as a part of its effort to expand internationally.
Deals leader Groupon, meanwhile, in May launched an instant, location-based mobile deal offering service called Groupon Now. Shortly after, it filed for a $750 million IPO.