Last week I posted on Yelp’s impressive growth in the local search space. Hitwise demographic and lifestyle data reveal some interesting insights about the users of Yelp, and could point to Yelp’s potential as a force within local search.
For the four weeks ending March 3, 2006, 57% of visits to Yelp were from females, and 34% were from users between the ages of 25-34. Not surprisingly, regional demographics skewed toward the states that contained its featured cities: 40% of visits came from California (SF and LA), 11% from New York and New Jersey (NYC), 10% from Illinois (Chicago), 6.4% from Massachusetts (Boston) and 5.8% from Washington (Seattle).
If you’ve spent any amount of time on Yelp, you will get the sense that there is a shared vibe among its users. They are young, hip, urban, and have plenty of disposable income to eat out frequently and go to bars, salons, and spas. Hitwise Lifestyle data, in conjunction with Claritas PRIZM NE Segmentation, gives us and even deeper view of who Yelp users are and what other sites they tend to visit on the web.
PRIZM NE segments the US population by 66 segments, based upon where people live, along with other factors like age, household income levels, household size, etc. The profile of visits to Yelp has a very strong skew toward the Urban Uptown social group, which is made up of the highest earning segments of the urban population. For the four weeks ending March 3, 2007, 31% of visits to Yelp came from Urban Uptown, versus less than 10% of the online population. The segment which accounted for the largest share of Yelp’s traffic was Young Digerati, which we will explore further. Below is the complete PRIZM NE profile of traffic to Yelp. You will notice that the segments are color coded by where they are located, and that their descriptive names gives you a sense what type of people they are.

Rarely is a site’s PRIZM NE profile so focused on so few segments. Yahoo! Local, for instance, has a much broader user base, with less of an urban skew, which is not surprising considering that it has been collecting reviews for a long time, and has the benefit of Yahoo’s broad reach. Here is a comparison of the segmentation for Yahoo! Local versus Yelp.
Young Digerati is a segment that many web marketers would like to attract. The Claritas description of the segment states

Young Digerati are the nation’s tech-savvy singles and couples living in fashionable neighborhoods on the urban fringe. Affluent, highly educated and ethnically mixed, Young Digerati communities are typically filled with trendy apartments and condos, fitness clubs and clothing boutiques, casual restaurants and all types of bars-from juice to coffee to microbrew.

The lifestyle and media behaviors they are more likely than the general population to engage in, according to Claritas, are: shopping at Banana Republic, Amazon.com and Bloomingdale’s, going snowboarding and scuba diving, visiting spas, spending more than $3000 on foreign travel in the past year, watching IFC, Showtime and HBO, and driving an Audi A4. Sound familiar? There are even more statistics that can be gathered about the lifestyles of this segment, as shown here.
Using the Find > Websites by Lifestyle Groups or Types function within Hitwise, I looked for sites that have a similar skew toward Young Digerati. This is a great way to find potential site partners, affiliates, advertisers, or just get a sense of the online behaviors of a group. Below is a list of sites for which skewed very high toward Young Digerati.
Shopping: BigBadToyStore, TechBargains, BuyDig.com, Banana Republic, Ann Taylor LOFT, Anthropologie
Entertainment: MyAmericanIdol, 411Mania
Banking: World Savings
News: Salon
Automotive: VWVortex
Food: Chowhound

Currently the Yelp user base is centered on its major markets and a distinct population within those markets. Similarly, in October 2004, the Craigslist home page received 39% of its traffic from Urban Uptown. As it has grown to have sites for 22 US metros and all 50 states, only 22% of Craigslist.org traffic came from Urban Uptown for the most recent 4 weeks. The momentum created by Craigslist in its first cities spread as city dwellers spread the word to friends and family and relocated to smaller markets for new jobs or to start families. Yelp appears to be growing in the same way, and if it continues to nurture and grow its core user base while at the same time expanding into new markets, it could disrupt the local search space, just as Craigslist disrupted local classifieds.