Yelp is facing one of its biggest challenges since being founded in 2004. Its current business model of relying on advertising and sponsorship revenues is far from profitable and is not sustainable for the future. Yelp must decide if they should transform its service into a subscription-based system or increase advertising efforts in order to continue to grow and compete with competitors such as tripadvisor.com and Google HotSpot. I think it would be kind of difficult to get independent establishments to increase any current support for Yelp as they run the risk of paying someone to host negative reviews of their business.
Since Yelp is full of reviews submitted and used by its consumers, they should implement a subscription model that will collect a monthly fee from its most frequent users. A type of "freemium" system will kick in after ten visits or so and also provide subscribers premium options in relation to posting reviews and other information. Not only would this provide Yelp with additional revenue, it would also deter random users that simply use Yelp in order to boost their own company's rating or to bash any competition.
Yelp must do something before Google really gets rolling with its HotSpot service. Yelp has to understand that other than the user-posted reviews, all of the information they can provide about a business is freely available on the internet (aka Google). They must focus on keeping around their premium users that provide quality reviews and information to the rest of the Yelp community. Google has proven over the years that with time they can master any type of online interface (Maps, e-mail, communication). Yelp has to lock down its valued users that keep the site up and running before they all switch over to HotSpot.
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