Street Fight Daily: Yelp Sees Growth in Local Ad Accounts, Facebook Agrees to Audit

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…

Yelp Stock Plunges After Sales Outlook Misses Mark, But Local Ad Accounts Grow (Business Insider)
Yelp shares slumped by as much as 11% in after-hours trading Thursday after the company’s projection for first-quarter sales missed analysts’ expectations. Yet local advertising accounts — an important metric that tracks how many small businesses are patronizing Yelp — grew 24% year-over-year in Q4 to about 138,000. 

Raise Report: New Funding for MapAnything, Cuebiq, SIM Partners (Street Fight)
Every two weeks, we round up some of the biggest fundraises taking place in hyperlocal marketing, commerce, and tech. This week’s edition includes funding for The Bouqs, Soundhound, Reserve, and Fuze.

Facebook Agrees to Audit of Its Metrics Following Data Controversy (WSJ)
Facebook has pledged to undergo audits by the media industry’s measurement watchdog, the Media Rating Council, people familiar with the matter say, a move that will likely please ad-industry executives who are skeptical of the tech giant’s data-reporting practices.

Why Back-End Tech is Key for Food Delivery Startups (Street Fight)
Megan Hannay: Outside of college campuses, local food delivery startups generally have larger neighborhoods to cover and customers with more niche needs. This may be why some of the biggest names in local delivery don’t seem as different at first glance, because their focus is on the back-end.

Lyft Has Hired the Head of Google Street View to Lead Its Mapping Team (Recode)
Lyft, last valued at $5.5 billion, is bolstering its engineering team with a splashy hire. The ride-hail company poached Luc Vincent, known as the founder of Google’s Street View team, to be its newest vice president of engineering.

Twitter Hopes Machine Learning Can Save It from Oblivion (VentureBeat)
Twitter’s latest earnings were an unmitigated disaster. But part-time CEO Jack Dorsey insists that all is not lost. And to rally the troops and convince investors to give him more time, he tried his best yesterday to highlight the ways he believes the company’s investments in machine learning offer reasons for optimism.

On the Road to Voice Payments, Google and Amazon Pull Ahead of Apple (Digiday)
Google has a leg up in voice, which is probably the next shift in consumer behavior, and as a result, payments. The same is true for Amazon. Google’s Hands Free facial recognition experiment may not have caught on, but the popularity of its Home Assistant, as well as Amazon’s Alexa, is rising rapidly.

Is Mobile Search Cannibalizing Google’s Core Search Business? (MediaPost)
Analysts are not sure whether mobile search is necessarily growing the fortunes of Google’s parent company. “We see mobile search growth as generally cannibalizing [Google’s] own non-mobile search activity, much as programmatic advertising cannibalizes non-programmatic sales at its display network GDN,” Brian Wieser explains.

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