Yelp.com (NYSE: YELP) is a customer review website founded in San Francisco in 2004. Its goal is to bring local people together to empower connecting people with local businesses. So far, "Yelp communities have taken root in major metropolitan areas of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Australia" (Yelp.com, 2013) and many other countries. As a typical web 2.0 product (ref?), Yelp has excellent interactive fonts that allow users to search for information for all types of local services and at the same time post their own reviews about a specific service after experiencing it. Yelp.com now has more than 40 million registered users called Yelpers from around the world and achieved a monthly average of 117 million unique visitors in the third quarter of 2013 (Yelp.com, 2013). Here in this essay, Yelp.com, as a case study, will be analyzed by two main theories of “limited effect theory”: “Use and Gratification Theory” and “Two-Step Flow Theory”. In this essay you will also find some of the author's personal experiences as a Yelper to illustrate the theory. Unlike the hypodermic needle model (Williams, 2003:174-178) or other early views that define the public as a passive group that only passively consumes media messages without any resistance (CITE ?PPT), the "paradigm of limited effects" shows the active side of the public. The "limited effect paradigm" shows that the audience does not consist of people who are the "passive, isolated and impressionable entities of mass society", instead, the audience can be seen as individuals who "interpret what they have seen and felt in line with what they have already seen." established beliefs" (Williams, 2003, pp. 174-178) The rise of "limited effects theories" is the first... half of article... website. References Hicks, A., Comp, S. , Horovitz, J., Hovarter, M., Miki, M., & Bevan, J. (2012). com: an exploration of uses and gratifications.' Computers in Human Behavior, volume ??, pages ??.Long, P. and Wall, T. 2009. Media Studies. Harlow, England: Pearson Longman.Officialblog.yelp.com. 2013. Official Yelp Blog. [online] Available at: http://officialblog.yelp.com/ [Accessed: 17 November 2013].Williams, K. 2003. Understanding media theory. London: Arnold.Yelp.co.uk. 2013. Swansea restaurants, dentists, pubs, beauty salons, doctors. [online] Available at: http://www.yelp.co.uk/swansea-swansea-gb [Accessed: 17 November 2013].Yelp.co.uk. 2013. Who we are | Yelp. [online] Available at: http://www.yelp.co.uk/about [Accessed: 17 November 2013].Yelp.co.uk. 2013. Press | Yelp. [online] Available at: http://www.yelp.co.uk/press [Accessed: 18 November 2013].