This story actually starts in 2012, even though I didn’t originally write about it until 2019. It began with a single restaurant listing on Yelp and turned into one of the stranger passive income experiments I’ve ever stumbled into. I don’t own a restaurant. I was just a customer trying to be helpful. Over time, that small decision has generated over $4,000 in ad revenue.
Back in 2012, Yelp dominated restaurant search results. Google Maps and Apple Maps existed, but Yelp routinely ranked above actual restaurant websites. If a Yelp listing linked to your site, that link mattered.
The backstory
I had eaten at this restaurant a few times before any of this happened. Good food, large portions, reasonable prices. It was clearly doing well even back then, and in the years since, they’ve expanded to multiple locations.
A few days before meeting friends for dinner, I pulled up their Yelp listing to grab the address. I emailed it over and included the website URL shown on Yelp. A friend replied and said the site didn’t load. The domain was dead.
That was the start of everything.
A problem worth fixing
Out of curiosity, I ran a quick Whois lookup. The domain wasn’t registered. A little more digging showed it had expired several weeks earlier. At the time, expired restaurant domains were easy targets for resellers, and this one was still available.
So I registered it. The intent was simple. I planned to tell the restaurant their domain had expired and transfer it back before someone else grabbed it.
Not long after, I discovered the restaurant already knew. They had launched a new website using a slightly different domain name. That should have been the end of it.
Except Yelp still linked to the old domain. I submitted an edit to fix the URL. That edit has never been approved, including all these years later.
What Yelp traffic looked like in 2012
At that point, curiosity took over. If Yelp was still sending traffic to this dead domain, how much traffic was it sending?
I put together a basic one-page site. I copied the menu photos from Yelp, hosted them on my own server, embedded a Google Map to their location, and made sure visitors coming from Yelp still got exactly what they expected. From the user’s perspective, nothing broke.
I added Google Analytics and let it run.
The results were eye-opening. Traffic from Yelp alone was over 400 visitors per day. For a single local restaurant. To a website that technically shouldn’t have existed.
That same weekend, when we went out to eat, there was a handwritten sign taped to the front door correcting the website URL. The staff knew something was wrong.
Avoiding an awkward conversation
During dinner, the manager stopped by the table and asked how everything was. I mentioned the sign. The response was immediate. Someone had stolen their website, and the owner was furious.
I dropped it.
When I got home, I filled out the contact form on their new website and explained exactly what happened. I told them the original domain had expired, that I registered it to protect it, and that I could transfer it immediately. I included the authorization code, a phone number, and used an alternate email address.
There was no response.
I followed up again. Then again. Over the next ten months, I reached out at least half a dozen times. Eventually the renewal notice came up. Letting it expire would just put them back in the same situation, so I renewed it.
At that point, this stopped being temporary.
Monetizing by accident
I didn’t want to renew a domain every year indefinitely without any upside. The site had steady traffic, and I was already monetizing other websites with display ads. I reached out to an ad rep, explained the situation, and asked if it was even worth monetizing a single-page restaurant site.
They laughed, then sent over a few ad placements.
From that point on, the site averaged around $30 per month. No SEO work. No content strategy. No outreach. Just a Yelp link that never got fixed.
Becoming the accidental webmaster
Over time, this stopped being truly passive. The restaurant expanded to multiple locations, which meant updating menus, addresses, phone numbers, and maps. Without ever agreeing to it, I became their webmaster by default.
When responsive design became standard, I rebuilt the site so the menus worked properly on mobile. Their official site still wasn’t mobile friendly at the time. Mine was.
For years, my site ranked above theirs in search results. Yelp continued to link to my domain even after the business claimed the listing. Their Google Business profile was claimed too, yet it also pointed to my site.
That part still surprises me.
The numbers, then and now
From 2012 through 2019, this site generated just under $3,000. That’s when I originally wrote about it.
Since then, total revenue has crossed $4,000. But the trend is clear. I don’t have detailed stats going all the way back, but 2020 and 2021 were still solid. Over the last three years combined, the site has generated only $244. In 2025 so far, it’s made $63.
Yelp traffic has declined. Ad rates have softened. I’ve continued trying to give the domain back to the restaurant, including recent attempts, and I’ve still never received a response. At some point in the last year, the Yelp page was finally updated.
This isn’t really a passive income case study anymore. It’s more a record of how much power Yelp once had, how long small technical mistakes can persist, and how a broken link from 2012 can quietly keep paying more than a decade later.