Yelp Inc. (YELP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. So as we're getting settled, why don't I -- we got an easier go-over here with the steps. You get a high score for execution and difficulty. So it's my pleasure to introduce the team from Yelp. We've got Jeremy Stoppelman, Co-Founder, CEO; David Schwarzbach, CFO. I'm going to turn it over to David to read the safe harbor, and then we're going to get into a, hopefully, good fireside conversation. So David, I'll throw it to you.

Excellent. Thanks, Eric, for having us at the conference. We'll be making some forward-looking statements during the conversation today that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Please refer to our SEC filings for more information on the risk factors that may affect our results.

Okay. There you go. Jeremy, I want to start with you. The company has been on quite a journey over the last couple of years. So I wanted to take a step back before we go forward and talk about what's to come. Talk a little bit about the journey you've been on and the evolution of the platform, some of the biggest changes you've undergone as a company in the last couple of years. And what are you most excited about in terms of that shift and where it leaves you positioned for the future?

Sure. So if you go way back, really, we were sales-driven. So to drive revenue, we're adding local sales head count, it's very people-heavy model. 2018 or so, we really started our transformation, leading into channels like self-serve, multilocation, also growing revenue through product and engineering innovation. So really tying revenue to our specific projects, getting way more efficient about how we were building things and what we were executing on. Obviously, pandemic hit. So that was a bit of a roller coaster, but it actually accelerated our strategy. We were able to reduce our sales head count far faster than maybe we were originally planning. We re-grew the revenue as we came out of the pandemic, and we've really become that lean, mean fighting machine with an incredible depth on the product and engineering side, a great portfolio, driving innovation, leaning into areas like LLMs. We've got the new Yelp Assistant we can talk about. And we also have an incredible ad tech stack. That's been an area that continues to give for us. So we have a lot of ideas that we execute on. Year in and year out, we get more and more efficient. So taking the same level of traffic, we're able to drive ever more highly relevant clicks through our advertisers which, of course, make them happy, hopefully stick around and spend more money with us.

Okay. So I want to talk about all of those different aspects that you intro-ed there. We'll talk a lot about that product and changes. I want to level set first on competitive landscape. So when you look across the competitive landscape today with respect to search and local services, I want to look backwards first and talk a little bit about how that's evolved. I know there's been some recent changes. And we'll talk a little bit about that.

Yes.

But how do you see the current competitive landscape and then we'll get into a little bit more of how it will evolve going forward.

Yes. I mean for us, we've been really focused on the services side of the business for some time. That was another shift that happened sort of in the wake of the pandemic. We've always had some activity in services. But we really leaned in, particularly with Request-a-Quote and we've had a lot of success there. We've been growing at healthy rates. Last quarter, 11%, services growth; 15%, in-home services. Obviously, there's other competitive dynamics out there. There's another large company with over $1 billion of revenue in the service space who's been having a tougher time out there. And like -- yes, I think we're -- in our view, we're really taking share with our innovation, with our great consumer product experience. We try to take a balanced view between delivering value for the business owner and the pros and also creating a really outstanding consumer experience.

Okay. So there's been some change in the landscape recently with DOJ versus Google and the decision that got handed down. You've been very vocal on the antitrust fund for a long time, really a decade plus. You recently made the decision to start litigation with Google. Maybe talk a little bit about why now, the confidence around that, and what are you hoping to achieve.

First off, I guess, it's over a decade and I've been on -- been working on -- working in this area for a long time. And so it's very gratifying and, I think, a watershed moment for antitrust generally that, not only did the DOJ bring the case but then they won the case. And if you go back 10 years plus when I was first getting involved on this issue, the conversations that I would have with regulators, with lawmakers was very discouraging, I would say. But now it's actually quite mainstream to understand that, hey, there are these monopolies. They very well may be maintaining themselves illegally as in the case of Google here. They were found to be illegally maintaining their monopoly. And so just having that determination is really powerful and, I think, represents a potential moment of great innovation. It's really exciting because if you think about the search space, there really hasn't been a lot of innovation in the general search market because Google has locked up all the entry points. And so that scrutiny on how they've done that, how they've maintained that illegal monopoly, I think, is really good, both for our company as, I think, like Yelp, but also the start-up ecosystem. There's never been a better time in my view, to start thinking about search and search innovation. I think it's directly the result of the DOJ's incredible work here of winning that case.

Okay. Maybe turning to the broader advertising environment. One of the bigger topics we've been talking about here at the conference is the current state of the macro environment. How would you frame the current advertising environment across your businesses? What's your key messaging about the outlook for it for the remainder of the year? And thinking about yourself specifically, as you go to market with advertising, how was your advertising services resonating in the current environment?

Well, we have the good news, and we have the bad news. So maybe we'll start with the -- the bad news is on the restaurant, retail and other side. And it's not specific to us for better or for worse. I think there's been signals all across the industry that in particular, restaurant and retail have been having quite a tough time. On the restaurant side, we've been hit with input costs. We've been hit with labor costs. And the response has been, well, we'll solve it through pricing. And then unfortunately, that then hits the demand side of the equation and consumers start balking, saying, I'm not going to pay $15 for my Chipotle burrito or what have you. And so that does create a headwind. I think we'll work through it. I don't think it's the end state for the industry. Obviously, the industry has a vested interest in figuring it out. And we're not just sitting on our hands, of course, waiting for it to come back. We continue to invest. We continue to make updates to the product. We have innovation within the home feed. We've got improvements on the reviewing side and reaction side. We're leveraging AI to stitch together videos. We showcased some of that earlier this year. So we're excited and ready to participate for that restaurant, retail and other recovery when it comes. But the incremental dollar that we have from an investment standpoint is going over into the services side where the business is healthy, growing at 11%. Home Services really rocking along at 15%. So we love our sustained momentum there. That has been the focus strategically for us for some time. We've also been obviously working on unlocking this off-Yelp opportunity through bringing in projects through SEM. That's been new for us. So there's a lot going on in the business that is very exciting and driving us forward. But you, of course, have to acknowledge the headwinds as well.

Okay. Understood. Maybe turning to artificial intelligence. You talked a little bit before about Yelp Assistant. So from a product and a user-facing standpoint, what's been the early traction on some of your AI products, specifically Yelp Assistant? And how do we think about the vision longer term where you want to take products like that?

Yes. Yelp Assistant, to me, is really exciting. We showcased it at the beginning of the year. It's a classic thing where getting the initial version is -- especially with LLMs, working with technology, that's the easy part. So it kind of works. It looks good. You put it out in the wild, sort of, frankly, not crushing it out of the gate. And so there has been like constant iteration on the internals of it, the functionality, and we really have gotten it right at this point, and it's contributing. And we've been scaling at various different entry points where you can now find Yelp Assistant. So for those that don't know what this functionality does, you obviously can phrase in your own way, what your project is, hey, my faucet's leaking. "Okay. I'll ask you a series of questions," hold your hand through that process, gather enough information to then deliver that job to a set of pros that we match you with. It's a great consumer experience. It's really intuitive. But to get it working within the Yelp internals the way that we wanted to has been a lot of work. It's been several months of rapid iteration. And we're now very excited about sort of the net effect of that, which is contributing more projects to the ecosystem and a great consumer experience, sort of the classic win-win. What can we do next with that? Well, obviously, it's continue to scale and get it into all the entry points that are relevant, but then you take it another step further and you could start talking about turning it into an API. And when you step back even further and think about the overall search landscape, you've got some of these search start-ups, sort of looking for ways to monetize to the extent a new general search company has traffic where people are asking questions about these services. You could imagine Yelp being a really easy plug-in to that situation that actually does deliver embedded monetization just by the nature of it working. So there's no clunky ads or what have you, you're getting matched to pros. Those pros are paid advertisers, like, it all kind of works together. So I think there's a long runway for this particular innovation. We're excited about it. And for us, it's kind of the first real tangible, sophisticated LLM application that we've kind of put out there from the initial demo, very exciting and delivered it in a productionized form.

Okay. Maybe continuing along this path, can you talk a little bit about the data licensing opportunity and how big you think that opportunity might be. There's been some announcements around this area. But how do you see this area developing? What are you building around it? How do you think the landscape continues to evolve?

Yes, we do see a lot of opportunity on the data side. Obviously, we have incredible trusted content, millions and millions of reviews, fresh reviews coming in every single day. And there are different ways that you can look at the stack of value. At the lowest level, you have just kind of the raw data, hand it to someone, they write you a check. And there are certain players where that makes the most sense, but you're not doing as much value add maybe as you could. Then you get to the next layer of like basic APIs. We have that, too. That adds value. It simplifies it. It makes it easier for organizations, potentially, to adopt and leverage your data. And then you have that third layer where you're adding really sophisticated AI on top of it and delivering it. It's still an API experience, but it -- or, I'm sorry, an API experience, but it's AI-powered and more responsive. And so that's even more value. And so we are attacking all three. I think, obviously, we like the higher parts of the stack. We have more control over our data. We're adding more value. We should be able to extract more value from an experience like that. But we also take -- open to all conversations and those continue to be ongoing in kind of the AI space. But also just people that are interested in our data generally. Again, we do have a substantial data licensing business already, and we see a lot of opportunity for that as we turn into '25 here.

Okay. Maybe one last one on AI, in general, maybe we'll tie it back to your earlier answer on regulatory changes, antitrust, the potential shifting landscape. I think that's one aspect that people ask about with respect to consumer search. How do you think about AI changing the landscape for consumer search more broadly? What are the potentials for the landscape to change? How do you think about some of the opportunity sets or even some of the challenges that those shifts from an AI landscape could do to consumer search?

Yes. I mean as I said earlier on, I think it is a really exciting opportunity, particularly with the scrutiny on Google's behavior and maybe a coming change in the numbers of opportunities available to smaller start-ups and so forth. And I think Yelp has a very unique data set, a very unique APIs that it brings to that market. And so for new general search players, you can already see with Perplexity, they've adopted Yelp. That's not an accident. It's because if you're looking for accurate local data, we are a natural place to turn, especially if you're competing against Google. And so that is a really excellent place for us to be. I also think there's an interesting opportunity within the voice space. We haven't seen sort of the version 2 of all of the voice search players. Obviously, you've got Alexa, you've got Siri, you've got all of these consumer voice search things that we thought were going to be a huge deal, maybe several years ago when they came out. And unfortunately, they weren't that great in terms of their functionality, in terms of their ability to understand us. But LLM really turbocharges that. And you can imagine, if you're talking to your Alexa, like, maybe you want to ask it about solving a problem around your house. So maybe that's the way that you could tie in to an API that touches the Yelp Assistant. Like, all that's theoretical. But I do think, from a search share standpoint, voice search could certainly be a thing in the way that we talked about maybe several years ago, but frankly didn't happen.

Okay. That'll be interesting. Okay. Maybe one last one for you, and then we'll bring David into the conversation. I want to talk a little bit about the services segment. So how should investors be thinking about the long-term growth potential for services as a business? And how should we think about some of the opportunity around enterprise service providers? And how the new leads API might accelerate efforts there?

Yes. So services continues with healthy momentum. We keep investing. It's a key investment area for us. We continue to invest in Request-a-Quote. We do have this new off-Yelp opportunity that we've been doing a lot of experimentation on. We've identified that for newer advertisers and for advertisers with maybe less reviews, it's particularly valuable to get these extra projects set to them. So that's the area that we're focusing on in the back half. And in that process, we've also realized there's a big opportunity out there in multilocation services. Historically, obviously, we've seen tremendous growth out of our multilocation business, but primarily in the restaurant, retail and other side. And with macro affecting restaurant retailer, that is sort of shined a big spotlight. I'm like, "Hey, we're not driving enough services revenue on the multilocation side? What's the issue there?" And as we were diving in with our clients, we're creating all this value within the Request-a-Quote ecosystem, but they haven't been able to tap into it because we frankly haven't provided the tools. And so with the Leads API, we're finally getting there. We have a set of tools that can bring those leads into their CRMs, allow them to get value. And so we do see that as an exciting opportunity as we go into the back half and more so into '25 as well.

Okay. David, may we bring you into the conversation. Earlier this year, you talked about pivoting to spending some money on SEM. Can you talk a little bit about the early learnings from the small paid marketing spend within the services segment? What's the groundwork that's been laid for services that allowed you to generate a return on that spend? And how should we think about the confidence that we're building around continued investments behind that spend?

So historically, Yelp hasn't spent very much on consumer acquisition, and it was principally on downloads, not actually on paid search. In fact, we spent nothing really on paid search for most of the history of the company, and there was a clear recognition that there's obviously a pool of traffic out there that couldn't be reached through paid search. So beginning actually early in 2023, we started to build out all the capabilities. It is complex. It requires you to really be able to bid efficiently, to be able to do it by category and geography, be able to land people to the right experience and convert those into a project. We made good progress in 2023, and we decided to increase the spend as we came into 2024. And what we did find was that we were able to buy projects at scale in categories and geographies that we liked at prices that were attractive. That was very positive. And we're able to land people to Yelp and convert those clicks on Google into projects on Yelp and those turned into clicks on Yelp and lowered CPC. All good, gave us a lot of encouragement and so we decided to increase the spend for the year and to continue to experiment. And just on this theme of iteration, what we did learn was that as we added clicks to the overall ecosystem, we did not yet see the return that we'd expected or hoped for. We were counting on a pretty simple thesis, which was if you can lower CPCs broadly for the marketplace, you will see more demand. There would be elasticity to that. What it turned out to be the case is that, in pockets, that was true, but not overall. So if you're already getting a lot of leads, you didn't really notice these incremental clicks. But for new businesses to Yelp or businesses that have very few reviews, it was much more meaningful. And so as we iterate and now are sort of on to V2 of this effort, we're really looking at ways to allocate those incremental clicks to folks who would be most responsive, who retain better and who would expand. So that's one area that we're working on. But it did mean going a bit slower, dialing back the spend a little bit. We had expected to spend $40 million, now we expect $35 million. Another opportunity to pick up on the theme around enterprise is, hey, we did know -- learn how to buy clicks and direct them for specific categories and geographies. Can we do that specifically for enterprise customers. But those enterprise customers needed that connectivity through our APIs to be able to manage those leads and work in their CRM. So that's actually another opportunity that we're working on. So we're approaching it from a couple of directions, leveraging the foundation that we've built over the past year. And we'll continue to iterate to the extent that we can make that work. We're going to invest in it. But we've shown, I think, a lot of financial discipline over the years. And if it's not working and we're not getting the return we expect, we're going to dial that spend back down, and we're going to either flow it through to EBITDA or we're going to invest it somewhere else.

Okay. Understood. Super clear. Away from the narrative around the SEM spend, and as Jeremy alluded to, you're sort of in the shift towards a product-led strategy. Maybe talk a little bit about your highest priorities for investments in the organization and the goals of trying to not miss opportunities to invest in growth, but also continue to produce yield, margin, trajectory there that you increasingly get asked about. Maybe that's for you, David.

Sure. So we go through, I think, like most companies, an annual planning process, and then that leads to a budget. And for us, head count is our principal expense. We are driven by our people and our success is dependent on putting those people on the right projects and allocating against the best opportunities. And what we have found is that it is important to maintain the overall experience. We want to be relevant. We want to participate in the recovery in restaurant, retail and other. But the marginal dollar of investment is clearly best spent at the moment on services where we're growing 11% overall, 15% in home services. So Yelp Assistant, obviously, is an area that we shifted resources. We continue to refine the matching algorithm and the technology underlying that in order to continue to improve, quickly building up this API for enterprises so that they could participate in the RAQ ecosystem was another opportunity for us. And I would just say, broadly, continuing to refresh the overall experience on Yelp is important because one of the strengths of Yelp is that you may come for a particular restaurant and you stay for services. What has increasingly been the case, as people have become more aware of Yelp is a place to pick service process, people are starting their journey on Yelp in services. So we like that, and we want to engage around that. We want to send e-mail that prompts people to do that. We want to do in-product marketing to make them aware, in that case, that they can also look up restaurants ironically. But on the restaurant side, obviously, we want to show them that they can do things on the services side. So we're very measurement-driven. We look for the ROI, but the theme right now and the strategic opportunity for us is to continue to drive the services business, and that's where we're spending.

Okay. Maybe one more big bucket for you, David. You bring it all together. First, you talk a lot about your capital allocation priorities. Maybe for those who are a little bit less familiar, you hit refresh on those priorities today, how they continue to evolve. And maybe just a third question would be how does M&A fit broadly inside those priorities for an incremental dollar of capital in the business?

So Yelp is unlevered. We do generate a considerable amount of free cash flow. We believe that for a company our size, we have a fortress balance sheet. We like having that. Now in terms of how we use that free cash flow, we have committed to return capital in excess of a target cash balance to investors. That being said, how do we get to the target cash balance? There's first, obviously, the operating requirements for the business. I think COVID told us all that you want to make sure you have a healthy buffer above your base operating cash. But we do hold cash on the balance sheet for acquisitions, and we're certainly always looking for opportunities there, though we don't have anything to announce at this time. But then we return, subject to market conditions, capital in excess of that. We did repurchase in the first half of the year about $125 million. We have about $450 million remaining under our current authorization. And on the employee side, we've committed to reducing stock-based comp to less than 8% by the end of next year. That meant here in 2024, we expect to issue 65% fewer shares to employees than we issued in 2023, going from about $6.6 million last year to about $2.2 million this year. So we're issuing fewer shares. We're buying back stock. We're committed on the stock-based comp. We're becoming a more efficient business. And so overall, I would just say, from a capital perspective, I think that we are doing everything to be a prudent steward of the capital that we have to continue to drive efficiency and, obviously, want to create shareholder return.

Okay. So we only have a few minutes left. Jeremy, I want to turn it back to you. We're obviously in a technology conference. We're always trying to think forward and take big picture. When you look out over 2 landscapes, number 1, over the next 12 months, what do you think of are things that maybe people aren't focused on today that could potentially surprise them with respect to the broader digital advertising or services landscape? And what are you most excited about when you look out over the next 3 to 5 years in terms of positioning the platform, positioning the company, what excites you the most for Yelp?

I think the 2 are related. I would say all the action and heat around Google and antitrust, up until this point, has been maybe underappreciated. I started to see some analyst notes come out that were maybe more encouraging in that regard in terms of it being taken seriously and, like, this being a pretty serious impact on their business and their go forward. And related, I think that scrutiny, the remedy phase, the subsequent components of this successful trial brought by -- the successful case brought by the DOJ, the ramifications are going to be huge. And it's at a moment, maybe much like 1998 when Google was born, that there is a technology that could create an opening for new players. And from 3 to 5 years out, like we could be on the verge of seeing the creation of the next Google, the next great innovator, whether it's coming from the start-up land, whether it's a company like Yelp finding additional opportunities to grow rapidly. Like, we are in the midst of, I think, a potential Cambrian explosion, all triggered by the scrutiny and the pressure brought by a return, frankly, to antitrust. Historically, we've always had strong regulators, people pushing back on businesses when they get too powerful, when they get extractive. And I think what the DOJ has done is fantastic. It's a watershed moment for technology. We should welcome that and we should be excited to see the innovation that is going to be unlocked here in the next 3- to 5-year period. And the timing couldn't be better because we have this new and exciting LLM AI technology. Like, there has been a level change in terms of the tools that we have available to us. And so it's on us, as innovators and technologists, to go and participate in the opportunity and capture the upside.

All right. Well, I think we're going to leave it there. First of all, thanks, both of you, for being here. Really enjoyed the conversation. Please join me in thanking Yelp for being part of the conference this year.