While many social-media companies have reported a digital-advertising downturn, Yelp Inc. managed to fight through it and increase its expectations for the full year.
Yelp
YELP,
produced record revenue for a fourth consecutive quarter, and Chief Financial Officer David Schwarzbach told MarketWatch on Thursday that the strong ad-sales trend has continued early in the current quarter.
“We did see strong advertiser demand through July, driven by our high-intent, more-affluent audience and ad sales that are measurable by a click,” Schwarzbach said in an interview.
Yelp reported second-quarter net income of $8 million, or 11 cents a share, compared with a net income of $4.2 million, or 5 cents a share, in the same quarter a year ago. Net revenue was $298.9 million, up 16% from $257.2 million last year.
Analysts polled by FactSet expected a net loss of a penny a share on revenue of $284 million. Yelp shares gained about 5% in after-hours trading immediately following the release of the results, after falling 1.3% to $32.34 in regular trading.
Record advertising revenue from Yelp’s Services businesses ($174 million), as well as a year-over-year surge in revenue from Restaurants, Retail & Other businesses ($109 million) led the results.
Yelp also raised its annual net revenue guidance of between $1.18 billion and $1.2 billion in 2022. Analysts were forecasting $1.15 billion, according to FactSet.
The results offered a contrast to disappointing financial numbers from Alphabet Inc.’s
GOOGL,
GOOG,
Google, Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc.
META,
Snap Inc.
SNAP,
and Twitter Inc.
TWTR,
Those companies, who are also dependent on advertising, blamed a toxic mix of inflation, supply-chain constraints, the war in Ukraine and rising commodity prices for weaker-than-expected numbers.
Yelp’s stock has slipped 11% so far in 2022; the broader S&P 500 index
SPX,
is down 13%.
