Yelp Reports Record Highs With $46 Million In Net Revenue For Q1 2013

Yelp released their first quarter 2013 earnings report today, announcing a 68 percent increase from Q1 2012 with $46 million in net revenue this quarter. CEO Jeremy Stoppelman started the earnings report webcast by stating the company had hit record highs in all core metric areas.

Climbing to approximately 102 million, Yelp’s average monthly unique visitors grew 43 percent year over year. Local business accounts reached approximately 45,000, a 63 percent increase year over year; and the number of reviews rose 42 percent year over year, with more than 39 million cumulative reviews on the site now.

Net losses are down this year, with a first quarter net loss of $4.8 billion for 2013, compared to a net loss of $9.8 billion for the first quarter of 2012.

“Looking to the rest of the year, we will continue to focus our product innovation around the mobile experience and new features to better serve the consumer and local business owners, and we will continue integrating Qype into the Yelp platform,” said Stoppelman in the release posted on Yelp’s investor relations website.

During the earnings report webcast, Stoppelman confirmed that Yelp will remain focused on their mobile strategy, international initiatives, and closing the loop with small businesses. In an effort to improve the user experience, Yelp cited the open data standard it developed to add health inspection scores to restaurant business pages, a feature that will have its first roll out in San Francisco.

Yelp launched mobile display ads this quarter as well, and its mobile app was used on approximately 10 million unique mobile devices. As far as Yelp’s international reach, they are now in 21 countries, adding New Zealand last month to the list of countries they serve. To help local businesses, Yelp CFO Rob Krolik referenced the revenue estimator tool, an application that helps businesses calculate the value of leads from Yelp. The newly launched application was mentioned during a the Q&A session of the earnings report webcast, along with a recent study that claimed businesses who advertised on Yelp experienced an average revenue lift of $23,000.

Yelp is forecasting net revenue for the second quarter of this year to be in the range of $52.5 million to $53.5 million. The company projects net revenue to reach $216 million to $218 million by the end of 2013.