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Yelp

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The profile

Yelp's advertisers are local businesses, and when they closed in March 2020 its restaurant searches fell about 60 percent in a month. It announced "$25 million in relief" for them, which it booked as $22.6 million of price concessions, and cut about 1,000 jobs. It took no PPP loan; the CARES Act let it defer $15.0 million of payroll taxes and carry 2020 losses back to a year taxed at 35 percent. By 2021 its revenue, $1,031.8 million, was above its 2019 level.

  • Category: local reviews and advertising
  • Pandemic-layoff role: Additional sourced company
  • Last updated: 2026-11-01

In the archive

Founders, executives and investors

Stoppelman co-founded Yelp and has been its chief executive since its start in 2004, according to that proxy statement. Before Yelp he held engineering roles at PayPal from 2000 to 2003, ending as vice president of engineering. Yelp trades on the New York Stock Exchange.

Business before the pandemic

Yelp sells advertising to the local businesses that consumers find through its reviews. In 2019 it had begun a multi-year plan to grow through product, marketing and multi-location customers "rather than primarily through local sales headcount." Its users wrote nearly 19 million reviews in 2020 alone.

What the pandemic did to the business

Consumer engagement and non-term advertising budgets fell sharply in March and April 2020, the company wrote. Revenue for 2020 fell 14 percent, to $872.9 million. Stoppelman, whose salary rate was already $1, gave up his base salary and the stock awards due to vest during the rest of 2020; the proxy statement Yelp filed in 2021 records what he was paid in salary for 2020: $0.30.

Yelp's closure counts became one of the private data sets used to measure the damage. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in August 2020 that, by Yelp's count, at least 252 Philadelphia-area businesses had closed permanently between March 1 and July 10. Nationally, Yelp counted more than 27,600 retail stores and nearly 24,000 restaurants closed, temporarily or permanently, between March 1 and June 15. Federal Reserve economists were skeptical. Yelp's highest estimated permanent closure rate, about 3.5 percent from March through August for burger and sandwich restaurants, annualized to about 7 percent, below the roughly 8 percent that restaurants exit in a normal year. "It seems unlikely that actual exit rates are below historical averages as Yelp data suggest," they wrote.

Relief it gave, and relief it got

On March 20, 2020, Yelp announced "$25 million in relief," mainly for independent restaurant and nightlife businesses. Its annual report for 2020 counts $22.6 million of relief, booked as price concessions, plus paused campaigns and free advertising in April and May worth $14.5 million. Together that is $37.1 million.

Most of Yelp's advertisers are small and medium-sized businesses. By the end of March, page views and searches for restaurants, its most-trafficked category, had fallen about 60 percent from the start of the month, Yelp told the SEC on April 9. For its services category, which brings in most of its revenue, the drop was about 40 percent. The company expected "many of its customers to cancel or reduce spending." The relief took the form of price cuts: waived advertising fees, three months of free Reservations and Waitlist for restaurants, and "$100 in free search advertising" for restaurants offering delivery or takeout. Yelp's first-quarter 10-Q and second-quarter shareholder letter record it as reduced revenue: $4.6 million in the first quarter and about $9 million in the second. The full-year $22.6 million equals 2.6 percent of Yelp's 2020 net revenue of $872.9 million.

On March 24 the Yelp Foundation and GoFundMe pledged to match up to $1 million in donations, with a $500 matching grant for eligible businesses that raised at least $500. An update dated April 13 on the same blog post says the rollout had been paused and that Yelp then worked with GoFundMe on a way for businesses to "opt into" the feature.

Yelp does not appear as a borrower in the SBA's Paycheck Protection Program loan data (release of September 30, 2024). Under the CARES Act it deferred $15.0 million of employer Social Security taxes, to be paid in 2021, according to its 2020 annual report. The act also let Yelp carry its 2020 losses back to 2017, when the corporate tax rate was 35 percent; the carryback was one reason Yelp recorded an income-tax benefit for 2020 instead of a provision. At March 31, 2020 it had about $491 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities and no debt; it arranged a revolving credit facility with Wells Fargo and had no loans outstanding under it at the end of 2020.

Executive pay and buybacks

Non-employee directors gave up their board pay for the second quarter of 2020. The executives' 2020 performance awards, which required year-over-year growth, paid nothing: revenue fell 14 percent and adjusted EBITDA 34 percent. In the third quarter the compensation committee granted new awards measured on the second half of 2020 alone, at half the original target value. It set the revenue target at about the midpoint of analysts' consensus, $422 million, using that consensus "as a stand-in for investor expectations." Second-half revenue came in at $454.0 million, and the new awards became eligible to vest at about 173 percent of target. For Stoppelman that meant 119,372 shares against a target of 69,033. The committee's stated view was that "there should be no payout for the first half of the year." His reported 2020 compensation was $7,960,242, against $6,310,987 in 2019; the proxy says those stock-award figures are grant-date values that "do not reflect the actual economic value realized."

Yelp bought back no shares in the first quarter of 2020, suspended repurchases in April and resumed them in November, spending $24.4 million that year. It had spent $481.0 million on buybacks in 2019 and spent $262.9 million in 2021. Revenue in 2021 was $1,031.8 million, above 2019's $1,014.2 million, and year-end headcount was about 4,400.

Layoffs

On April 7, 2020 Yelp's board approved a restructuring plan that cut about 1,000 jobs, about 17 percent of the 5,950 employees it had at the end of 2019, furloughed about 1,100 more and cut salaries; 63 more jobs ended in July. Yelp ended 2020 with about 3,900 employees. How Yelp handled layoffs →

After the first shock

Revenue grew 32 percent and traffic 40 percent in the third quarter of 2020 from the second. Yelp restored salaries in August 2020 and recalled nearly all furloughed employees between August and October. Revenue from home and local services returned to growth in the second half, and self-serve advertising revenue grew about 25 percent in the fourth quarter. Stoppelman called 2020 "the most challenging year in our 16-year history."

Since 2025

Yelp is still listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Its investor site reported $361 million of net revenue for the first quarter of 2026, 485,000 paying advertising locations and 330 million cumulative reviews. Its newsroom announced "record net revenue in 2025" on February 12, 2026, and the purchase of Hatch, an AI lead-management platform, in January 2026.

Sources

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