Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman offered his thoughts on the company’s mobile monetization strategy today during the analyst conference call for the company’s second quarter earnings report.
Not surprisingly, Yelp is seeing a lot of growth on mobile. The company says that mobile apps are being used by 7.2 million unique devices every month, up from 6.3 million in the previous quarter. Stoppelman also said that apps currently account for 40 percent of all Yelp searches — making up the majority on weekends.
Asked about user behavior on the mobile app, Stoppelman said it’s comparable to the website — whether you type in www. yelp.com or download the app, you’re going to be more engaged than someone who clicks through to a listing via search.
As for turning that growth into money, Stoppelman said that Yelp already runs ads on the mobile web, and that those ads actually see a higher clickthrough rate than their desktop counterparts. That makes the company “very confident” that it can basically transfer its monetization to mobile without having to rethink things dramatically. He added that the company will be “open to anything that works well” for its customers, but for starters it can just introduce standard ads that are priced based on clicks or impressions.
So to introduce ads into Yelp’s mobile apps, Stoppelman said it’s just “a technical thing to get that implemented.” He declined to offer a specific date on when it would happen, but he did say it will be “sometime soon.”
Yelp (NYSE: YELP) connects people with great local businesses. Yelp was founded in San Francisco in July 2004. Since then, Yelp communities have taken root in major metros across the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Singapore, Poland and Turkey. Yelp had a monthly average of 86 million unique visitors in Q4 2012*. By the end of Q4 2012, Yelpers had written more than 36 million rich,...
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