All right, good afternoon. Thanks, everyone. It's Brian Fitzgerald from the internet research team at Wells Fargo. We're very happy to have with us Yelp and David Schwarzbach, CFO. David, thanks for being here, first of all. But before we jump into things, you have to hit some finer points-
Yes.
-very quickly.
Yes. Thanks, Brian, for having us at the conference. We'll be making some forward-looking statements during the conversation today that are subject to certain uncertainties. Please refer to our SEC filings for more information on the risk factors that may affect our results.
Awesome. So let's... I got a lot I wanna cover, so let's jump into it. David, Yelp has really changed a lot over the past few years, particularly compared to kinda pre-pandemic Yelp, and investors are certainly noticing. Your stock's up 60% year to date. So great performance. Congrats. So I wanted to drill down on what parts of the business do you think you've made the most progress on? What trends have helped you deliver consistent, profitable growth? And maybe areas you're excited about with that as a backdrop going forward.
Yeah. So Yelp definitely has been through a transformation, and I think overarching, it's the shift from this sales headcount-driven growth model-
Yep.
- to product-led. And even the transition to product-led, you obviously emphasize it, but then you also start to approach the business in a different way. As opposed to saying, "Hey, what do we need to do for go-to-market?" It's, "How will we use technology? How will we apply product to solve these problems and, and drive performance?" So that's overarching. Now, about five years ago, we said for ourselves, the number of areas that we wanted to really focus on, one was absolutely around services. We had a lot of services traffic that was under-monetized. We'll come back to that, but that's been a big theme for us. We thought it was a good idea to deliver value to advertisers.
Yep.
We worked heavily on that. Then there was a clear opportunity for us to expand our opportunity by going into enterprise and serving mid-market, and doing that more efficiently through self-service. Those were the, those were the big themes, but I, I just underscore for us, over the past several years, it's really been services. Services grew 20%-
Yep.
In the third quarter, about 20%, and that has worked very, very well for us.
Yep. You mentioned kinda that the value proposition you're trying to drive for both advertisers and consumers. Can you unpack that a bit? How do you create value for both, you know, advertisers and consumers on your platform? Sometimes that may seem at odds.
Yeah.
And maybe some examples of... And we can get into product initiatives that have resonated well with both sides of the business.
Yeah. So one thing that Yelp has always been very focused on is the consumer, and we have a great brand. We think that brand comes from our trusted content, and it has been a terrific way to engage consumers. If you want to retain those consumers, then when we say value, value comes from ratings being accurate and relevant. It comes from reviews being detailed enough for you to be able to make a good decision, and it means matching you with the right service pro if you're doing a project or recommending the right restaurant. So value for the consumer comes from enabling them to make a great decision and being relevant to them.
Right.
I think that's something that you have to guard against, for instance, increasing ad load so much that the experience becomes poor.
Right.
So that's on the consumer side. On the advertiser side, of course, they want a great lead, or they would like someone to come into the restaurant or come shop at their business. And the way that we tackle that is to really invest in the ad tech stack-
Right.
and really gather information from the consumer. I just say, for us, the consumer comes, it's query-based, they're telling us exactly what they're looking for.
Right.
I need a locksmith. It's 2:00 A.M. I'd like them to come right now." And so we're not guessing, and then finding that right locksmith for that person who we know is gonna be able to get them into the home, and it's gonna be a comfortable experience in the middle of the night. The matching technology, we've invested in heavily, and that has really, really yielded over the past several years. So it actually isn't a contradiction to be able to deliver more value to advertisers, even as we deliver more value to consumers, 'cause if you get that right service pro out to help you with something, then you're happy, and of course, they're happy.
All right. So, let's continue riffing off of services. It's been really interesting to watch the evolution there, delivering consistent growth, 60% of revenue today. Can you talk a bit about what is it the value proposition that's driving that strong performance, that matching? Are there other products at the core of the services offering, that are also, you know, lifting there, and how do you see the service offering evolving from here?
Yeah. So I think Yelp of a decade ago was a pretty uniform experience, regardless of category. Over the past five years, we've really invested heavily in differentiating the experience for the consumers and actually differentiating it.
Yep.
for advertisers. On the consumer side, if I'm looking for a restaurant, I need something different than if, if I'm hiring someone to do a kitchen remodeling project for me. So we introduced Request a Quote a number of years. Request a Quote is where I say something about the job I wanna do. We ask you some questions about it. That helps us to refine-
Right.
who it is that we should propose as a service pro for you, and that differentiated experience has really worked well.
Right.
We've continued to refine it. So that's at its core, a specific experience in services. Now, at the same time, what's very important about Yelp, it's a directory. We have more than 6 million registered businesses. It means that in every market, we have someone to return as a search result.
Right.
So we're not dependent on having a depth of advertisers there, because in the United States, typically, if you're starting a new business, what do you do first? You're gonna register on Yelp.
Right.
So it means that we stay relevant. Now, for the advertiser, it also means that that format, the way that we show you to that consumer, we've continued to refine that with ad formats and whatnot. We've got the matching underneath it. But overall, it's really been this consistent product effort on a differentiated experience where we can communicate value to advertisers while delivering value to consumers, that has enabled us to grow that 20% in home services in the third quarter, about 14% overall in services.
Part of that product focus, like, you've brought in executives and heads that have really increased the pace with which you're kind of evolving and A/B testing and rolling products out.
Absolutely. So, a couple of years ago, Craig Saldanha joined us from Amazon. He's our Chief Product Officer. He has been a huge addition to the team. It's important to appreciate about products, not just that front-end experience. You know, product management goes into the ad tech stack, it goes into the way that we surface data to teams inside Yelp, it's corporate systems, it's what do we present to our sales team? It's very broad-based.
Mm.
He owns all of that. So he's brought all of that Amazon discipline and experience to Yelp in a way that complements Jeremy, who himself is very, very good at product. As an example that combines what he's doing with our focus on services, something that we have not spent almost any money on is SEM in the past, buying AdWords.
Right.
And it's something that we've introduced. We expect to spend an incremental $5 million on that in the first quarter as experimentation budget. You asked about A/B testing.
Sure.
So we like to start with the testing budget. We built the foundation for it. We need it to be profitable or, you know, it work financially for us. But the real power for us around SEM, not having spent there, is to be able to not just acquire projects and direct them to the right service pros, but because we're this broad-based consumer app, we can actually also acquire a consumer, a highly valuable consumer-
Right.
... 'cause they're coming in services to us. So why does that matter around Craig? Craig's able to take this business objective, which is, we wanna acquire more traffic. There's traffic on Yelp that we're not tapping into. We need to do it in a way that works financially, and then translate all that into: what do you need in the back end? What do you need to be able to surface? How do you bid on that? How do you figure out the ROI for that? And how do you ensure that when that person comes, they don't just come for that single project, but then we get them to come back again and again? That is all product work that Craig oversees, and we're really pleased with the progress that we made here in 2023 in building out that foundation.
Yep.
But it gives you a sense for his role. It's not just, "Hey, what do I do with product?" It's, "What is the business objective? What are the financial objectives? How do I translate all of that into a system that's gonna work for Yelp over the long term?
So, great progress in 2023. Great progress with the Request a Quote in general. How much runway do you think you have left in terms of improving monetization of the leads and services? Do you have further penetration to go in terms of what's applicable for Request a Quote?
In 2021 and 2022, we monetized about 25% of services leads.
Right.
At the beginning of 2022, we said, "Hey, we do need to attend to quality." We did that. We'll share the 2023 number when we get to the Q4 call.
Yep.
But we still think that there's plenty of opportunity there to continue to engage consumers. There's also a category mix thing that's a little harder to see, which is, as you come to Yelp and you have a good experience, particularly in services, and let's say you did, you know, a simple job, which was, you know, I had a clogged a drain, and I needed that cleared out, and I hired a plumber. Then I'm like: Oh, that, that actually was accurate. The review is accurate. I understood that they, they would do a good job. Then I'm more comfortable doing that next project. That next project might be landscaping.
Yep.
The project after that might be roofing. So we care a lot, not just about increasing the number of services leads, but that repeat with that consumer.
Right.
We always wanna do this in a way that doesn't compromise the consumer experience. The SEM piece, obviously, will be monetized-
Yep.
... because if we're gonna pay to bring a project to Yelp, the consumer to Yelp, we want to ensure that we are going to see return on that. But broadly, this idea that we can continue to increase the monetization of Yelp while meeting and protecting the consumer experience, I think that we still think that we have a lot of room to run.
Right. And I wanna riff off of that point about engaging a consumer, then getting them to come back, because you've talked, you've talked before about, you know, your services customer and then also your Restaurants, Retail and Other customer, and how both of those can coexist on the platform, and they can benefit each other. Can you talk about cross-sell opportunities and a little bit about the dynamics with both services and RR and other, and how that's progressed?
Yeah.
'Cause I think one feeds the other.
Absolutely. So, Restaurants, Retail and Other is entire frequency. You're going out to eat more often-
Yep.
... than you're remodeling your kitchen. And the part of what's important about that experience on Yelp is, I see the rating, I read the reviews, I go to the restaurant, and it matches... what I thought it was going to be. That is very, very important to have confidence and trust in what we're providing. That provides a halo because then I think to myself, "Oh, now, of course, we're marketing in product that suggests, 'Hey, you- have you considered Yelp for services?'" But now I have this context-
Right.
- that what I saw on Yelp was accurate. I can expect it to be accurate for service pro, and this is a lot more spend. Plus, the detail of the review is there, so I know what to expect when they arrive at my home. We think that works really well, and we are gonna continue to lean in, and that's why we're this broad-based consumer app. We don't think about it narrowly as a vertical, although obviously we've really invested heavily on the vertical side, particularly home services. But we continue to have this mindset that we're a broad-based consumer app, in which high frequency can feed low frequency, lower value can enable higher value.
I wanna drill down on some product initiatives, on both sides, actually, for the advertisers and the consumers. When looking specifically at Yelp Guaranteed, rolled out nationwide in Q3, you talked a bit about doing A/B testing to figure out, you know, whether you can roll that out, what categories you can roll that out in. So I think that'd be interesting to talk about. Talk about the expansion of Yelp Guaranteed into other categories and how that product is helping improve the user experience on the platform, and ultimately, that's helping to drive monetization.
Absolutely. Yelp Guaranteed is our money-back guarantee, up to $2,500 lifetime. It is a way for us to enable consumers to have higher confidence. Now, if you're already a four-star rated electrician with 79 reviews, I think the marginal value of the badge-
Yep.
is lower than if you have one review or let alone zero reviews.
Right.
There, we're really extending the brand trust to these new advertisers. Now, we have a way to evaluate whether we think that that service pro is going to do a good job. But the important thing is when you come to Yelp for that first time, you're advertising that month, we wanna ensure you get a lead. We wanna show you value. So I really think Yelp Guaranteed helps with that. But across both folks who have more rating, ratings and those who don't, it has increased engagement and click-through in a good way.
Mm-hmm.
We are paying out against it, but it's very, very manageable. What we found is that people are coming with legitimate claims that we should be addressing, and that helps to further increase their trust and broadly, the trust of the folks who are using Yelp to make those decisions. We are rolling it out now across our home services categories. That's going very well, and we're very pleased with the progress.
Okay. Okay. As you're rolling that out, you talked to us earlier about you were very deliberate about testing that product in market because if you roll it out, you can't reel it back in. And so I guess, are you seeing, as you're rolling out to all categories now, is it going faster? Are you picking up momentum because you continue to do, you know, learnings and we're getting much better at doing this?
Yeah. I think a way to describe our approach to product development is experimentation-driven, agile development. So we love experimentation.
Yep.
We start with hypothesis, we test that hypothesis, and there's information to be gained. If it doesn't work, that's just fine. It tells us that we need to go in a different direction. Of course, we like when it does work, because then we can double down on it.
Yep.
Fundamentally, though, it's this continuous improvement.
Yep.
It's always finding that next thing that you can do to drive an outcome that comes part and parcel with that mentality of being experimentation driven. So in the case of Yelp Guaranteed, we continue to, of course, measure, but then as we refine it, where should we badge? How should we badge? Who should we include in the program? Who should we exclude from the program? How do we increase the ease of use when you have a claim? How do we discern a fraud from a genuine claim?
Right.
Those are all areas where we continue to experiment to refine it.
Okay. I wanna come back and talk about KPIs, how you measure success, 'cause you just rolled off, you know, a dozen of them. But first, I wanna talk about Yelp Audiences. Can you talk about how that fits with the other pieces of the platform and how it broadens the value proposition for advertisers?
So Yelp Audiences is our product where you come to Yelp, we see intent, and then we use that intent to create an audience for targeting off Yelp by advertisers.
Yep.
So that's the product. The bigger theme is off Yelp, which is, here we've had someone come and visit Yelp, and we can generate more value by retargeting off Yelp. So you haven't increased the ad load, but you've increased revenue. Now, there's a lot of things that are good about that from our perspective. The first, of course, is if we have an existing advertiser on Yelp, this gives us the opportunity to ask for more budget. "You've seen success on Yelp, let us help you across the internet." So that's one. Two, it enables us to go into categories where you don't have a natural reason to advertise on Yelp, say, a credit card. So we like that as well. But third, we are tapping into traffic away from Yelp, so we're expanding our reach.
And then we learn something from all of that, and that informs both what we do with Yelp Audiences, but how we think more broadly, for instance, on the SEM side.
Right.
So that all fits together, I think, as a cohesive approach to expanding the audience that we can reach or provide to advertisers.
And is Yelp Audiences attracting a new type of advertiser onto the platform, or is it just expanding the breadth for current advertisers, or both?
It really is both.
Yep.
Yeah.
Okay. I said I wanted to circle back on metrics. Anything else you think of as you're rolling out new products? It sounds like you're consistently hitting on the head, "Hey, is this driving engagement on the platform, and is it productive for both advertiser and consumer?"
Yeah. So I would say it's both: Is it driving engagement, but also, is it driving disengagement? We care a lot about that.
Yeah.
We don't want to be in a position where we've rolled something out, and actually, we've damaged the consumer experience. So that's definitely top of mind. You know, it does depend on the particular product area. For instance, click-through rate, enormously important-
Yep.
... obviously, for us in that matching algorithm. But just where do people click? Why do they click on it? When we roll out a new ad format, that's also an opportunity for us to increase the amount of advertising without increasing perceived ad load. So think of a carousel.
Right.
So you have multiple ad units in there, say four. You see two or three. It's a single row. We may have had a different ad unit there in the past that may have been a single ad, but now we have four ads.
Right.
Now, from the consumer experience, it still needs to be relevant. So then it's, what is the format of that? Which are the ad units that we're picking to show to that consumer? Are they relevant to them? Do they perceive it as relevant? So we're looking at all of those different things, and then that opens up a whole 'nother area that I think is very important and just reflects what I believe is a sophisticated approach, which is, we want to get to a point where we do a whole page auction. So when a visitor comes, we are running an auction to determine the market clearing price for that visitor at that time in order to match them. So we want to do whole page auction. So for all the ad units-
Yep.
... what's the right mix of ads to show? And then dynamic page composition, which is for that visitor, for this query, in that category, at this time, in that geography, how can we adjust the layout to enhance both the experience for the consumer, but also the propensity to click through on the ad?
Right.
That is a very high order level of optimization that we're aiming for, and we are well on that journey.
Yeah. Right, because the further down somebody is in the funnel, the more in market, the more relevant it is for them, the more they don't even perceive ad loads, actually, because they're-
Exactly.
... they're in market right now.
Exactly. And I would say a few things around that. One, you know, one thing that you don't get to shed on Yelp when you advertise is your rating and your review. That follows you.
Right.
I think that's very, very important. So when you see an ad unit, you're still getting valuable information. This is a four-star business with 79 reviews. So I think that's one thing. Also, I think it's important to appreciate who are our consumers. So people visiting Yelp, more than 50% of visitors come from households with income over $100,000.
Yep.
So they're more affluent. 77% of visitors to Yelp have some college, college degree, or advanced degree, so educated. You have people who want to do research. They want to be informed when they make a decision. Now, that's a very valuable audience, of course, for advertisers to reach. They're also very discerning.
Right.
If you're able to show them information that's relevant and they click through and we're paid, but it leads them to reading something that informs that decision, they have received value for the experience on Yelp, and we've been able to monetize it.
Got it. This will just be a quick follow-up, but with third-party cookie deprecation coming in 2024, are you seeing any impact from that on advertisers' interest in audience? Maybe more broadly, do you see audiences evolving? How do you see it evolving in the years ahead as third-party cookies go away? Because you bring your own first-party data to bear as well.
Exactly. So, we do have a lot of first-party data. I think that's actually extremely important in a post-
Yep.
... a cookie environment. It's still emerging. I think the timetable has moved a few times-
Yep.
... from Google, Google on cookie deprecation, but it sounds like it is coming in the third quarter of 2024. We've been preparing for that. Certainly, in the short run here, it hasn't impacted anything-
Right.
... because they still exist, and so we as long as we're delivering value, advertisers wanna use Yelp Audiences. But it's certainly something that we think about, and there's emerging industry consensus on how to approach attribution. I think there's still some adjustment to come. There's Privacy Sandbox, which Google has obviously been, I think, scaling, but it's not yet quite settled-
Yep.
... what the industry method is going to be. I think it's important to appreciate that advertisers will have to share more information in order for ad platforms to be able to measure the incrementality of the advertising that's been provided.
Right.
So in a sense, maybe we are, as an ad platform with first-party data, but also very capable of ingesting data, analyzing, and returning results, we may be in an even better position because we're gonna have more information to determine the ROI of the ads that they have placed. And as a reminder, we're click-based, so you don't pay unless the person clicks through.
Right.
We're bottom of the funnel, high intent, performance-based, measurable. So I think that puts us in a terrific spot, but I do think it's still emerging.
Okay. Last one on products, and then we'll move on. We can't talk this year about products without hitting inevitably on AI. How do you internally view AI? Is it a threat? Is it an opportunity? Is it a bit of both, I think you're probably going to say. And then I have a follow-up to that.
Yeah. Unequivocally, we see it as an opportunity. We've been using what is commonly called AI, but machine learning-
Yep.
For almost the entire history of the company. One of the real assets of Yelp is content moderation, and that's done algorithmically. We also have a human component to that, but it's predominantly algorithmic, so we're very used to it. On large language models, we actually started tracking those a number of years ago. We started using them in the middle of 2022, so it wasn't when OpenAI announced ChatGPT, and obviously, everybody became very focused on them. We were already applying them. We're applying them in ways that enhance the product. In our Request a Quote product, that's where you're going through that flow, and we're asking you some questions. We've used it to refine the questions there.
It turns out, in search, it really matters to have the right synonyms, so we've used it to help enhance the set of synonyms that we use when we run the matching algorithm. When you write a review, we're indicating at the top, have you covered food, in the case of a restaurant, food, service, and decor-
Right.
or atmosphere. So we're really applying them. But I think the big opportunity, which I think is self-evident, is just to make the experience much more conversational.
Yep.
We do intermediate the interaction between service pros and consumers today. We revamped our message center, which is really an inbox.
Yep.
But we've added what we call Request a Call. We're adding text. We're adding the ability to reply through email. We're masking phone numbers, so it's still very privacy-oriented. But I think we'd all can appreciate where this technology can go, which is, rather than having a predetermined question tree for Request a Quote-
Right.
... it's tell me about your project, ask a couple of follow-up questions, ingest that data, move it over to your matching algorithm, inform the way the algorithm ranks the results, display those results, and help the service pro to improve the quality of their response to that opportunity.
Right.
We think that we're incredibly well-positioned because it's not new. We have that foundation-
Yep.
- the database, the ability to move the data around, to compute quickly, and then to surface it in the right way, in the right place.
Yep.
I don't think that's a small capability, actually. I think that's actually a very sophisticated capability that we have. So when we think about it, we definitely see this as an opportunity.
So, this might be paying more to come, and that's, I think, the way we think about it. But as a publisher with, you know, decades of pristine data, trusted reviews, you know, I don't know - I don't think we've had a court case yet where we've got to the bottom of, "Hey, you can't just set this thing loose on my content to feed your model."
Yeah.
Any thoughts? Maybe, again, maybe it's still early days, but do you view that as a threat, or are you like, "No, we're... This is our data," and is there a licensing opportunity?
We're absolutely exploring ways to license.
Yep.
Personally, I think there's three levels to where this goes. I think there's the raw data. These are enormous data sets that are being used to train. And yes, your data is rich and relevant and valuable, but as part of that first level of training an LLM-
Yep.
... I'm not sure it's the most valuable piece. But then there's a second thing, which is, okay, I've created the LLM, now someone makes a query. What gets returned, I think, is very valuable.
Yep.
And then there are insights on top of that, which, by the way, you can use the LLM to mine, which I think is extremely valuable.
Yep.
So we're looking at it at each of those three levels. Obviously, we want to be paid for our content, but we don't want to stop there. We actually want to move up the value chain. At the end of the day, first and foremost, we're going to make Yelp a more valuable property, is the first order of business-
Yep.
... for us before we're too worried about all the licensing opportunities, but we're absolutely exploring it.
Okay. I want to move on to self-serve and multi-location. They're now over 50% of the business, but longer term, where does that get to? How should we think about that as a driver of profitability for your business? And-
Yep.
And then we can segue into margins.
Yeah. So we do have self-serve as a way for SMB advertisers to come and sign up and set ad spend and set their targeting. That was growing about 25% in the third quarter. It's about 20% of total ad revenue. We obviously love that-
Yep.
... because there's no human involved, so it's much higher margin for us. We still see plenty, plenty of opportunity there. Folks who come in through self-serve retain longer.
Yep.
So that's the first piece. Then we have our multi-location business, which is mid-market and national or enterprise accounts. That accounts for about 30% of the business. Combined, they're 51%. And obviously, enterprise marketing spend is enormous, billions of dollars, so there's plenty, plenty of room to go. We spent a lot of time on this theme of product, building out our product set for those large enterprise advertisers, so that we have products up and down the funnel, both on and off Yelp, with attribution. You have to do all of that, and that's been many years in the making. And then, of course, you need a good enterprise sales team that has built relationships and communicate value, and that we've also built. So, we think that there's plenty of opportunity ahead for us.
Parlaying that into a discussion on margins. Nice improvement in margin this year, again. You said headcount is gonna be flat, going forward this year. SBC is moving to 8% by 2025. So a lot of things you're doing, to really manage OpEx, and to push those margins. How should we think about margin? And you talked about how self-serve is helping out margins as well. How should we think about, you know, margin progression in the short to medium term?
So maybe I can just start with SBC for a moment. So what we said as part of our Q3 earnings was, all things equal, the changes that we've made and now communicated to employees around the shift from equity compensation to cash compensation, equity or stock-based comp would reduce $20 million in 2023, cash expense would increase about $20 million. Now, something that's very important to appreciate about that is, when we say $20 million in-year, that's $80 million of grants because it's a four-year vest.
Yep.
So we're not granting $80 million in equity, and that each year is, also, we didn't grant $80 million when we make that shift. So this is a very big step forward on stock-based comp. Now, obviously, if you reduce stock-based comp expense, it's not gonna add back. So adjusted EBITDA has to go through a transition here as we shift from a one-to-one cash to equity over time, because you're not stacking all of that equity.
Yep.
Then we believe that there will be margin improvement. More broadly, we strongly believe, and I think we're demonstrating it, that our product-led strategy can lead to margin expansion. And this year, as we've performed and we've exceeded our guidance, we've been able to basically flow all of that through net of cost of revenue, through to adjusted EBITDA. And 28% in the third quarter, I think, is a strong proof point for the leverage that we can generate in the business. Now, as we go through the year, typically costs are relatively flat. That was true in 2022. It has been true through the third quarter in 2023, and implicit to our guide for Q4, and revenue does increase over the course of the year. So you get that. That's where the margin comes from.
I think sometimes as we start the year, people are uncertain because our margin in the first quarter is lower.
Yep.
Then the question is: Well, can Yelp achieve that expanded margin later in the year? What I would point out historically is that expenses are relatively flat. Revenue increases over the course of the year, and several years in a row now, we've been able to flow that through to generate the EBITDA. But there is a shape to the EBITDA through the year as we increase the overall EBITDA performance.
Okay. Okay. I wanna briefly... we have a little bit of time left. I wanna hit on capital allocation. You've listed M&A as a component of your capital allocation strategy. Mentioned tuck-in acquisitions, specifically. Are there areas that you think you could benefit the most from such acquisitions? One of the biggest questions we get is, this is a fragmented space. There's a lot of players, some are performing better than others. And so what are you seeing?
So we do have a team. We do evaluate M&A opportunities, specifically around capital allocation and tuck-in acquisitions.
Yep.
Our capital allocation philosophy is to return capital in excess of a target cash balance. That target cash balance is determined by looking at our operating cash requirements, a buffer to that, and holding capital on the balance sheet for tuck-in acquisition. In around tuck-in acquisitions, things that we look for are things that will either enhance the experience or accelerate time to market. So for instance, Yelp has become much more visual. There's more photographs. That's the way consumers interact with media today, and more video.
Yep.
So we want to enable people to be able to edit video or include that in an easy, seamless way in their reviews, or enhance the photos in some way, or at least upload them in a relevant way. So that might be an example of a tuck-in acquisition. On the ad tech stack, things that enable us to be more effective in matching, for instance, it could be a bidder or a pacer. These are components to the ad tech stack, and we do run that auction. So getting the bidding algorithm right is important. That is something we have built. But as we talk about going off Yelp, bidding for ad units off Yelp is something that we care about, so that could be relevant. You wanna pace the ad through the month.
Yep.
That's what pacers do. So there's both these technical things that are invisible that would make us better, or they're features for consumers that we think that could enhance their experience and enable them to engage with Yelp in a way that they enjoy and that is a benefit for us as a publisher.
We're out of time. Last point, what do you think the Street still underappreciates or is less understood by the Street about, about Yelp?
I think our durability.
Yep.
10th quarter in a row of double-digit growth, and we have shared our perspective on being able to drive leverage. We delivered 28%, as I said, in the third quarter. We think we can drive long-term profitable growth, and I think that we have been proving that by our consistent delivery quarter after quarter.
The Rule of 40 company now.
We don't mind Rule of 40.
Good. Awesome. Well, David, thank you very much. Really appreciate it.
Thanks so much for having me.
Thanks.