Yelp Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Yelp first quarter 2021 earnings call. All participants will be in listen only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touch tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to James Milne, Senior Vice President of Finance and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us on Yelp's first caller 2021 earnings conference call. Joining me today are Yelp's Chief Executive Officer, Jeremy Stoppelman, Chief Financial Officer, David Chwasbach, and Chief Operating Officer, Jed Nockman. We published a shareholder letter on our investor relations website and with the SEC and hope everyone had a chance to read it. We'll provide some brief opening comments and then turn to your questions. Now I'll read our safe harvest statement. We'll make certain statements today that are forward-looking and involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Please note that these forward-looking statements reflect our opinions only as of the date of this call, and we undertake no obligation to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. In addition, we are subject to a number of risks that may significantly impact our business and financial results. Please refer to our SEC filings as well as our shareholder letter. for a more detailed description of the risk factors that may affect our results. During our call today, we'll discuss adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin, which are non-GAAP financial measures. These measures should not be considered as an isolation from or as a substitute for financial information prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. In our shareholder letter released this afternoon and our filings with the SEC, each of which is posted on our website, you will find additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP financial measures, as well as historical reconciliations of GAAP net income to both adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin. And with that, I will turn the call over to Jeremy.

Thanks, James, and welcome, everyone. Our first quarter results represent a strong start to the year, driven by the success of our go-to-market shift and an increased focus on product innovation, which together comprise the foundation of our next stage of growth. We saw record performance for North Services categories, self-serve channel, and non-term advertiser budget retention. Revenue growth in the self-serve channel accelerated once again to approximately 30% year over year in the first quarter. Services revenue performance was driven by ongoing strength in home services, which increased by nearly 15% year over year. At the same time, we're seeing consumer traffic return with the recovery in local economies, benefiting businesses in our more COVID-impacted categories. Demand from these businesses increased over the course of the first quarter. More recently, the encouraging traffic recovery trends we saw in the first quarter continued in April, page views and searches for home services businesses continue to exceed pre-pandemic levels while page views and searches for restaurants have rebounded 40 percent from december 2020. building on the strong momentum of our q1 performance we're investing in product development marketing and multi-location sales to support our initiatives and deliver more valued advertisers We believe this will enable us to drive growth and scale our business in a more profitable way over the long term through increased revenue retention and a more efficient go-to-market approach. In the first quarter, lower CPCs contributed to record non-term advertiser budget retention. We were able to achieve these results with local sales headcount remaining at approximately 50% of pre-pandemic levels, which also enabled us to improve net loss by 10 million year over year to 6 million and deliver a 19% adjusted EBITDA margin while heavily investing in our growth initiatives. We are pleased with this start to the year and expect our investments to continue benefiting both revenue and adjusted EBITDA over the long term. Together with the structural changes we've made to our business over the past year, we believe we are well positioned to fully participate in the economic recovery and to deliver long-term sustainable growth in the years to come. With that, I'd like to turn it over to David.