I am past the point of wanting another explanation from Yelp management. I want them gone. The stock is around $21-$22, down from $47.34 at the end of 2023, despite nearly $2 billion of historical repurchases and a float that has been ground down to roughly 52.5 million shares. They have spent years buying the stock, retiring an enormous number of shares and telling shareholders about all the value they are creating, while the actual value of a Yelp share has been obliterated. If you can dramatically shrink the denominator and the stock still gets cut in half, perhaps the problem is no longer the denominator. Perhaps it is the people running the company.
And every time Yelp disappoints, there seems to be another explanation that conveniently originates somewhere outside Yelp. Restaurants are struggling. The consumer is weak. Input costs are high. Gas costs are high. Inflation. Tariff uncertainty. People aren't eating out as much. Weather and seasonality. Then this year David Schwarzbach actually pointed to the “conflict in the Middle East” as a reason advertiser budgets softened in March. Iran. We are now at the stage where a local advertising company headquartered in San Francisco is explaining its numbers partly through a Middle East war. Maybe every one of these things had some incremental effect. That is not the point. The point is that after enough years, enough quarters and enough outside explanations, management starts sounding like the guy who has a different reason every month why the rent is late. At some point the answer can simply be: you aren't doing a very good job.
The really insulting part is that there is apparently no comparable economic cycle for executive compensation. Jeremy Stoppelman received $10.26 million of reported compensation in 2025 and has $8.89 million of target compensation for 2026. Jed Nachman, who oversees sales, marketing and administration, has a 2026 target of about $4.92 million. Schwarzbach is around $4.82 million. Yelp likes to describe executive pay as heavily “at risk,” but half of target equity is plain RSUs that vest with time. Apparently shareholders get performance risk while management gets retention risk. The stock can go from $47 to $21, management can explain that restaurants are having a hard time and there is a war thousands of miles away, and everyone upstairs continues collecting compensation packages that would suggest they are running one of the great compounders in America.
Then look at the capital allocation. Yelp repurchased $292 million of stock in 2025, another $175 million in the first half of 2026 and another $25 million in July. It spent roughly $271 million acquiring Hatch, drew $100 million on its revolver and then paused the buyback so it could pay the revolver down. So after years of telling us Yelp shares were worth buying, they managed to reduce financial flexibility right around the time the stock became cheaper than almost all of those purchases. I hope Hatch is spectacular, because this team has certainly paid itself as though it knows exactly what it is doing.
I don't need Yelp to discover some magical new KPI. I don't care about another slide showing Yelp Assistant engagement or another conference appearance where management explains that Other Revenue is exciting. Yelp is a profitable company with a famous brand, valuable local data, substantial cash generation, licensing opportunities, Hatch, Host and a tiny share count. Yet the market assigns the whole thing a garbage valuation because nobody seems to trust what management will do with the assets. That is fixable. Fire the people who have presided over the collapse, bring in adults whose compensation actually depends on making shareholders money, put every asset and expense on the table and tell the new CEO he has twelve months to prove Yelp belongs as an independent public company. If not, sell it. The easiest way for YELP to go up may have nothing to do with Iran, tariffs, restaurant traffic, gas prices or the next AI feature. **It may simply be Jeremy Stoppelman and this management team leaving.s**