Yelp Inc (NYSE: YELP) Q1 2020 Earnings Call Transcript

Yelp Inc (YELP) Q1 2020 earnings call dated May. 07, 2020

Corporate Participants:

James Miln — Vice President, Financial Planning and Analysis

Jeremy Stoppelman — Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer

David Schwarzbach — Chief Financial Officer

Jed Nachman — Chief Operating Officer

Analysts:

Colin Sebastian — Baird — Analyst

Cory Carpenter — JPMorgan — Analyst

Dan Salmon — BMO Capital Markets — Analyst

Michael Ng — Goldman Sachs — Analyst

Shweta Khajuria — RBC Capital Markets — Analyst

Richard Kramer — Arete Cap Research — Analyst

Rod — Wedbush — Analyst

Presentation:

Operator

Good day, and welcome to the Yelp First Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to turn the conference over to James Miln, Vice President of Financial Planning and Analysis. Please go ahead.

James Miln — Vice President, Financial Planning and Analysis

Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us on Yelp’s first quarter earnings conference call. Joining me today are Yelp’s Chief Executive Officer, Jeremy Stoppelman; Chief Financial Officer, David Schwarzbach; and Chief Operating Officer, Jed Nachman. We published the shareholder letter on our Investor Relations website and with the SEC about an hour ago 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 harbor 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 publically 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 in 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.

Jeremy Stoppelman — Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, James, and welcome, everyone. At the beginning of the year, we, like everyone else, could not have imagined where we’d be today as a community. The global pandemic has disrupted any sense of normalcy for the world, and we’ve been witnessing the impacts on consumer behavior in real-time. While the physical distancing measures and shelter-in-place orders have inevitably dealt a significant blow to many local businesses, this crisis has reinforced for us the critical role that Yelp plays and will continue to play connecting people with great local businesses.

We moved quickly to take steps to navigate our business through these unprecedented times. To protect the safety of employees and do our part to help flatten the curve, we took early and swift action to migrate our workforce to work from home. As a company with thousands of employees, I am proud of the operational agility and speed with which our team has been able to adapt to this new work-from-home environment given the difficult circumstances. We prioritized efforts to help our consumers and local businesses stay connected with Yelp’s trusted content during this time.

Our product team moved fast to create new features for businesses to showcase relevant offerings such as virtual estimates or whether they offer delivery or takeout during COVID-19. These new attributes have been rapidly adopted by business centers with more than 120,000 active locations by the end of April. In addition, as part of our efforts to support local businesses, on March 20, we announced a $25 million relief initiative primarily to support local restaurants and nightlife businesses, which have been particularly devastated by COVID-19.

We also took the difficult but necessary steps to reduce our workforce and expenses to help maintain financial stability in the quarters to come. From a balance sheet perspective, we ended the quarter with $491 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities, and no debt. We believe we have the financial strength and liquidity to weather the uncertainty of the pandemic under a range of scenarios, allowing us to continue to focus on the health and well-being of the Yelp community, our employees, consumers and local businesses.

In summary, we entered this pandemic on the back of strong performance over the preceding quarters and into the first two months of this year. Despite the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in March, our first quarter revenue was $250 million, up 6% compared to the first quarter of 2019. We responded quickly to the health crisis and made the decisions we believe were necessary to preserve our financial liquidity and maintain our operational capability. By doing this, we believe Yelp will emerge uniquely positioned to help local economies through the recovery, both partnering with our existing advertisers and helping grow new ones.

With that, I’d like to turn it over to David.

David Schwarzbach — Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Jeremy. Since this is my first earnings call with Yelp, I wanted to share a few thoughts around why I joined the team and to share a few first impressions. I’ll then move on to our view around the second quarter. At its heart, an advertising business depends on content, consumer interest and reach. Yelp has all 3. We have highly valuable content through trusted reviews. We enjoy a strong consumer brand built over the past 15 years, one with appeal that weighs towards more affluent households, and we deliver value to advertisers across a broad range of categories from restaurants to home services. These strengths remain true even with the current pandemic and together, they provide the foundation for us to grow as the economy recovers.

As I’ve worked with the team over the past two months, I’ve seen impressive operational agility in difficult circumstances as we transition to work from home and then had to take significant actions to reduce expenses. Those actions made with careful consideration reflect the commitment to financial discipline while also helping to ensure that we continue to drive product innovation and reach business owners through our sales organization. We believe that the steps we have taken align expenses to reduced revenue across a broad range of scenarios.

As Jeremy said, we also have a strong balance sheet with $491 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities at March 31. We currently have no exposure to corporate securities. We continue to take additional steps to further increase our liquidity. Most recently, adding a revolving credit facility in May with Wells Fargo for $75 million. While we are mindful of dilution, we’ve indefinitely postponed share buybacks given current conditions. Taken together, I am confident in our ability to weather the current storm from a liquidity perspective and to emerge well positioned for growth.

Now I’ll turn to our thoughts around Q2. While we are not in a position to provide our usual guidance for this quarter or the full year given the current uncertainties, we continue to closely monitor business performance and make decisions to ensure our financial strength. As described in our shareholder letter, we’ve seen a steep decline in traffic, fewer people going out to eat and shop, coupled with broad-based shelter-in-place orders that resulted in an extraordinary number of local businesses closing or operating at limited capacity. This, in turn, has understandably led to many of our advertisers canceling, pausing or reducing their spend on Yelp.

In California and New York, two of our strongest regions, and two of the first states to order residents to shelter-in-place, we began to see both traffic and advertiser budgets begin to stabilize in the second half of April. While we are still closing our books for April, we expect revenue to decline by approximately 35% compared to April of 2019. It is important to recognize that our revenue may be lower in May and June due to a number of factors. While we are seeing some easing of consumer restrictions, it remains a very challenging environment for small local businesses, and we may see more of our advertisers pause, reduce or cancel budgets.

To support many of these businesses, we may expand upon our relief initiatives, and this could have a direct impact on both our advertising and services revenue. With recent changes to our sales force, we may not be able to maintain productivity levels as time passes, and we continue to work remotely. In addition, the rates of recovery and consumer behavior and user engagement will impact revenue through the fulfillment of ad budgets and the cost per click we deliver, both of which remain uncertain.

On the cost side, we expect a reduction in GAAP expenses of approximately $70 million compared to Q1. This excludes a onetime restructuring charge between $4 million and $5 million for the year. It’s important to recognize that our cost basis is driven predominantly by our headcount. As revenue recovers, we plan on restoring more employees to full time. As a result, we anticipate our expenses will rise in the second half of the year.

As we see improvement in business performance, we plan to selectively reinvest in our business. We will be guided in that reinvestment by opportunities to drive profitable growth over the long-term across channels, categories and geographies while maintaining our financial discipline.

With that, operator, please open up the line for questions.

Questions and Answers:

Operator

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Colin Sebastian of Baird. Please go ahead.

Colin Sebastian — Baird — Analyst

Great, thanks, good afternoon. Jeremy, maybe a little bit early, but beyond managing through the current environment, are you thinking of any longer-term changes to the company’s strategic priorities? Or is the goal to get back to the progress that you were making earlier in the year? And then as a follow-up on the multi-location, given some of the relative strength we’re seeing in national chain restaurants and other businesses, can you talk about maybe some of the relative demand trends from that group in your business sitting here in early May and maybe some of the B2B performance marketing that you plan to leverage with that group.

Jeremy Stoppelman — Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer

Colin, this is Jeremy. I’ll take the first half of the question, and maybe Jed can hop on with the national question. But as far as changes to our priority authorities. Certainly, we’re looking at our product development pipeline to see if there’s any things that should be done more urgently in light of COVID-19. We already scrambled the jets and got out a bunch of features to help make it easier for businesses to communicate with their customers around things like hours changing, how are they handling pickup and delivery and so forth.

And we’ve actually seen a lot of success as measured by engagement with some of those features. So we have a COVID-19 banner, for instance, that all businesses can put up on their business page. We had 225,000 of those up by the end of April. We launched some new Business Highlights. Those are sort of titles that businesses can put up to highlight specific things about their offering. The we put out some special ones related to COVID and we had 120,000 of them activated by the end of April.

Additionally, Yelp Connect, some which is functionality that allows you to post, both visual and text information to your page and then it also gets pushed out to people that are past customers as well as people that might be interested in your business has seen a pretty nice pickup there with 10,000 businesses activated. And so we’ll continue to push forward on features like those that are extremely relevant in the short-term. And then there’s adjustments I think to the pipeline over the long term things that maybe we hadn’t considered before that now are more urgent.

But I would say, generally, a lot of the things that we were working on are still quite relevant. We’ve seen a lot of strength and resiliency in the local services home and local services category. It’s been less impacted overall. And we have an enormous opportunity, which we still have to monetize more of the leads there. And so many of the projects that we’re already working on continue to be relevant at driving high-value, high-quality leads to our advertisers.

With that, maybe, Jed, you can hop in on the national chain question.

Jed Nachman — Chief Operating Officer

Sure. So in terms of the national chains, they are obviously still operating in a local economy, and they have been hit in varying degrees depending on the segment and category. Obviously, restaurants are still trying to find their footing in this new world. And when we talk about multi-location, it’s kind of everything from mid-market, all the way up to kind of your largest national chains, and then you have to break it down further into kind of QSR versus dining in options. And so there’s a very broad range in terms of how this has impacted. Obviously, pickup and delivery are a dynamic that is within the restaurant segment specifically.

We are seeing a bunch of increased interest on that, although I don’t think, as a rule, most of these large enterprise accounts have really figured out what strategy they’re going to move forward with. And it’s a complex problem, given varying rules and regulations and regulations in different states and different cities. So the most important thing is we’re just aligned with them side-by-side as they’re making their plans to kind of come into a recovery posture and making sure that when they do turn on the spigots in terms of advertising budgets that we’re right there with them.

I would say on the services side, this is an opportunity. We still see folks on the consumer side are still need services. And on the business side, they’re still buying advertising. And so making sure that we’re fully alongside of the services side, too, because that’s going to tend to have a faster recovery than the restaurant piece of the business.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from Cory Carpenter of JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Cory Carpenter — JPMorgan — Analyst

Great, Thanks for the questions, and appreciate the color on April trends in the shareholder letter. I was just hoping you could expand some on what you’re seeing across sales channels and categories over the last month. Maybe, I don’t know if it’s possible to quantify, but how far ahead New York and California may be than other geographies? And then you touched on some what’s the B2B performance marketing, maybe just more color on your strategy to drive reengagement.

Jeremy Stoppelman — Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer

I can take the one on categories and segments. Overall, in terms of channels and categories, the services segment obviously, as we indicated, has not been hit as hard as the restaurant side, both from a traffic and from a revenue perspective. We were certainly encouraged by April seeing at least a leveling off of the decline and a stabilization, which has been really important. Our sales force productivity has been as good as we could have expected.

We did a huge transition to work from home and the really, did not see any dips in productivities. In aggregate, we’re on an individual basis. And so we’re seeing real strong productivity there. Obviously, you start to look at categories like health and beauty that are impacted as well. And restaurant has obviously taken a bit hit. But overall, I would say the strength has been in the services side of the business, both from a retention and a production perspective.

Jed Nachman — Chief Operating Officer

So Cory, this is David…

Jeremy Stoppelman — Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer

I guess I can take the sorry, go ahead, David.

David Schwarzbach — Chief Financial Officer

So Cory, this is David. When we think about driving advertiser engagement, part of the investment in the sense that we made is we provide relief to our businesses, the $25 million that we announced, was an opportunity to engage with them and bring them back, allowing them the pause for the business. And so one of the things that we’re focused on is ensuring that it’s easy for them to come back and for our sales team to engage. On the B2B marketing side, as you know, we have not invested heavily in Performance marketing, and we haven’t had to. That being said, as we see opportunities there, we’re definitely looking to drive traffic as the economy recovers.

Cory Carpenter — JPMorgan — Analyst

All right, great.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from Dan Salmon of BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Dan Salmon — BMO Capital Markets — Analyst

Great. Everyone, thanks for taking some questions first. First, maybe just return to the restaurant category, specifically, and maybe for Jeremy or Jed, you noted continuing to maintain the high level of investments in national. Can you just remind us what I think that if we step back, notwithstanding the multiple categories of multiple location that the general view that they should rebound more than traditional sort of local restaurants, independent restaurants. So just maybe remind us what are some of the key areas of investment to support the national business, and in particular, your views on whether that may be able to accelerate coming out of it?

And then maybe for David, just welcome to your first your first call, but and we’ll jump right into one about with buybacks being halted, how we should think about expectations for restarting that? What are some of the key milestones you’re looking for? Would love to hear a little bit more on that as well.

Jed Nachman — Chief Operating Officer

I can take the first one on national in terms of the investment. I would start with when we talk about not continuing to invest in that segment, we largely kept the enterprise sales team in place and the infrastructure in there to make sure that we can service those folks in the best way possible. And so those relationships continue today, even where some of those folks have cut down on initial advertising spend. Obviously, we’ve got to take a look at delivery and pickup as a huge opportunity for these folks. Although it’s not the panacea that would totally drive that segment in terms of a quick rebound, I think most folks are just trying to kind of keep their head above water.

Obviously, in-store attribution is going to be a little bit harder given this environment and folks sheltering in place. So an example of one of the things that we’re doing is that Yelp audience platform where we kind of look at folks who have intent to pick up and deliver and can access them in other places around the Internet, and that’s been a product that has seen some uptick recently as a result. But in general, it’s just making sure that we’re providing the kind of the core blocking and tackling so when folks decide they need to start to spend and in various states, and cities start to recover, that we’re right alongside them.

David Schwarzbach — Chief Financial Officer

And Dan, I’ll pick up from Jed there. In terms of share repurchase, one thing, of course, that’s important to appreciate is that over the course of last year, we bought a nearly $500 million of stock. And so it’s much too early to consider share repurchases today. We’ve been extremely focused on liquidity. And as we mentioned, we believe with $491 million at the end of the first quarter, we’re extremely well positioned. We just added the credit facility with Wells. We’re taking other steps. We are mindful of dilution, but it’s much, much too able for us to consider moving back to a position where we’re engaged in share repurchases.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from Michael Ng of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Michael Ng — Goldman Sachs — Analyst

Great, thank you for the question. I was wondering if you could just expand a little bit about the pacing of revenue through the first quarter. I thought it was encouraging to see the acceleration in revenue growth in February to 15%. What drove that acceleration in February? And does that give you confidence that you’ll be able to execute against those same initiatives once the pandemic is over?

Jeremy Stoppelman — Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer

I can jump in on that one. Yes, we were really happy with the way that the year started and looked at that acceleration from January into February at that 15% range. And I think it was a lot of the work that we had started in 2019. Obviously, we had, I think, a 25% year-over-year improvement in retention. That was the largest driver there, continuing to deliver more value to our advertisers per dollar spent was really, really important. And as we saw kind of the need the calendar turnover that became very evident that we saw those retention improvements. Sales productivity continued to be in a very, very healthy place over those first two months and even into the first half of March.

And I think looking forward, we just structurally kind of changed the model over 2019 that was much more heavily reliant on not growing the sales force as much and driving kind of growth while we had a shrinking local sales force and really leaning into the national opportunity and the self-serve opportunity. So all those things kind of came together over the first couple of months of the year. And I suspect that we I would imagine as we come out of this, that we’ll continue to lean in on those channels and continue to make improvements on the retention side as well. And that is a big driver of that productivity and a big driver of the revenue.

Michael Ng — Goldman Sachs — Analyst

Thank you very much.

Operator

The next question comes from Shweta Khajuria of RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Shweta Khajuria — RBC Capital Markets — Analyst

Great, thanks. A quick one, and I’m sorry if this was covered. But Jeremy, could you talk about how you think Yelp will be positioned post-COVID, how differently it will be positioned post-COVID as you think about self-serve as well as larger advertisers that you may multi-location advertisers and your positioning there? And also in terms of your conversations with small businesses, they may not be operating right now, but post-COVID currently, are you in conversations just so that it is a smoother on-boarding post-COVID?

Jeremy Stoppelman — Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer

Shweta, this is Jeremy. Yes, I would say one of the things we’re really focused on is making sure we are top of mind with consumers. And we think one of the most important ways to do that is ensuring that our information is as up-to-date as possible. So we’re spending a lot of time and resources on making sure that things like hours are correct, how is the business handling itself during this time, what can you buy from particular businesses, can we automate some of that, especially for larger businesses?

You mentioned national. Obviously, it’s harder for a business with thousands of locations to keep everything up-to-date and to making sure that we have the resourcing to help them stay top of mind with consumers. I think all of that work is going to help keep that connection to consumers. And ultimately, that’s what businesses are coming for is valuable leads, getting connected to that consumer that’s ready to buy. And so that’s where our focus remains is connecting with those consumers to businesses.

And then you had a second question, which was I didn’t catch it. Let’s see. It is post-COVID, self-serve self-serve and multi-location, how are we going to change that? I think we are basically open to all the different channels. We acquire customers through a variety of different means, obviously, local sales teams, self-serve. Multi-location is more of an enterprise relationship. And I think we want to be very thoughtful about how we bring on all that recovering revenue. And so we’re going to be looking for the most efficient channels.

We’ve gotten better and better at self-serve, for instance, that’s a great place to reacquire customers because we can reach out to them, maybe people that have churned and with one click, they can be activated again on Yelp and spending with us to grow their business coming out of COVID. So we are taking steps right now to make ourselves more efficient as we ultimately come out of this pandemic so we could reacquire any business that we’ve lost. And then also just ideally grow more efficiently and quickly.

Shweta Khajuria — RBC Capital Markets — Analyst

Thanks, Jeremy.

Jeremy Stoppelman — Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer

Sure.

Operator

The next question comes from Richard Kramer of Arete Cap Research. Please go ahead.

Richard Kramer — Arete Cap Research — Analyst

Yeah. Thank you very much. It’s for Arete Research. Two questions, please. First of all, I’d like to ask about how you see the value of the $210 million cumulative reviews. That’s traditionally, in a number of categories, been very important to Yelp’s business. But obviously, they will age rather more quickly in this COVID environment. So how do you see that review base going forward as a key asset for the company?

And then I guess the second question. You cited the increase in provision for doubtful accounts. Could you give us a bit of a sense of how far through that process you are and understanding how many of your, both claimed locations and current advertisers will make it through to the other side and whether that changes the sort of scope of the business or the nature of the business in terms of how many of your potential advertisers can weather the storm?

Jeremy Stoppelman — Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer

Richard, I’ll take that first half of the question. Maybe David can take the second one there. But we do have, as you pointed out, an incredibly rich corpus of reviews that has been proven to be extremely valuable and durable. And we continue to have an engaged community of reviewers, especially our elites are worth calling out, which are our model users, and we have maintained a large community management team that works from home currently and engages with those key community members. What we generally see is contributions do move along with traffic.

And so as traffic goes down, you would expect to see contributions, as people are experiencing to your businesses, will go down. I don’t expect all this 210 million reviews to be worthless anytime soon. I think obviously, and we all hope that many local businesses will survive even if they’re on pause for a period of time and their past performance is a pretty good indicator to consumers of how they’ll perform in the future. That said, we still continue to get quite a bit of content from our community of reviewers still writing, and we’re still engaging them with our community with our community managers.

And we continue to develop new features and functionality geared towards contributors to make sure that they stay engaged through the pandemic and to the other side when things can come, we hope, roaring back. So we are conscious of trying to maintain that connection with consumers. That’s top of mind for us since that’s such a key part of our business over the long term.

David Schwarzbach — Chief Financial Officer

This is David. So there’s really two parts to the question you asked, provision for doubtful accounts. And then what are we seeing in terms of advertisers, but really businesses surviving? And just to answer the second first, it’s still very, very early. And many of these folks are still working through their survival strategy, and they’re obviously also applying for loans. So we ourselves are not going to know for some time yet where that’s going to land. So unfortunately, that will be something that we’re all going to see, as Jeremy said, we hope, of course, that many survive.

In terms of the provision for doubtful accounts, it was significantly higher at the end of the first quarter, as you’d expect, as a variety of these businesses took steps to trim advertising or already in a position where they could no longer pay bills. And so that was definitely elevated. What I’d expect is for us to see a somewhat elevated level for a period of time, but that provision for doubtful accounts really is a monthly item. And so we’ll see how that evolves. As the overall recovery takes place, I think the duration of that will certainly influence the ability of people to continue to pay or not.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from Ygal Arounian of Wedbush. Please go ahead.

Rod — Wedbush — Analyst

Hey guys, This is Rod [Phonetic] on the line for Ygal. I wanted to ask on self-serve. You talked about it a little bit already, and you called it in the letter that we’re seeing good strength in February and obviously, some channel could reaccelerate quickly. But by the same token, I imagine it’s also maybe a channel where the pullback was a bit faster. So kind of what’s been the impact on the environment on self-serve specifically? If we can get some color there?

And kind of is it at a level that gives you confidence, they’d be depressed but in a level that you think you can reaccelerate it quickly? And do how you balance that with the changing dynamics of the sales force? You were talking about this a little bit ago in terms of the go-forward and kind of the strategies for coming out on the other side, so just a bit more color on that would be helpful.

Jeremy Stoppelman — Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer

Sure. I can start off, and if David wants to jump in after, feel free. In terms of self-serve versus our rep sales channel, we’ve actually seen them in line in terms of, obviously, there’s a mix shift as a result of COVID. But we’re really encouraged with the progress we’ve made on the self-serve channel. And I think kind of a proxy for that right now, first of all, if you look at claimed businesses, they’re up we’ve had significant progress year-over-year on claimed businesses, which shows that businesses are interacting with what is the self-serve platform.

And then you look at all those features that have been adopted as part of the COVID effort and whether that’s business highlights or the special COVID banners or the Connect product that we’re seeing upwards of 10,000 folks who have kind of chosen to kind of use that as well. It really bodes well for self-serve over the long term. And what you really want in these periods of times is engagement. And there might be a subset of businesses that today, in April, May, cannot afford to go advertise. They’re worried about survival and their employees and kind of coming out of this thing and navigating through their various circumstances. But they’re still engaging and understand that Yelp is an important platform and an important communication platform for them.

And we’ve been making improvements both in our kind of platform as well with a new business owner site that is a lot more rich in terms of the features and functionality, and we’re really pleased with the engagement that we’re seeing thus far. So I think it bodes well for coming out of this as a continued shift towards self-serve. We’re always going to have a local sales force, and we’ll be really mindful of how we grow that kind of coming out of this and make sure that, a, we have enough coverage, but also that we continue down the path of trying to get more efficient with the channels that we do have.

David Schwarzbach — Chief Financial Officer

Rod, this is David. We didn’t quite catch the second part of your question there.

Rod — Wedbush — Analyst

Yes. No, I was just kind of asking how in terms of like the go-forward and coming out on the other side of this, how do you maybe strike the balance in terms of moving into self-serve in kind of like the more rapid response versus the changing dynamics of the sales force, especially given the increased relevance of the sales force given the current environment, maybe leaning into a bit more heavily. So just kind of going forward, how do you balance the two different channels and try to kind of prioritize on the flywheel? Like, what’s the best combination to be emerging out of this the strongest?

Jeremy Stoppelman — Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer

I can take a crack at that one, too. It’s really looking at making sure that we’re serving the customer whichever way they want to get served. And we can see that some folks are always going to want to have a self-provisioning interface and not want to talk to a salesperson. And there are folks that no matter what you do want to get somebody on the phone and actually have them walk them through an advertising program.

So I guess going back to my kind of last answer, we’re going to be able to see that in real time, although I do believe that self-serve is very well positioned coming out of this. And then in terms of the multi-location, we believe, are still very, very early in this opportunity for Yelp. And certainly, at this time, notwithstanding, when we come out on the other end, it’s going to be a really important segment for us.

Rod — Wedbush — Analyst

Okay, great, thanks very much.

Operator

[Operator Closing Remarks]