Wall Street Gives Yelp Five-Star Review as Stock Soars 23 Percent

One day after Yelp easily beat Wall Street analysts’ expectations for the second quarter, the online review site’s stock climbed 23 percent, to $51.50.

Trading activity surged, with volume registering 6.5 times the average.

Cantor Fitzgerald maintained its “buy” rating and bumped up its price target to $47, while RBC and Mark Mahaney maintained its “market perform” rating, but admitted, “We clearly have been wrong so far.”

The Yelp Platform and the company’s related partnership strategy were big areas of interest on yesterday’s earnings call. CEO Jeremy Stoppelman maintained that the on-site transactions the platform allows for are aimed at improving the user experience for Yelp users, and not at maximizing the revenue Yelp gets from integrating partners, such as OpenTable and Delivery.com.

Still, some analysts think the company has big revenue potential outside of advertising.

“While management underplayed new revenue streams on the call,” Cantor Fitzgerald’s Youssef Squali wrote today in a research note, “we believe e-commerce revenue from food delivery orders, table reservations, movie ticket purchases, coupons, etc., could offer significant upside over the intermediate- and longer-term.”