Reviewing Yelp (NYSE:YELP) & Vivid Seats (NASDAQ:SEAT)

Yelp (NYSE:YELP) and Vivid Seats (NASDAQ:SEAT) are both small-cap communication services companies, but which is the better investment? We will contrast the two businesses based on the strength of their profitability, analyst recommendations, earnings, institutional ownership, dividends, valuation and risk.

Profitability

This table compares Yelp and Vivid Seats’ net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Yelp	N/A	N/A	N/A
Vivid Seats	N/A	N/A	N/A

Volatility & Risk

Yelp has a beta of 0.45, indicating that its stock price is 55% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Vivid Seats has a beta of 1.14, indicating that its stock price is 14% more volatile than the S&P 500.

Analyst Recommendations

This is a summary of recent recommendations for Yelp and Vivid Seats, as provided by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Yelp	3	3	1	0	1.71
Vivid Seats	2	6	2	0	2.00

Yelp currently has a consensus target price of $25.57, suggesting a potential upside of 36.80%. Vivid Seats has a consensus target price of $10.27, suggesting a potential upside of 325.30%. Given Vivid Seats’ stronger consensus rating and higher probable upside, analysts clearly believe Vivid Seats is more favorable than Yelp.

Institutional and Insider Ownership

90.1% of Yelp shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 39.9% of Vivid Seats shares are held by institutional investors. 8.3% of Yelp shares are held by insiders. Comparatively, 60.5% of Vivid Seats shares are held by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, endowments and hedge funds believe a company will outperform the market over the long term.

Valuation and Earnings

This table compares Yelp and Vivid Seats”s revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Yelp	$1.47 billion	0.69	$113.41 million	$2.09	8.94
Vivid Seats	$518.83 million	0.05	-$511.58 million	($45.51)	-0.05

Yelp has higher revenue and earnings than Vivid Seats. Vivid Seats is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Yelp, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Summary

Yelp beats Vivid Seats on 6 of the 11 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Yelp

Yelp Inc. operates a platform that connects consumers with local businesses in the United States and internationally. The company's platform covers various categories, including restaurants, shopping, beauty and fitness, health, and other categories, as well as home, local, auto, professional, pets, events, real estate, and financial services. It provides free and paid advertising products to businesses, which include cost-per-click advertising and multi-location Ad products, as well as enables businesses to deliver targeted advertising to large and high-intent audience; and business listing page products. The company also offers other services comprising Yelp Guest Manager, a subscription-based suite of front-of-house management tools for restaurants, nightlife and certain other venues, which include online reservations, a waitlist management solution that allows consumers to check wait times and join waitlists remotely, as well as through hostless kiosks, and seating and server rotation management tools; Yelp Knowledge program that offers business owners local analytics and insights through access to its historical data and other proprietary content; and Yelp Fusion, which offers free access to various basic information through publicly available APIs, and paid access to content and data for consumer-facing enterprise use. In addition, it provides content licensing, as well as allows third-party data providers to update and manage business listing information on behalf of businesses. Further, the company offers its products directly through its sales force; indirectly through partners; and online through its website and business app, as well as non-advertising partner arrangements. It has partnership with Grubhub for providing consumers with a service to place food orders for pickup and delivery. The company was incorporated in 2004 and is based in San Francisco, California.

About Vivid Seats

Vivid Seats Inc. operates an online ticket marketplace in the United States, Canada, and Japan. The company operates in two segments, Marketplace and Resale. The Marketplace segment acts as an intermediary between event ticket buyers and sellers; processes ticket sales on its website and mobile applications through its distribution partners; and sells tickets for sports, concerts, theater events, and other live events. This segment offers Skybox, a proprietary enterprise resource planning tool that helps ticket sellers manage ticket inventories, adjust pricing, and fulfill orders across multiple ticket resale marketplaces; and Vivid Picks daily fantasy sports that allows users to partake in contests by making picks from various sport and player matchups. The Resale segment acquires tickets to resell on secondary ticket marketplaces; and provides internal research and development support for Skybox and to deliver seller software and tools. The company was founded in 2001 and is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.