Head-To-Head Contrast: Yelp (NYSE:YELP) and Salon Media Group (OTCMKTS:SLNM)

Yelp (NYSE:YELP) and Salon Media Group (OTCMKTS:SLNM) are both computer and technology companies, but which is the better stock? We will compare the two businesses based on the strength of their valuation, risk, institutional ownership, analyst recommendations, earnings, profitability and dividends.

Insider & Institutional Ownership

90.1% of Yelp shares are held by institutional investors. 8.3% of Yelp shares are held by company insiders. Comparatively, 52.6% of Salon Media Group shares are held by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, hedge funds and large money managers believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

Analyst Recommendations

This is a breakdown of current ratings and recommmendations for Yelp and Salon Media Group, as reported by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Yelp	3	4	1	0	1.75
Salon Media Group	0	0	0	0	0.00

Yelp presently has a consensus price target of $27.88, suggesting a potential upside of 20.77%. Given Yelp’s stronger consensus rating and higher probable upside, analysts plainly believe Yelp is more favorable than Salon Media Group.

Earnings and Valuation

This table compares Yelp and Salon Media Group”s top-line revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Yelp	$1.46 billion	0.87	$145.60 million	$2.19	10.54
Salon Media Group	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A

Yelp has higher revenue and earnings than Salon Media Group.

Risk & Volatility

Yelp has a beta of 0.47, meaning that its share price is 53% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Salon Media Group has a beta of -1.11, meaning that its share price is 211% less volatile than the S&P 500.

Profitability

This table compares Yelp and Salon Media Group’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Yelp	9.47%	20.19%	14.45%
Salon Media Group	N/A	N/A	N/A

Summary

Yelp beats Salon Media Group on 9 of the 10 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 Salon Media Group

Salon.com, LLC, an Internet media company, operates an online news Website in the United States. It produces a content Website with various subject-specific sections. The company's Salon.com Website features various voices and perspectives; and covers a range of topics, including news, politics, race, religion, culture, entertainment, sustainability, economy and innovation, technology, and business, as well as food, and health and science. Salon.com, LLC was founded in 1995 and is based in San Francisco, California. As of November 8, 2023, Salon.com, LLC operates as a subsidiary of Find.co.