• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, August 1, 2012

Local information and ratings site Yelp on Wednesday reported a 67% increase in net revenue in the second quarter after expanding into new markets overseas and on mobile devices.

The company posted a net loss of $2 million, or 3 cents per share, in the quarter, compared with a loss of $1.2 million, or 8 cents per share, a year earlier.

Revenue increased to $32.7 million from $19.6 million a year ago. Analysts had forecast a loss of 6 cents a share on revenue of $30.7 million.

Yelp's average monthly unique visitors grew 52% to more than 78 million from a year ago, while active local business accounts more than doubled to 32,000.

The company said it expanded into eight new markets in the second quarter including Denmark, Finland, Norway and Madison, WI, bringing the total number of markets it's in to 90. It also saw continuing uptake on the mobile side. Yelp apps were used on 7.2 million devices on average each month during the second quarter, up from 6.3 million in the prior quarter.

About 40% of searches on Yelp now take place on mobile devices and half the photos uploaded to the site are from handsets.

The local recommendations service got a boost from Apple when the tech giant announced in June it would integrate Yelp content into the “Maps” application and Siri in the next version of iOS, along with links that go directly to the site. Yelp has already been integrated into local search on Bing.

During the company's conference call Wednesday, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said the company is seeing promising results with an ad unit running on its mobile Web home page, and expects to extend advertising to its mobile apps as well soon. He didn't specify a timeline, though.

Looking ahead, Yelp expects net revenue to be in the range of $34.5 million to $35.5 million. Full-year net revenue will be $135 million to $136 million. That's higher than analysts' consensus estimate of $128 million to $132 million.