BuzzFeed, Inc. Q1 FY2023 Earnings Call

Good afternoon, and welcome to the BuzzFeed, Inc. First Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Amita Tomkoria, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to BuzzFeed, Inc.'s First Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. I'm Amita Tomkoria, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Joining us today are Founder and CEO, Jonah Peretti; President, Marcela Martin; and CFO, Felicia DellaFortuna. Before we get started, I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by these forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause these results to differ materially are set forth in today's press release, our 2022 annual report on Form 10-K and in our Q1 quarterly report on Form 10-Q. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. During this call, we present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin. The use of non-GAAP financial measures allows us to measure the operational strength and performance of our business to establish budgets and to develop operational goals for managing our business. We believe adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin are relevant and useful information for investors because they allow investors to view performance in a manner similar to the method used by our management. A reconciliation of these GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release. Please refer to our Investor Relations website to find today's press release along with our investor letter. And now I'll pass the call over to Jonah.

Thank you, Amita. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Last quarter, I shared my vision for the future of digital media, namely that content creation would be transformed by creators and AI. With a massive direct audience across our premium brands and IP portfolio, we are poised to benefit from these trends. We have built trusted brands with awareness equivalent to that of 100-year-old companies. U.S. Gen Z and millennials spend vastly more time consuming our content compared to any other digital media company in our competitive set according to Comscore. These competitive advantages have helped us carve out a strategic position in the ecosystem of audiences, advertisers, platforms, and creators. The biggest beneficiaries of the shift to the creator economy and generative AI will be incumbents with recognizable brands and scaled distribution. In Q1, our content teams made great progress in launching new content formats to align with these trends. Regarding creators, the next few years will be defined by creators partnering with the best media brands for credibility and community. For us, Tasty is leading this transformation in how media is made and distributed through the creation of programs that provide creators the tools and skills to drive large audiences. Creator-led content has generated twice the views per video and achieved more than one billion views on Instagram alone. This reinforces our conviction to extend this model to more brands. The results are beneficial for everyone when creators and media companies collaborate, develop IP together, and jointly brainstorm with analytics from the broader BuzzFeed, Inc. media network. To build on this success, we are rapidly expanding our Creators Program to enhance both revenue and content output. Tasty recently welcomed a new class of creator residents, and earlier this year, Complex launched its inaugural creator class. Turning to our progress in artificial intelligence, I believe generative AI will begin to replace the majority of static content. Audiences will start to expect all content to be personalized, interactive, and dynamic with embedded intelligence. Formats developed prior to the AI revolution and many of the industry's conventions will need to be updated or will begin to feel stale. This is why BuzzFeed has been investing in AI-powered content and launching new formats like Infinity quizzes and chatbot games. In the past two months, we've seen Time Spent increase by more than 40% for AI-powered quizzes compared to legacy quizzes. Our first chatbot game, Under the Influencer, had an average time spent four times higher than on static quizzes. Looking ahead, we are rapidly prototyping new generative AI formats, including quizzes and chatbots that we will scale in the coming months. We have also made significant strategic and organizational changes to position the business for long-term growth. Last month, we completed a strategic reprioritization across the company to accelerate our progress in the areas of Creators and AI and translate this exciting work into new revenue opportunities that will help us reaccelerate growth. Specifically, we have significantly reduced our fixed cost structure and aligned resources with the formats and platforms we believe will propel our future growth. We refocused our flagship BuzzFeed on entertainment and announced the closure of our platform-dependent news brand, BuzzFeed News, to concentrate on building a significant direct audience at HuffPost. These changes, alongside the momentum we've built in growing audience reach and engagement around new platforms and formats, position us to close the gap in monetization and accelerate our revenue growth. We are committed to building a business that delivers significant margin expansion and generates strong cash flows over time. I appreciate the support of our shareholders as we continue to transform our business in this new era of digital media. I look forward to seeing you at our upcoming virtual Investor Day this Thursday. I'll now hand off the call to Marcela to discuss our business performance and operational highlights.

Thank you, Jonah, and good afternoon, everyone. I will recap our Q1 performance, including some of the progress we have made in refocusing our sales efforts to unlock the full monetization potential of our combined brand portfolio. Let’s start first with our Q1 performance. We delivered first quarter results in line with our guidance range for both revenue and adjusted EBITDA. Q1 revenues declined 27% to $67 million, driven by the ongoing shift toward short-form, creator-led content, continued softness in the broader digital advertising market, and the sales execution challenges I outlined last quarter. Looking ahead, we expect Q1 to be the trough in terms of both revenue growth and adjusted EBITDA. Felicia will provide more details shortly, but at a high level, in Q2, we expect to see a modest improvement in core advertising and content revenue trends year-over-year relative to Q1. To measure our progress, we will supplement our Time Spent reporting with a new metric on revenue retention. As we execute against the cost savings plan we have announced to date, we are driving towards a significantly lower fixed cost structure, positioning us to mitigate much of the bottom-line impact from lower Q2 revenues and achieve full-year adjusted EBITDA profitability. Over the last few months, we have made significant changes to our sales team structure to improve execution, enable cross-brand synergies, and bring our wider brand portfolio to market for our clients. First, we are now working collaboratively with centralized sales enablement and support teams set up to service all brands in the portfolio. Second, we are focusing more on traditional sales verticals such as CPG, retail, entertainment, tech, and financial services with leaders that bring strong industry knowledge and relationships. Previously, coverage of these verticals was fragmented across the sales organization. This new organizational structure will help us serve our customers more effectively. Third, we have enhanced our coverage for new businesses and industries. Finally, through the consolidation of teams and dismantling silos, we are accelerating knowledge transfer across BuzzFeed and Complex brands. With these changes, we are positioned to drive further improvements in year-over-year trends in the latter half of the year. Now turning to our progress regarding Creators and AI. In Q1, we continued to build audience momentum on creator-driven platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. Viewership of our short-form content across platforms continued to grow, and we once again surpassed one billion views on both Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, respectively. Tasty expanded its creator footprint in Q1 by welcoming a new class of Tasty residents and launching a new TikTok series called Potatoes 100 Ways. The series has already amassed more than 50 million views across its first two episodes. These initiatives continue to attract advertiser demand from household brands like Campbell's and McCormick. As for AI, BuzzFeed's new AI-powered content formats are already resulting in deep engagement. As you heard from Jonah, audience Time Spent with our quizzes and chatbot games is significantly higher relative to our static content. Although it's still early, we are encouraged by this momentum. Audiences appreciate the interactivity, personalization, and shareability of this content. We have much more in store for our audiences in the forthcoming weeks and months. As we continue to build audience engagement around these new formats, we anticipate translating this momentum into innovative products and partnership opportunities for our clients. Before I conclude, I want to reiterate my excitement for the future of BuzzFeed, Inc. By leaning further into Creators and AI, we are on the path to building a content creation model that makes our creative teams more efficient and substantially expands our output without increasing fixed costs. We hope you will join us this Thursday at our Virtual Investor Day where you will hear more from our extended leadership team including our brand leaders and our Head of Sales about how this exciting work is expected to drive our long-term growth and profitability. Thank you. Felicia will now take you through our financial results and outlook.

Thank you, Marcela. We delivered first quarter results in line with our guidance range for both revenue and adjusted EBITDA. On a year-over-year basis, overall revenues for Q1 2023 declined 27% to $67.2 million, as expected, driven by the ongoing shift toward short-form creator-led content, continued softness in the broader digital advertising market, and the sales execution challenges Marcela referenced earlier. Performance by revenue line is as follows: advertising revenues declined 30% year-over-year to $34.2 million, in line with fourth quarter trends as expected, primarily due to both pricing and demand pressures on our owned and operated properties. Content revenues declined 33% year-over-year to $21.6 million, with branded content performance decelerating versus the fourth quarter as expected. To complement our content revenues, we are introducing a KPI to represent net branded content advertiser revenue retention, which is a function of both the number of clients we serve and the spend per retained clients. This metric reflects current period trailing 12-month branded content revenue as a percentage of prior period trailing 12-month revenues for branded content customers that spent a minimum of $250,000 in the prior period. As we outlined last quarter, the steps we took to combine the BuzzFeed and Complex sales teams created operational challenges that negatively impacted our revenue performance in Q1. These impacts manifested as lower revenue retention versus the prior year. However, average spend per advertiser remained relatively consistent year-over-year. Commerce and other revenues grew 6% to $11.3 million, driven by easing comps in our organic affiliate business. This revenue performance led to a Q1 adjusted EBITDA loss of $20.2 million in the quarter, which is $3.5 million lower year-over-year, with the majority of the lowered revenue year-on-year offset by the cost actions taken throughout 2022. We also incurred charges that did not impact adjusted EBITDA. A full reconciliation of our GAAP to non-GAAP measures can be found in today's press release available on our Investor Relations website. We ended the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of approximately $50 million. As for audience engagement and Time Spent, we continue to report U.S. Time Spent across our owned and operated properties and third-party platforms according to Comscore. This metric is intended to complement our advertising revenue performance. As discussed previously, audience Time Spent with our content on Facebook has continued to decline due to increased competition from newer creator-driven vertical video platforms, for which Time Spent is not currently captured by Comscore. Consequently, the advertising revenues we generate from Facebook are no longer material to our overall advertising revenues. As of January 1, 2023, we have removed Facebook from our reported measure of Time Spent. We will continue to report U.S. Time Spent according to Comscore, reflecting our owned and operated properties, YouTube, and Apple News. As Jonah discussed earlier, the broader strategic reprioritization across the company has enabled us to align resources to the platforms and formats that represent the biggest opportunities for future growth. We believe this change in reporting methodology now aligns with our go-forward monetization strategy, specifically to increase focus on our owned and operated properties. In Q1, U.S. Time Spent as reported by Comscore declined 3% year-over-year to 109 million hours. As for creator-led vertical video, ahead of scale monetization, we are continuing to build audience momentum around newer platforms and formats, including YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and TikTok. In the first quarter, viewership of our short-form creator-led content grew, generating billions of views across platforms. This gives us further confidence that we are driving the right strategic focus to position the business for long-term growth and monetization. Before I share our financial outlook for the second quarter, let me first provide some context. Starting with revenues, in the year-ago quarter, BuzzFeed Studios delivered two feature films, which contributed to Q2 2022 content revenue. For Q2 2023, no film projects are scheduled for delivery. Also in the year-ago quarter, Complex hosted a metaverse experiential event known as ComplexLand, which will not be repeated in Q2 2023. Excluding these year-ago revenues, we expect Q2 year-over-year trends to improve modestly compared to Q1. Regarding adjusted EBITDA, as Jonah and Marcela discussed, in April, we took further steps to reduce our fixed cost structure and align resources to the formats and platforms that will propel our future growth. These efforts, along with the previously executed cost savings, have positioned us to mitigate the majority of the bottom-line impact from lower revenues and achieve breakeven adjusted EBITDA in Q2. With that, I will turn to our financial outlook. For Q2 2023, we expect overall revenues in the range of $76 million to $81 million, representing 24% to 29% lower than the year-ago quarter. We expect this revenue decline, in conjunction with the fully executed cost savings announced in mid-April, to result in adjusted EBITDA in the range of $0 million to $4 million, and we anticipate delivering full-year 2023 adjusted EBITDA in the high teens million. As we lean further into creators and AI, we see the opportunity to drive significant operating leverage and adjusted EBITDA margin improvement over time. We look forward to sharing much more about our long-term plans with you at our Virtual Investor Day. Thank you, and we look forward to taking your questions at our Investor Day this Thursday.