Shutterstock, Inc. Q2 FY2021 Earnings Call

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. And welcome to the Q2 2021 Shutterstock, Inc. Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will follow at that time. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Mr. Chris Suh, VP, Investor Relations and Corporate Development.

Thank you, Phyllis. Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us for Shutterstock's second quarter 2021 earnings call. Joining us today is Stan Pavlovsky, Shutterstock's Chief Executive Officer; and Jarrod Yahes, Shutterstock's Chief Financial Officer. Please note that some of the information you will hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including without limitation, the impact of COVID-19 on our business, the long-term effects of investments in our business, the future success and financial impact of new and existing product offerings, our ability to consummate acquisitions and integrate the businesses we have acquired or may acquire into our existing operations, our future growth, margins and profitability, our long-term strategy, and our performance targets. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to today's press releases and the reports we file with the SEC from time-to-time, including the risk factors discussed in our most recently filed 10-Q and our annual 10-K for discussions of important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from any forward-looking statements we make on this call. We'll be discussing certain non-GAAP financial measures today, including adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin, adjusted net income, adjusted net income per diluted share, revenue growth including by distribution channel on a constant currency basis, billings and free cash flow. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in the financial tables included with today's press release, in our 10-Q, which are posted on the Investor Relations section of our website. Finally, please refer to the brief information that we posted on our website that contains supporting materials for today's call. With that, I'll turn the call over to Stan.

Thank you, Chris. Good morning everyone and thank you for joining Shutterstock's second quarter 2021 earnings call. We're happy to report that the company has seen another strong quarter in terms of growth. This morning, I'll be discussing the key drivers of growth. However, before doing that, I'd first like to talk in more detail about the exciting announcement that you saw this morning in connection with the formation of Shutterstock.AI and the acquisition of three AI-driven creative intelligence platforms. As a backdrop, in previous quarters, I've spoken about Shutterstock’s three strategic pillars: workflow innovation, fresh and relevant content, and data and insights to drive performance. Shutterstock.AI and its three acquisitions represent a very important and tangible advancement with respect to our plans for data and insights. This is a major milestone for us that will reshape our product offerings and ultimately our addressable market in the years to come. In broad terms, Shutterstock.AI will offer two discrete solutions: predictive performance and computer vision solutions. The acquisitions we announced this morning relate to our predictive performance offering, which will be rolled out to both e-commerce and enterprise customers gradually over the next 6 to 12 months. We believe that our predictive performance offering will address a major customer pain point by delivering actionable data-driven recommendations. These recommendations will be embedded in a comprehensive, yet intuitive workflow that enables customers to test, analyze and optimize their content prior to deployment. With these acquisitions, Shutterstock will be able to score our content library to predict performance. As a result, marketers will no longer be guessing or solely using intuition in selecting their content for campaign or other marketing purposes, but rather they will have predictive insights baked into our offering. This means that Shutterstock customers can pick and choose within our content library with the benefit of predictive insights that will help drive performance for them. These insights will be delivered via either general models, which will not rely on any customer-specific campaign data, or custom models, which will leverage an individual customer’s historic campaign data. Lastly, the Shutterstock predictive performance solution does not rely on third-party cookie-based identity data, since it relies on contextual targeting. I'd like to talk more specifically about our three acquisitions and the critical components each company contributes. On a combined basis: Pattern89, Datasine, and Shotzr will help us deliver on our vision for predictive performance. Each company represents an important piece of the overall puzzle. Pattern89 is an Indianapolis-based company. Customers rely on Pattern89’s SaaS solution to analyze past campaign data, predict future campaign performance, and optimize their media spend in real time, rather than relying on A/B tests or educated guesses. The analytics are focused on a myriad of creative dimensions, such as colors used, text sentiment, presence of people, and presence of specific objects. Pattern89 is a product-led organization and its platform provides Shutterstock with a frontend workflow and a backend campaign data feed alongside strong product and tech talent. Datasine is based in London. Datasine is particularly strong in areas such as machine learning and natural language processing, which drive the analytics on the backend to understand and optimize the creative elements of an ad. These backend strengths are highly additive to Pattern89’s frontend in terms of both technology and talent. We are excited about the combination of these uniquely complementary platforms. Last but not least, Denver-based Shotzr has built a repository of survey data, which informs the company's proprietary audience models. These audience models will allow Shutterstock to generate what we call resonance scores, which are predictions on how well a particular digital asset will resonate for a given audience segment. Unlike Pattern89 and Datasine, Shotzr doesn't need specific customer campaign data to generate its predictions. This is particularly critical in addressing the cold start problem in instances where a customer may not yet have a deep dataset of historic campaign data. I'm extremely excited for the advancement against our product roadmap that these three acquisitions represent. I look forward to updating you on our progress on our data and insight strategy in the quarters ahead. Now that we've reviewed our predictive performance offering and the three acquisitions that power that offering, I want to turn to computer vision. Helping AI models see and understand digital imagery is a large and growing market. Today, a number of our customers are looking to train their own AI models for use cases, such as self-driving cars and robotics. To that end, Shutterstock’s computer vision offering leverages and commercializes our extensive dataset, which includes a collection of more than 400 million images, videos, music tracks, and 3D models and associated metadata. In short, Shutterstock has built a proprietary process for tagging assets over our 17-year history, which gives us one of the richest datasets in the marketplace, which we continue to enrich. Switching gears to revenue and overall demand environment. Digital marketing spend is exhibiting continued strong momentum across channels and use cases. SMBs, large enterprise corporates, and agencies are all spending again with an eye on growth and new customer acquisition. The result for Shutterstock was revenue growth of 19% in the second quarter and constant currency organic revenue growth of 12%, a meaningful acceleration. Subscriber KPIs were exceptional with subscriber count growing 44% and subscriber revenue growth of 25%. E-commerce was up 23% in Q2 2021, driven by balanced growth across image, footage, and music, as well as the strong performance of TurboSquid 3D. Meanwhile, enterprise saw a true inflection in its momentum with revenue growth accelerating to 13%. This significant acceleration in enterprise revenue growth was driven by bookings momentum, both in our large agency and corporate businesses supported by products like Shutterstock Studios, and our small and medium businesses supported by innovative new products such as SMB FLEX, which allows customers to buy multiple assets within a single subscription. We are truly pleased with enterprise revenue and bookings growth, and are increasingly confident that this revenue channel has turned the corner in terms of sustainable growth. In closing, based on our strong record second quarter and confidence in the continuation of the economic recovery, we are raising our revenue and EBITDA guidance for 2021. We could not be more excited about the potential of Shutterstock.AI and the unique offering we will bring to market, garnering us access to a large and fast-growing market. Furthermore, we expect to bring several more exciting innovations to market this year around tools and creative workflows that we think our customers will love, while continuing to provide Shutterstock customers access to fresh and relevant content, which will soon be uniquely augmented with data and insights to drive performance. And now, I'll turn the call over to Jarrod.

Thank you, Stan, and good morning, everyone. Shutterstock grew revenues 19% in the second quarter or 16% on a constant currency basis, our fourth quarter of accelerating revenue growth. Revenues benefited this quarter from the addition of TurboSquid, which added 4% to our growth. Our growth rate also benefited from the comparison to the second quarter of 2020 when demand was negatively impacted due to the pandemic. Constant currency organic growth was 12% for the second quarter. The acceleration in organic constant currency revenue growth in the second quarter is further evidence of demand acceleration, along with solid execution across revenue channels, geographies, content types, and industries. Both our e-commerce and enterprise revenue channels performed strongly this quarter. Growth was led by our e-commerce channel which grew 23% or 16%, excluding TurboSquid. TurboSquid has grown over 20% year-to-date post-acquisition, clearly exceeding our expectations for the business. Our enterprise channels were up 13% and accelerated from 5% growth realized last quarter on the back of some of the product introductions and bookings momentum Stan mentioned previously. From a geographic perspective, revenue was up 23% in North America, 24% in Europe, and 11% in the rest of the world. European growth was strong and accelerated from the prior quarter driven by the UK, Germany, and France, which also continued to be favorably impacted by currency movements. The rest of the world had more moderate growth, led by Asia and Australia. However, that growth was negatively impacted by relatively weaker performance in South America. Gross margin improved by 400 basis points to 64% in the second quarter compared to 60% in the second quarter of 2020, and was down 200 basis points from the first quarter per our expectations and commentary last quarter. Gross margin was impacted by the return to growth in paid downloads in this quarter of 2%, an additional month of the inclusion of TurboSquid royalties, and an ongoing step-up in earnings tiers achieved by our contributors over the course of the year. Sales and marketing expenses were 24% of revenues compared to 22% in the second quarter of 2020. This increase is driven by increased investment in marketing spend as well as higher sales commissions associated with our increased enterprise revenue. Product development as a percentage of revenue declined 200 basis points in the second quarter. However, our product development spend of $12 million was up 12% sequentially from the first quarter of 2021, due to higher compensation costs resulting from the additional hiring of engineers as well as additional performance-based stock compensation expense. We anticipate that the recent acquisitions and the additional technology hires will increase product development expense in the second half of the year, as we continue to invest in product priorities. G&A expenses were 16% of revenue, flat from the second quarter of 2020. G&A expenses this quarter included some incremental stock compensation expenses associated with our performance-based stock awards. Excluding stock compensation expenses, G&A expenses as a percentage of revenue declined by 150 basis points compared to the second quarter of 2020, due to continued cost reduction efforts, combined with operating leverage in our business. The 460-point expansion in adjusted EBITDA margins to 27.9% resulted from the combination of accelerated revenue growth, upside in gross margin, and operating leverage across the business. For the second quarter, GAAP diluted earnings per share was $0.79 and adjusted diluted EPS was $1.02, representing growth of 49% and 65%, respectively. Turning to our balance sheet and cash flows. At the end of the quarter, we had $411 million of cash, up from $363 million at March 31, 2021, which includes $71 million of operating cash flows, offset by $10 million of CapEx and content acquisitions, $7 million of taxes paid on the vesting of equity awards, which were issued on a withhold-to-cover basis, and the $8 million quarterly cash dividend paid in June. Our deferred revenue balance of $162 million increased over $8 million from March 31, 2021, and over $23 million from the second quarter of 2020, representing year-over-year growth of 17%. The growth in our deferred revenue is a strong leading indicator of the future growth and recognized revenues of our enterprise revenue channel, which represents more than half of the deferred revenue balance. In terms of capital allocation, we will pay our next quarterly dividend of $0.21 per share on September 16, 2021. As previously stated, we plan to grow the dividend in line with earnings growth and plan to revisit the quarterly dividend after the third quarter consistent with last year. With respect to our share buyback program, we will commence a $75 million annual buyback. We expect this to be an ongoing annual program, wherein we purchase a similar amount each year by dollar cost averaging and being in the market each month over the course of a quarter. By growing our dividend over time at rates in excess of average equity market rates of return, repurchasing shares on a consistent basis, and remaining active in M&A, our goal is to provide investors compounding annual returns that exceed our growth in revenues and operating profit. Turning to our key operating metrics, they continue to be exceptionally strong for Shutterstock during the quarter. Subscriber count increased by 44%, subscriber revenue increased by 25%, average revenue per customer increased by 9%. Paid downloads were up 2% and revenue per download increased to $4.17 per download. Our image library expanded by 12% and our footage library increased by 16%. Our subscriber growth and subscriber revenue growth are driven by demand for our SMB and prosumer-oriented smaller subscription products, and some of the new products we have brought to market over the past year. Investors should remember that we introduced a range of new video and music subscription products in the back half of 2020, and we expect to lap the introductions of those products and their contribution to our revenues in the back half of the year. Similar to our commentary in the first quarter, we expect subscriber growth and subscriber revenue growth to come down from current levels in the back half of the year. With that being said, as Stan mentioned, we're really pleased with the market reception of SMB FLEX, and the progress in our pivot towards the subscription model. Our near-term goals are to introduce incremental value and to differentiate our subscription offerings by using Shutterstock.AI’s data and insights. Shutterstock.AI’s predictive performance solution will be a core element of delighting our subscribers. And we believe this could ultimately result in meaningfully higher retention for our subscription offerings over time. Before discussing the guidance revision, I'd like to add to Stan's comments on Shutterstock.AI and I would also like to encourage investors to go to the Shutterstock.AI webpage to better understand our offerings. I'm truly pleased that we were able to fill out the data and insights element of our product roadmap with these three acquisitions and complete all the necessary pieces of the puzzle concurrently. Shutterstock.AI was created as a discrete legal entity, an acquisition vehicle to acquire these intellectual property assets and will also serve as a contracting entity for our computer vision and predictive performance offerings. In the future, this will allow us to disclose elements of the Shutterstock.AI business as it grows and we see strong reception in the market.

While the aggregate cash consideration for the transaction was relatively small at $35 million, executing on these three deals gives us core technology and intellectual property that would have taken us a minimum of three to five years to build internally. We also have an aggressive product integration and go-to-market plan that has us being in market with our predictive performance offering within the next 6 to 12 months. Therefore, we do not expect predictive performance to meaningfully contribute to revenues or improve retention until 2022. That being said, we are already in the market with our computer vision offering and expect to have some exciting deals to announce soon. Finally, I'd like to review our revised guidance. Based on the results from the second quarter and a greater level of confidence for the remainder of the year, we are increasing our full year revenue, adjusted EBITDA, and adjusted earnings per share targets as follows: Revenue of $740 million to $750 million, representing 11% to 12.5% annual revenue growth. Adjusted EBITDA of $175 million to $180 million, with annual margin expansion towards the upper end of the previously provided range of 50 to 100 basis points. And adjusted earnings per share of between $2.80 per share to $2.95 per share.

Looking at the revenue growth for the remainder of the year, our commentary remains consistent with last quarter. We expect to see continued steady growth in our enterprise business. However, the quarterly growth rates of e-commerce will moderate in the back half of the year as the comparables become more difficult, and we lap the growth of some of our successful subscription product introductions in 2020. With respect to margins, implied in our guidance we expect a further 100 to 200 basis point decline in gross margin from the second quarter based on a step-up in earnings tiers achieved by our contributors, combined with expected utilization increases. In addition, we have two major investments totaling $20 million we expect in the back half of the year. Firstly, we've engaged with several agencies to spend in excess of $13 million in the second half of the year on incremental brand advertising and new product rollout support. We think of this as a long-term investment that will further fuel the top end of our funnel and allow us to carry our strong growth momentum into 2022. Additionally, we expect to incur approximately $7 million in costs associated with the consumption and integration of the Shutterstock.AI deals we discussed earlier. Those costs include $1 million for advisory and legal costs, $2 million of employee retention bonuses, and $4 million of ongoing operating and integration-related expenses associated with the deals. Even with the $20 million investment in the back half of the year, we still expect to be at the upper end of our previously provided margin guidance of 50 to 100 basis points of margin expansion as compared to last year. We could not be more pleased with our results for the first half of the year, including the market reception of our subscription offerings, the accelerating momentum in enterprise, as well as the strong profitability we have been exhibiting. The consummation of the three AI acquisitions, and the formation of Shutterstock.AI as a core part of our data and insights pillar, has the potential to open up new opportunities for Shutterstock and uniquely differentiate our offerings in the market. Thank you so much for joining us today. We very much appreciate your time.

At this time, I would like to open the line up for any questions.

Thank you very much, and congratulations on an impressive quarter. I have two questions, if I may. First, Jarrod, regarding the guidance you just shared. You mentioned a sequential improvement in the top line primarily driven by enterprise and to a lesser extent by e-commerce. However, if I consider the high end of your guidance of 750, it suggests that in terms of dollars for Q3 and Q4, you would likely either be at or below what you achieved in Q2. Can you provide some insight into that? Is it due to concerns or conservatism? And Stan, congratulations on the recent deals. Could you provide a broader perspective on the business compared to where you were last year or a couple of years ago and your vision for the future? It seems the business is increasingly shifting towards AI. These recent campaigns and acquisitions, particularly Datasine and Shotzr, appear to be enhancing your focus on campaign management optimization. Can you share how you envision the evolution of the business and its future over the next three to five years, especially considering how different it is now compared to a few years ago? Thank you.

Sure, Youssef. So with respect to our guidance, I think we feel really good about the guidance raise. $20 million at the top end and the bottom end of the raise I think is something that at this point in the year we're feeling quite confident about the business. We're feeling quite good about the subscription metrics. And yes, to your point, we are feeling quite good about enterprise and the bookings growth that's taking place there. And you can see some of that on the balance sheet in the deferred revenue balance. As you look towards the back half of the year, I think there's a few things going on. Number one, as we've mentioned several times, we are lapping some of the new subscription product introductions in the second half of the year, and we think that will bring some of the subscription growth metrics down. We are going to face tougher comparables in the back half of the year. So if you look at 2020, by the time we got to the fourth quarter, there was a pretty sharp rebound in demand. We grew 9% in the fourth quarter of 2020. And so as we face those tougher comparables, we are being more conservative as we look towards the back half of the year. I think as you pull apart the numbers, one of the things you'll see is, if you look at the constant currency organic revenue growth implied by the top end of the guidance, it's somewhere around mid-single-digit growth in the back half of the year. And I think at this point in time, that's a zone that we feel quite good about from a guidance perspective and visibility perspective.

Good morning, Youssef. Thanks for your question about the company and sort of strategically where we're going. You're right. We are definitely pivoting the company. But what I would say is, from an industry perspective, the cross-section or the intersection of content technology and data is something that's extremely powerful, and something that we've talked about for a couple of years. But at the 30,000-foot level, we looked at what are our customer pain points? And the creative selection criteria is one of the key pain points that remains within the marketing workflow. And so we felt like this is an area that is open and fragmented and really felt like our first-party data in conjunction with some of these acquisitions. It could really be a powerful solution for customers as they determine what content will work for their campaigns. So what you can expect from us in terms of pivot is that our subscription products will continue to be enhanced so that customers have not just content, but intelligence around that content. So they can make smart decisions about what will work. But also as I mentioned in my talking points earlier, we will continue to further develop products in the workflow. So you can imagine that we will continue to launch products that entrench us further in the customer's workflow. And everything will be data-enabled to allow customers to make smarter decisions. So we are going to be much more of a technology platform going forward, not just a content marketplace. And we feel that this is going to be a good use of our cash for shareholders, but also we feel like the decisions we're making with these investments will be great for our customers.

Thank you. That's actually helpful. Thanks.

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the question. I've got one and then I have a follow up please. As we think about the impact of AI kind of in 2022, can you help us understand how big the impact can be? So said another way, as AI starts to mature, does that decouple Shutterstock from industry growth of 5% to 10%? Can you guys grow faster than that now? Can it materially move kind of revenue growth higher?

Yes, absolutely. I'll take this one. This is Stan. Ultimately, everything we do in support of our customers is meant to improve retention and acquire new customers. So this is definitely for us part of the growth strategy that we have over the next several years. So while we're not providing any guidance today on 2022 and the impact that Shutterstock.AI will have, we will do so in Q4. The one thing I can tell you is that, for example, today we're in market with computer vision services and we have a very robust pipeline. We've already generated several million dollars of revenue and we have a robust pipeline around that. So that hopefully at least gives you a sense of the fact that this is something that we are launching in the near term, but we expect a lot more of the benefits as we integrate these technologies within the marketplace and within our subscriptions over the next, call it, 12 to 18 months.

Okay. That makes sense. Thank you. And then on enterprise, bookings growth was pretty impressive, up 6% quarter-over-quarter. Can you talk about just the sustainability of enterprise and the impact from SMB FLEX?

Yes. We focus on several customer segments within enterprise. In our high-touch business segment, we've experienced significant growth due to increased customer retention, new customer acquisitions, and rising average order values. This positive trend is largely a result of our revamped go-to-market strategy from the past 12 to 18 months, which has introduced new services such as Studios, Editorial, and News Desk. We have also reorganized our sales team to align with specific customer segments. This effort has led to notable success over the past year and a half. In the small and medium segment, we've introduced innovative products to support small businesses. Notably, we launched our first multi-asset subscription, allowing customers to purchase image, music, and footage assets within one subscription. This offering is achieving strong global performance. We're committed to continuing the introduction of new products, and following recent acquisitions, including 3D and other data-related acquisitions, we are confident in our ability to deliver significant value to our agency partners, corporate customers, and small and medium business clients.

Great. Thanks, guys.

Great. Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. The investments in AI make a whole lot of sense. I was just wondering from like a competitive standpoint or agencies, are they doing anything with AI and big data and just how differentiating your offering will be? And I have a follow up as well.

Yes, absolutely. Many companies are using AI for various purposes, both to automate processes and enhance performance. Media agencies definitely utilize AI due to the vast amounts of data they have on behalf of their clients. Our focus is on creative solutions, while our data offering centers on assessing the effectiveness of that creative, which remains a significant challenge for customers. They need to decide upfront what to choose in the process, combining their creative instincts with data insights to make that process more efficient. When you visit our site and search through a library of nearly half a billion assets, having tailored recommendations and greater confidence in what content will perform well, rather than just running A/B tests, is something we believe sets us apart in the market. The use of AI and machine learning, particularly in computer vision, varies widely across the industry, and we anticipate it will play a significant role in creative content and performance. Additionally, as a business, we have been using machine learning and AI internally for some time, and we are now focused on commercializing these internal data assets for our customers.

It makes sense. And then I know we spent a lot of time on the last call talking about TurboSquid. So I was just wondering if you could talk about the contribution of TurboSquid in the quarter, how the integration process is going and any early data points on cross-selling to existing customers?

I'll briefly discuss the integration before passing it over to Jarrod for the financials. TurboSquid has been an excellent addition, and the team is outstanding. As a reminder, this company is based in New Orleans and is the largest 3D marketplace globally. The business has experienced significant growth recently, not only in volume but also in unit economics, as we see increasingly sophisticated models being utilized for various applications, such as gaming and special effects in movies. In 2022, we anticipate real opportunities for integration across the areas I mentioned, particularly in democratizing 3D usage, which currently requires specialized skills that aren’t widely available. We aim to simplify 3D usage for our customers. Furthermore, as we consider emerging technologies like augmented and virtual reality, we believe we can contribute to major platforms developing innovative technologies such as self-driving cars and 3D mapping. There is considerable excitement and demand in this space. You will see us integrating across all our sales channels, with offerings that include Studio services for enterprises centered around 3D, alongside enhanced self-service options in e-commerce. As always, we will utilize our platform partners and solutions for 3D integrations with some of the largest platforms globally. Jarrod, would you like to discuss TurboSquid's contribution this quarter?

Sure. And Bernie, just in terms of the specific contribution from my prepared remarks, TurboSquid contributed 4% in the quarter, so $6.8 million of recognized revenue. This is the first quarter where we recognize the full three months of TurboSquid revenue as we closed on the deal at the beginning of February. But I would say that the business has certainly outperformed our expectations from the time of the consummation of the acquisition really as a result of a lot of the tailwinds that Stan mentioned. So we feel great about the secular industry demand for 3D. We feel great about the company that we've acquired and brought into the Shutterstock family. And I think now we're really going to be in investment mode, integrating the business and making sure that we can leverage the full breadth of assets that we acquired with Shutterstock's channels and capabilities.

Great. Thanks for taking the questions.

At this time, I would like to turn the call back over to Stan Pavlovsky, CEO.

Well, thank you everyone for joining us today. In closing, we are extremely excited for what lies ahead in terms of innovation around data and insights, workflow innovation, and fresh and relevant content. As always, thank you to all of our customers, contributors, and employees. That ends our call for the day.

Thank you. That does conclude today's conference. We thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.