BuzzFeed, Inc.

Hello and welcome to the BuzzFeed Inc. 4th Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw from the question queue, please press star, then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Amita Tumkoria, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to BuzzFeed Inc.' 's fourth quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Joining us today are founder and CEO Jonah Peretti, President Marcelo Martin, and CFO Felicia de la Fortuna. 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 and in our annual report on Form 10-K to be filed with the SEC. 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 margins. 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 margins 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 gap-to-non-gap 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 investor presentation. And now, I'll pass the call over to John.

Thank you, Amita. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We continue to face a tough operating environment for digital media, However, our value proposition is consistently resonating in the marketplace. With iconic brands, a massive audience, and a differentiated technology platform, we occupy a unique position in the ecosystem of audiences, creators, platforms, and advertisers. Our premium brand-safe content reaches millions of young people each day and appeals to hundreds of advertising clients, the biggest tech platforms, and emerging creators, all looking to break through in a crowded market. We are a scaled, diversified digital media company that is poised to capitalize on the future of the industry and deliver long-term value to shareholders. And we have a lot of exciting work underway, some of which I will share today. Before I turn to that, let me briefly discuss our performance. 2022 was a challenging year for our business, and we navigated the dual headwinds of a weakening digital ad environment and the ongoing shift to short-form vertical video, while also integrating complex networks into the company. First, on the operating environment. Over the course of last year, many of our clients were forced to constrain ad budgets in order to navigate deteriorating macroeconomic conditions, which pressured year-over-year growth in our advertising and content revenue. In this operating environment, our global teams also work to integrate complex networks into the business. While that integration resulted in meaningful cost synergies, we believe we have not yet reached our full revenue potential as a combined company. We have much more work to do in order to overcome these challenges, which Marcella will speak to shortly. Turning to the ongoing shift to short-form vertical video, a year ago at our first earnings call, I discussed the implications of the rapid rise of short-form vertical video on our business, namely that we would shift focus to building large, highly engaged audiences around our short-form video content across platforms. And we made great progress in 2022. As a result of this shift in focus, We nearly doubled our output in terms of short-form vertical video across TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. We continue to surpass 1 billion quarterly views on both Reels and Shorts, with multiple videos consistently earning millions of views each, on par with premium globally recognized brands like the NFL and Louis Vuitton. Q4 viewership of short-form content across platforms more than tripled year over year. As I've discussed before, it takes time to ramp monetization of newer content formats. Recently, we have seen certain platforms, such as YouTube Shorts, begin to open up opportunities for partners to monetize their short-form content on the platform. Although we are in the early stages of operationalizing this change, we expect this momentum to continue, which is why I believe we are driving the right strategic focus to position the business for long-term growth and monetization. In December, we made significant adjustments to our cost structure to focus on the platforms and formats with the highest potential for long-term monetization, align with the weaker demand environment, and accelerate our progress on the integration of complex networks. Execution against our cost savings initiatives has allowed us to focus on the areas that I believe will drive long-term growth across our combined portfolios of brands, specifically creators, and artificial intelligence. I believe the future of digital media will be defined by the rise of creator-led and AI-powered content. As we have seen over the course of the past year, the rapid rise in popularity of new content formats like Reels, TikToks, and Shorts have proven that audience consumption behavior continues to favor creator-led content. To capitalize on the audience momentum we have built around our creator-led content, we are building the premier we are building the premier creator platform to attract the next generation of Internet talent. This includes expanding our suite of technologies, tools, and resources to empower creators' end-to-end content creation and monetization engines. We have been a creator-led publisher since BuzzFeed's inception, with a proven track record as a discovery engine for the next generation of Internet creators. In fact, some of the biggest careers in media and culture have started at BuzzFeed and Complex. This commitment to creators has helped us develop a core competitive advantage in the marketplace. We are able to offer our trusted network of talent to advertisers struggling to navigate the world of influencers and creators. Our platform also allows creators to build a sustainable monetization engine with access to our massive audiences and best-in-class tools and resources. We've made great strides in growing our network of creators, which further strengthens our content flywheel with higher quality content that reaches a wider audience across more platforms and helps us capture deeper data and insights. BuzzFeed has always lived at the intersection of technology and creativity, and recent developments in artificial intelligence represent an opportunity to take this convergence to the next level. As the creative process becomes increasingly AI enabled, we are continually looking to maximize the creativity of our writers, creators, and producers. We view AI as an exciting new creativity tool, one that humans can harness to open up new avenues for imagination, storytelling, and engagement, and explore new premium product offerings that will appeal to our clients and partners on the new frontier of media. And our work in this area is off to a good start. In 2021, Three, you'll see AI-powered content move from an R&D stage to part of our core business, enhancing the quiz experience, informing our brainstorming, and personalizing and curating our content for our audience. I cannot be more excited for us to explore these transformative new frontiers in digital media. As creator-led and AI-powered content creation continue to gain audience share, BuzzFeed, Inc. is well-positioned to both influence and benefit from these trends. We hope you will join us at our Virtual Investor Day on May 11th, where we will have more time to fully communicate what we are working on. Thank you. Now I'll hand the call over to Marcela.