BuzzFeed, Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to BuzzFeed's second quarter 2023 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. Please note that today's conference may be recorded. I will now hand the conference over to your speaker host, Amita Tumkoria, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to BuzzFeed Inc. Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. I'm Amita Tumkoria, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Joining me today are founder and CEO Jonah Peretti, President Marcella Martin, and CFO Felicia Della 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, our 2022 annual report on Form 10-K, our Q1 quarterly report on Form 10-Q, and in our Q2 quarterly report on Form 10-Q to be filed tomorrow. 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 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 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 now I'll pass the call over to Jonah.

Thank you, Amita. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We continue to see a shift in the marketplace as consolidation and share gains across the biggest platforms have presented headwinds for digital content and publishing companies. Further, as Facebook and other major tech platforms continue to prioritize vertical video, traffic referrals from these platforms to our content have diminished. These dynamics have impacted monetization in Q2, and into Q3. As a result, we expect the year-on-year revenue clients we saw in Q2 to persist in Q3. To address this, we are laser-focused on our strategy to drive traffic directly to our owned and operated properties by introducing new AI-assisted content formats to increase engagement and offer innovative advertising opportunities to our clients, rapidly expanding our creator network to participate in the rise of vertical video, and prioritizing destination news content to grow our HuffPost front page audience. Though it will take time for these initiatives to translate into scaled monetization, we are making good progress in executing against our transformation plans. The strategic and organizational changes we discussed at our investor day in May have been fully executed, putting our rich library of IP and scaled owned and operated properties at the center of our operating model to create innovative, audience-driven content. We are successfully leveraging our trusted brands to attract a growing number of emerging internet creators in order to more rapidly scale our content output. And we have prioritized resources aimed at growing engagement on our owned and operated properties through new AI-powered content formats. In doing so, we are reducing our dependence on the major tech platforms and leaning into our rare combination of voice and scale in a fragmented media environment. We have strong and differentiated IP across BuzzFeed, Complex, Hot Ones, First We Feast, Tasty, and HuffPost, each with a trusted and established brand identity. For BuzzFeed, it's pop culture, entertainment, and curating the best of the internet using AI to shift content delivery and distribution. For Complex, it is delivering premium original content that covers the latest trends in sneakers, music, and convergence culture. For First We Feast, it is expanding the Hot Ones universe and building more IP at the intersection of food and pop culture. For Tasty, it is attracting emerging food creators and leveraging the social platforms to build community around cooking. For HuffPost, it's breaking news coverage and audience-centric stories for a massive direct front page audience. The brands we have built are valuable and hard to replicate. As a testament to that, we continue to lead the industry in terms of time spent. U.S. Gen Z and millennials spend vastly more time consuming our content than that of any other digital media company in our competitive set, according to Comscore. With a streamlined sales team structure and a revamped go-to-market strategy that is anchored in three intersecting pillars of innovation, creators, AI, and cultural moments, we are now able to leverage the individual strengths of our brands more effectively and in order to re-accelerate our growth and close the gap in monetization versus the broader U.S. digital advertising market. First, we are prototyping new generative AI formats, including quizzes and chatbots. We doubled our output of AI-assisted content from Q1 to Q2, and we expect to continue ramping up at a similar rate in Q3. Second, we are rapidly expanding our creator programs to increase both revenue and content output. Building on the success of the BuzzFeed and Tasty creator programs, we have expanded this model to our other brands. We now have close partnerships with more than 180 creators who publish original content across our distribution channels. And we work with a much larger extended network of hundreds of creators across our brand portfolio. Collectively, creator-led content drove hundreds of millions of views across our network in Q2. And third, we are taking advantage of the fragmented media environment as one of the few companies that can deliver culturally relevant moments at scale. something that platforms or creators can't match on their own. Moments can be homegrown or they can be part of the broader pop culture calendar. Very few partners can deliver voice and scale together in one package. BuzzFeed Inc. is a one-stop shop for big moments in culture, whether it's the NBA playoffs or the latest episode of Hot Ones, that marketers can plan for and advertise around. In Q2, across our brand portfolio, we launched several new products in each of these areas, a few of which I want to highlight on today's call. Starting with BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed has always been the leader in data-driven storytelling, operating at the intersection of technology and media to curate the best of the internet for our audiences. In Q2, the editorial team continued to harness AI in new ways to deliver deeply engaging entertainment to our audiences. Over the past six months, BuzzFeed has launched several new AI solutions content formats, including new personalized quizzes, chatbots, and multiplayer games, and viral AI image collections. Even more exciting, when we look at individual pieces of AI content, we see increased engagement, more time spent, and AI-inspired image posts that have gone viral across BuzzFeed.com, Instagram, and TikTok. One such example is our recent post, Here's What Barbie's Dream House Would Look Like in Each State, which capitalized on audience excitement around the Barbie film premiering The Barbie film premiered using AI to generate unique images of fictitious Barbie dream houses across the country. The post saw over 1 million views and went viral on TikTok and Reels. More broadly, as compared to Q1, views of our AI content and time spent have both increased threefold, driven by higher content output. And the new content is also driving higher engagement quarter over quarter. Our top 20 AI articles published in Q2 generated more than twice the time spent when compared to our top 20 AI articles in Q1. Complex also began integrating AI to engage their audiences in new ways, leaning into the brand's authoritative voice and audience reach to celebrate the 50th anniversary of hip-hop. From print to to digital, to streaming, to experiential, Complex represents the past, present, and future of convergence culture. As one of the leading digital media brands for the hard-to-reach young male demographic, according to Comscore, Complex attracts loyal audiences with obsessions that range from sneakers to streetwear to sports to hip-hop. In Q2, Complex continued to celebrate the 50th anniversary of hip-hop with experimental AI work in partnership with Sprite, This innovative collaboration allows fans to generate a personalized mixtape album cover with the help of AI. Earlier this year, Complex launched its first creator program, welcoming 18 diverse voices to the inaugural creator class, providing exciting opportunities to deliver original, creator-driven content on behalf of brands. Although it's still early, this content is resonating with advertisers. In fact, Uber is set to team up with us and one of our creators, Ross Mack of Mack Comics, to develop original branded content around financial tips for Uber drivers. First We Feast, our food and pop culture brand, celebrated a huge milestone in Q2, airing the 300th episode of its hit YouTube interview show, Hot Ones. Since 2015, Hot Ones has attracted the biggest celebrity guests, garnered more than 25 billion minutes watched, received multiple Emmy nominations, and broken new ground for YouTube-endemic talk shows. In Q2, The show continued to monetize major cultural moments like the NBA playoffs to deliver our audiences and clients. Hot Ones fans rallied around the NBA playoffs through a collaboration with NBA playoffs official sponsor, Google Pixel. The partnership went deep into the Hot Ones universe to include a Hot Ones episode sponsored by Google Pixel, custom-branded social content designed by our creative team, and brand integrations featuring the Pixel phone across both Hot Ones and the Truth or Dab spinoff series. Turning to Tasty, since its launch in 2015, Tasty has taught the Internet how to cook through inspiring recipes, cutting-edge trends, and inclusive food stories that reflect the wide identities of our audience. Today, Tasty garners over 1 billion cross-platform views each quarter, and audience engagement across platforms continues to surpass the competition, making it the largest and most engaged food community on the Internet, according to Tubular Intelligence. Over the past year, Tasty has also emerged as a leading platform for food creators. To date, the Tasty creator program has onboarded 10 residents to develop new content in collaboration with the brand. The residency has produced incredible results, helping creators to grow their audiences substantially while also driving deeper engagement with the Tasty community. This success led to new Tasty TikTok series, Potatoes 100 Ways, helmed by one of Tasty's inaugural residents, Jerry Mobley, This series rapidly gained an audience following, earning more than 70 million views to date and securing a multi-episode sponsorship from Idahoan Potatoes. As we continue to ramp our creator-led content, we're excited to introduce even more ways to bring creators and brands together on our platform. In May, Tasty introduced a first-of-its-kind culinary companion in Batatouille, an AI-powered chef bot designed to revolutionize the cooking, meal prep, and shopping experience for Tasty's global community of chefs. And users are engaging more deeply than we expected. They're having long conversations with Bata Tewi, asking the chef bot to help solve their daily cookie challenges from meal planning to healthy cooking to ingredient inspiration. HuffPost continued to engage readers with destination news content in Q2. The brand's breaking news coverage from the high-profile departures at Fox and CNN to the tragic events of the Titan Submersible to new developments in the Trump indictment and arraignment drove massive audience traffic during the quarter. HuffPost is also working with 10 rising stars as part of its own creator program to collaborate on editorial content in order to scale the brand's short-form vertical video offerings while preparing the residents for careers as creators. Resident content has been featured across HuffPost social channels since its program launched last December. HuffPost has grown its vertical video output exponentially. Across our portfolio of premium brands and IP, we reach millions of young people every day who visit us directly to enjoy our content. And as you've heard, our initiatives around AI, creators, and cultural moments are gaining real momentum with audiences and clients alike. validation that we are pursuing the right long-term strategy for growth and monetization. As we execute against our vision, we are committed to building a business that delivers significant margin expansion and generates strong cash flows over time. I'm grateful for the support of our shareholders and honored to work alongside our talented teams of creators, journalists, producers, and all our employees as we continue to lead the industry forward with an unwavering commitment to our mission to spread truth, joy, and creativity on the internet. I'll now hand the call off to Marcela to discuss our business performance and operational highlights. Marcela?