Eventbrite, Inc.

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Eventbrite, Inc. 4th Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode. If you have any questions or comments during the presentation, you may press star 1 on your phone to enter the question queue at any time, and we'll open the floor for your questions and comments after the presentation. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Katie Pickett. Ma'am, the floor is yours.

Good afternoon and welcome to Eventbrite's fourth quarter 2024 earnings call. My name is Katie Pickett, Investor Relations. With us today are Julia Hartz, our co-founder and chief executive officer, and Anand Gandhi, our chief financial officer. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded and will be available for replay on Eventbrite's Investor Relations website at investor.eventbrite.com. Please also refer to our investor relations website to find our shareholder letter announcing our financial results, which was released prior to the call. Before we get started, I would like to remind you that during today's call, we'll be making forward-looking statements regarding future events and financial performance. We caution that such statements reflect our best judgment as of today, February 27th, based on the factors that are currently known to us. and that actual future events or results could differ materially due to several factors, many of which are beyond our control. For a more detailed discussion of the risks and uncertainties affecting our future results, we refer you to the section titled Forward-Looking Statements in our shareholder letter and our filings with the SEC. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made during the call to reflect events or circumstances after today or to reflect new information or the occurrence of unanticipated events except as required by law. During this call, we'll present adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin, which are non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP financial measures are not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles and have limitations as an analytical tool. You should not consider them in an isolation or as a substitute for analysis of our results of operations as reported under GAAP. A reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure is available in our shareholder letter. We encourage you to read our shareholder letter, which contains important information about GAAP and non-GAAP results. And with that, I'll now turn the call over to Julia.

Thank you, Katie. Welcome to our fourth quarter earnings call. Before we dive in, I want to take a moment to welcome Anand to his first earnings call as our CFO. Since joining, Anand has already made a significant impact, bringing deep marketplace expertise and a disciplined approach to financial management. I'm excited to have him as a partner as we continue executing our strategy and driving long-term value. Welcome, Anand. Now let's get into our fourth quarter and year-end results. The end of 2024 was about stabilization, and we closed out the last quarter strong, delivering $76.5 million in revenue at the upper end of our outlook range and $6.5 million in adjusted EBITDA, enabling us to exceed our 10% margin target for the fiscal year. As a reminder, in September, we made a meaningful change to our pricing model by eliminating organizer-side listing fees. This allows all creators to publish unlimited events without upfront fees. Since then, we've seen steady improvements in creator acquisition, event volume, and ticket transactions. Total ticketing volume returned to growth up 2% year over year in Q4. As we had anticipated, free ticket volume recovered faster, growing 8% in Q4, which was a 25% point swing from Q3, and paid ticketing trends improved sequentially from Q3 to Q4. Additionally, paid transacting creators and paid event volume improved. That momentum has continued into 2025, Looking at January's year-over-year performance, both paid ticket sales and paid transacting creators improved over the previous month, and ticket sales per creator also continued to strengthen. We're now tracking five consecutive months of improving year-over-year paid ticket trends, adjusting for last year's leap year impact. Another key driver of momentum is Eventbrite ads, which continues to scale. Compared to last year, ads revenue grew 35% in Q4 and 83% for the full year, with more creators investing in promotion to expand their audiences. Creators who used ads sold four times more tickets than those who didn't, creating a strong cycle where better event discovery leads to more ticket sales and deeper engagement across the platform. With stabilizing ticketing trends, growing creator engagement, and expanding ad monetization, we're confident in our ability to accelerate from here. Now I want to take a moment to frame how we're thinking about 2025. We are guiding to a lower revenue range than last year, which may stand out at first glance. But to be clear, this is purely a function of structural revenue mix changes, not a reflection of weakening fundamentals. With the pricing changes fully reflected in our 2025 guidance, we expect to exit the year as a stronger, more scalable business in ticketing revenue and marketplace monetization. This is a year of transition, one that we believe will prepare us to scale efficiently and drive stronger growth in 2026 and beyond. Now, we're entering 2025 with momentum, as I mentioned, and that's a direct result of our disciplined execution of a clear strategy. This year, we're sharpening our focus around three things, expanding our consumer reach, deepening creator engagement, and strengthening marketplace monetization. For consumers, we're rolling out a redesigned Eventbrite app, making event discovery more immersive with video, social-driven recommendations, and enhanced tools for creators to showcase their events. We're also launching it lists curated event recommendations from cultural tastemakers and brands to make finding great events easier than ever. And we're also refreshing our brand to better connect with the next generation of Eventbrite users and drive greater awareness, engagement and retention. For creators, we're doubling down on those who drive the majority of ticket volume. High-volume creators accounted for nearly 60% of paid tickets in 2024 and were investing in retention programs, expanding segments like timed entry, rolling out Stripe point-of-sale at scale, and deepening relationships with high-value creators who drive consumers to the marketplace. Take the Detroit Auto Show, for example. They recently returned to the platform and opted into our early access release of the integrated Stripe point-of-sale solution. They sold over 100,000 paid tickets to their event, with a third of those sales processed in person at the event using this new extension of our platform with ease. They were thrilled. This is exactly the type of customer we want to serve, high-volume event creators who rely on Eventbrite to power their growth. We're continuing to invest in this segment by offering powerful new solutions centered around efficiency and reach, such as improving tools for audience segmentation, social integrations, and data and insights to connect creators with their audiences. We're also driving marketplace monetization through the continued expansion of Eventbrite ads by increasing adoption among high-volume creators who already see strong ROI on ticket sales when leveraging promoted listings. We plan to enhance targeting and automation to increase advertisers' efficiency and add new placement opportunities across the consumer journey to better connect consumers with the events they love. So while our revenue outlook reflects a shift in mix, it does not reflect a weakening of the business. In fact, we're running a leaner, more efficient, and more scalable company than we were a year ago. With five months of improving ticketing trends, growing adoption of Eventbrite ads, and a leaner operating structure, we are executing against our plan for a stronger, more scalable business. Now I'll hand it over to Anand to walk you through our financials and provide more detail on how we're pacing towards these goals. Anand?