Getty Images Holdings, Inc.

Good afternoon, and welcome to Getty Images' first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Today's call is being recorded. We have allocated one hour for prepared remarks and Q&A. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Stephen Kanner, VP of Investor Relations and Treasury at Getty Images. Thank you. You may begin.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Getty Images first quarter 2023 earnings call. Joining me on today's call are Craig Peters, Chief Executive Officer, and Jen Layden, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, we would like to remind you that this call will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are subject to various risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, which could cause our actual results to differ materially from these statements. These risks, uncertainties, and assumptions are highlighted in the forward-looking statement section of today's press release and in our filings with the SEC. Links to these filings and today's press release can be found on our Investor Relations website at investors.gettyimages.com. During our call today, we will also reference certain non-GAAP financial information, including adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, adjusted EBITDA less capex, free cash flow, and currency neutral growth rates. We use non-GAAP measures in some of our financial discussions as we believe they assist investors in understanding the core operating results that management uses to evaluate the business. Reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP measures, as well as the description, limitations, and rationale for using each measure, can be found in our filings for the SEC. After our prepared remarks, we will open the call for your questions. With that, I will hand the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Craig Peters.

Thanks, Stephen, and thanks to everyone for joining our Getty Images first quarter 2023 earnings call. I'll start by addressing the quarter's business performance and progress at a high level before Jen takes you through the first quarter financial results. First quarter 2023 reported revenue was $235.6 million, representing year-on-year growth of 2% and currency neutral growth of 5.5%. Our adjusted EBITDA finished at just over $76 million for the quarter. This reflects a reported year-on-year decrease of 2% and growth of 2.2% on a currency neutral basis. As accounted for in our guidance, we anticipated currency headwinds through the first half of 2023 to impact our bottom line. However, we anticipate this will significantly improve over the second half of the year. Top line results reflect continued softness in some parts of our business, notably in Europe and some agency customers, which we believe is due to customers approaching spend more cautiously in the challenging macro environment. Our iStock e-commerce performance continues to perform well and is the thriving engine behind our growth in total purchasing customers and annual subscribers, with the latter totaling 69,000 net additions in the quarter. Unsplash Plus, the paid subscription we launched in Q4 2022, continues to show positive signs with respect to customer acquisition, utilization, and renewals. Our total paid downloads increased by 6.6% year-over-year, with contributions to growth coming from each of our brands from creative and editorial, and from stills and video. This speaks to the increasing value our customers are deriving from our offers. Of course, we believe increased commitment and consumption is underpinned by the uniqueness and quality of our content offerings. In this quarter, we were pleased to renew our longstanding exclusive content partnerships with Sky News and End of Dollar. The more recent Met Gala and the coronation of King Charles The third also demonstrate our unique coverage capabilities and distribution. During the quarter, we were pleased to announce our collaboration with NVIDIA to develop and distribute responsible generative text-to-image and text-to-video offerings. We are committed to building new, durable, recurring revenue streams with this technology, And this collaboration addresses many of the concerns with respect to current generative models and speaks to the uniqueness of Getty Images assets in the context of generative AI. Getty Images delivers a unique level of quality with respect to the content and metadata, a level of exclusivity and rights, and a level of research, expertise, and ongoing flow of high-quality contemporary content to maintain and improve these models over time. In collaboration with NVIDIA, we look forward to commercializing these responsible AI models over the coming quarters to bring new capabilities to our collective customers. Further leveraging responsible AI and building on the core strengths of our pre-shop model, which continues to maintain distinct advantages with respect to quality, time efficiency, resolution, and search cost, In partnership with Bria, we deployed one-click background removal functionality to all of our iStock subscribers. We're seeing strong initial adoption, and we'll be expanding these capabilities to object removal during the second quarter. These integrated capabilities allow our customers to get the exact image they need with increased time and budget efficiency. Following the close of the quarter, we were pleased to close on an amended, upsized, and extended $150 million revolving credit facility. This facility provides us with increased financial flexibility, and as a result, we have made a $20 million voluntary repayment on our U.S. dollar turn loan. As a company, Getty Images continues to focus on providing meaningful value to our customers by allowing them to elevate their creations and audience connections. saving their precious time and resources, and reducing their risk. We're focused on expanding our differentiation based on the quality of our offerings supported by our exclusive contributors, our premium content partners, our event access and rights, and through the depth of our content expertise and archive. We are embracing new capabilities to increase the value we provide to our customers and to create new and recurring revenue streams. We are staying mindful of current near-term economic conditions through disciplined cost management, while continuing to invest in long-term across technology, new products, and geographic expansion. We see continued momentum highlighted by our growing customer base, growing customer commitment via annual subscriptions, growing customer downloads and video consumption, growing geographic penetration, and our ability to attract and retain high-quality partners and customers. And with that, I'll hand the call over to Jen, who will take you through the more detailed financial