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Shutterstock, Inc.
4/26/2022
Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the first quarter 2022 Shutterstock earnings conference call. At this time, all participant lines are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you'll need to press star, then 1 on your telephone keypad. Please be advised, today's conference may be recorded. If you require operator assistance during the call, please press star, then 0. I'd now like to hand the conference over to your host today, Chris Hsu, Vice President, Investor Relations and Corporate Development. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Liz. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Shutterstock's first quarter 2022 earnings call. Joining us today is Stan Pawlowski, Shutterstock's Chief Executive Officer, and Jared Yays, Shutterstock's Chief Financial Officer. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including without limitation, 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, including 2022 guidance. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to today's press release and the reports we filed with the SEC from time to time, including the risk factors discussed in our most recently filed Form 10-K, for discussions of important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from any forward-looking statements we may 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 and in our 10Q. With that, I'll turn the call over to Stan.
Thanks, Chris. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Today, we'll be discussing Shutterstock first quarter results, We'll also talk in more detail about Shutterstock's product roadmap, which we believe uniquely positions Shutterstock for continued growth. And finally, we wanted to address the ongoing war in Ukraine and its impact on Shutterstock, both from a contributor and customer perspective. Shutterstock grew 9% year-over-year this past quarter, or 11% on a constant currency basis. driven by a further acceleration of growth in our enterprise channel to 11% and e-commerce growth of 7% per our expectations. The 11% year-over-year growth in enterprise reflects the dramatically improved execution, the strength of our Flex family of products, and continued momentum in our studios and editorial businesses. Our Flex team subscription and Flex premium products are now a key part of our offering geared towards small and medium businesses and middle market customers. Additionally, both Shutterstock Studios and editorial businesses turned in strong quarters. Shutterstock Studios has built a strong presence and credibility in the market, which has enabled us to win multifaceted contracts for blue chip brands, increase our overall AOVs, and maintain strong customer retention while all positioning Shutterstock as a strategic, full-service partner capable of serving our customers' most complex creative needs. Our editorial business is growing at a healthy rate, driven by continuing innovation in our new newsroom offering, which we rolled out in 2021. We are especially proud of some of the great work being done by our photographers in their coverage of key entertainment and media events. In short, our increased focus on offering end-to-end enterprise solutions, such as studios and editorial, has enabled Shutterstock over the past several quarters to change the conversation with our enterprise customers and better position ourselves as a strategic partner able to meet their needs. In our e-commerce channel, we experienced 7.3% growth year over year and 9% on a constant currency basis, in line with our expectations, which we discussed last quarter. We saw the continuing shift by customers to our subscription offerings with accelerating net subscriber additions in the first quarter, driven by the Flex 25 product introduced this past October. This past quarter, our overall subscriber count grew 17%, and our subscription revenue grew 12% on a year-over-year basis, resulting in subscription revenue as a percent of total revenue reaching 43%, which was an all-time high. We also feel good about the actions we're taking to re-accelerate growth in our e-commerce channel and expect to see some positive momentum throughout 2022. These actions include introducing new content subscriptions, including a new unlimited music subscription with sound effects in Q2, enhancing the value of our content subscriptions with predictive insights and workflow applications that help our subscribers select and create better content, which I'll discuss next. As you may remember, we made several key acquisitions last year in data and workflow, and I'm happy to say that we're making exciting and tangible progress towards integrating these acquisitions and building out our core capabilities. We are entering a very exciting period of testing, learning, and rapid iteration as we bring new features and capabilities to market in Q2. Our immediate focus is on adding value for our existing content subscribers and on bringing new subscriptions and add-ons to market in the second half of the year. In early April, we released our Catalog and Plan applications to our e-commerce customers. Catalog allows customers to organize their licensed and saved content in one place. Meanwhile, Plan allows customers to stay organized, through a centralized content calendar. These value-enhancing features are available for free for our e-commerce subscribers and our enterprise customers, and we are already seeing promising early results in terms of engagement. This week, we released AI-powered search to our enterprise customers and e-commerce subscribers. These are powered by our acquisitions of Pattern 89 DataSign and Shotser. And this feature allows customers to set objectives and define target audiences as part of their search to discover content most likely to perform for their goals. Additionally, our predictive technology provides the why behind content recommendations, helping our customers understand with specificity what elements in each photo are the key drivers of performance. This predictive power is now a feature of our core search experience. In addition, this AI-powered search underpins our newly launched Predict application, which we have released to a handful of beta enterprise customers. Given the reduced reliance on third-party cookies and device IDs and the ever-expanding sea of content available from which to choose, Marketers are increasingly facing challenges in reaching their target audience with the right content. Our Predict app helps overcome this challenge by providing tools that enable our customers to select the right content asset for their specific needs. In addition, the Predict app allows our customers to collaborate within their teams to find the right content with features like shared project boards. We are also approaching a major milestone with the release of our Create application in the coming weeks. This app, powered by the technology acquired from the PicMonkey acquisition, will allow customers to access templates, customize text, remove backgrounds, make touch-ups, and handle other creative editing functions. In short, customers will be able to produce professional quality designs through an intuitive, easy-to-use interface. The catalog plan, predict and create apps are either available now or will soon be available at no charge to our e-commerce subscription customers and our enterprise customers as value-enhancing features to our existing premium products. Across both our e-commerce and enterprise channels, We believe that these applications will resonate with our existing base of creative professionals who seek to supplement or validate their intuition with data-backed insights. Moreover, as we continue to evolve these applications in 2022, they will enable us to better serve marketing professionals who will be able to generate predictive scores and insights on their own assets and leverage custom, account-based predictive scoring, and insights based on their own historic data. In addition, we plan to introduce later this year a Creative Flow subscription, which will include the catalog, plan, create, and predict apps, and will also incorporate our AI-powered search. This new product will target the casual creative segments and will include a free tier of Shutterstock content with an upsell path to Shutterstock's premium content subscriptions. We believe that this standalone Creative Flow subscription product, which will be available at lower monthly price point, represents an extension to new audiences who previously may not have had a need for stock content. In summary, Our new offering will connect our massive content library with a powerful editing and design platform, easy to use collaboration tools, and AI powered insights so that creatives and marketers can make, share, validate, and organize their creative work all in one place. This will extend Shutterstock's presence to a broader part of the creative process rather than just the contact selection phase. We encourage you to visit our investor relations microsite, which contains a link to a video that gives you a glimpse of all these capabilities. And lastly, we wanted to spend a moment addressing the war in Ukraine and any impact on our business. As an organization, we are committed to supporting our network of contributors in Ukraine. To that end, in early March, Shutterstock made a donation of $1 million to provide direct assistance to Shutterstock's thousands of contributors in Ukraine. In the first quarter, Shutterstock had approximately 2.1 million contributors, up over 20 percent from the prior year. And the content collection is massive, with 430 million assets. We have not seen any significant changes in the pattern of content submissions in this region that is meaningfully different from the rest of the world. Throughout the history of Shutterstock, we have seen the sources of our content shift globally from region to region with impressive flexibility and responsiveness to the needs of the market. And that is part of the powerful network effect that we have created with our efficient marketplace. While we do not believe our contributor supply chain will impact our revenues, we do have about 1% of revenues from the impacted region, which we believe will go away in large part, and we have factored into our expectations for the year. In conclusion, a few final takeaways before I turn over the call to Jared. First, the product rollouts in connection with our predictive performance and creative design capabilities represent the crystallization of our acquisitions from last year. Second, we believe that the recent and pending launches of our workflow applications will enable product differentiation and sustained growth in the marketplace. And finally, we are changing customers' perception of Shutterstock by offering strategic, full-service solutions and a suite of applications we are more deeply embedding us into our customers' workflows. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Jared.
Thank you, Stan, and good morning, everyone. Revenues grew 9% in the first quarter, or 11% on a constant currency basis, per our expectations for the quarter and a good start to the year. E-commerce revenue grew 7% this quarter, or 9% on a constant currency basis. We witnessed an acceleration in net subscriber additions with the fastest growth in multiple quarters, driven by our smaller subscription products, including our Flex 25, launched in October of 2021. This strength was partially offset by our non-subscription pack and transaction products. To remind investors, pack and transaction products tend to have lower LTVs and lower net revenue retention than our subscription products. As a result of this continued mix shift towards subscription products, our subscription revenues reached a record 43% of revenues this quarter. As a reminder, we only include in our subscriber counts and subscription revenues long-term subscribers that have been with Shutterstock for more than three months. Our enterprise channel turned in another strong quarter, growing 11% or 13% on a constant currency basis based on sustained growth in our Flex Team products, as well as strength at Shutterstock Studios and in editorial. For the first quarter, gross margin declined by approximately 114 basis points to 65.1% year over year, largely driven by higher non-cash M&A amortization expense of $5.5 million. Backing out M&A amortization, Q1 gross margin improved by 150 basis points year over year. Gross margins are improving partially due to the ongoing mix shift towards subscription offerings, which tend to have lower utilization than pack-in transaction products. Sales and marketing expense was 27% of revenues as compared to 23% in the first quarter of 2021 and down from 30% in the fourth quarter. The year-over-year increase in sales and marketing was driven by additional investment in performance marketing spend, along with sales headcount additions to support the future growth of our enterprise channel. Product development as a percentage of revenue increased 1% due to costs associated with our 2021 acquisitions, as well as further investment in our product roadmap. G&A expenses were 15% of revenue down 120 basis points from the first quarter of 2021, as we are experiencing leverage in G&A as our business continues to grow. G&A also included the $1 million donation to our contributors in Ukraine, which had a 50 basis point impact EBITDA margins for the quarter. Excluding the donation to Ukraine, G&A costs would have been down 170 basis points year over year. Adjusted EBITDA margins were 27.5%, down by 300 basis points from last year, mainly driven by additional marketing spend. For the first quarter, GAAP diluted earnings per share was 71 cents, and adjusted diluted earnings per share was $1. Turning to our balance sheet and cash flows, at the end of the quarter, we had $258 million of cash, down from $314 million at December 31st, 2021. The $56 million decline in cash is driven primarily from our share buyback program during the quarter, as well as our annual bonus payment in the first quarter. As we indicated during the fourth quarter, we were more aggressive about buying back our stock and repurchased 422,000 shares for 38.4 million. As a result, our total shares outstanding decreased by 280,000 shares to 36.1 million shares at the end of the quarter. In addition, we also paid 18.5 million related to taxes on the vesting of our equity awards, which are issued on a withhold-to-cover basis, further limiting share count creep. We also paid $8.7 million for our quarterly dividend, which we recently increased to $0.24 per share and announced that in January. This is a total of over $65 million of cash utilized to return value to our shareholders during the quarter. Cash outflows also included $13 million of CapEx and content acquisitions. As described in previous calls, we believe that our framework of increasing dividends, consistent share buybacks, and M&A is an attractive complement to our baseline of shareholder value creation generated from revenue growth and margin expansion. Our deferred revenue balance was $179 million, an increased $25 million from the first quarter of 2021, representing year-over-year growth of 16 percent. Adjusting for the deferred revenue balance for PicMonkey, deferred revenue grew 10 percent year-over-year, faster than our overall revenue growth for the quarter. Turning to our key operating metrics for the quarter, subscriber count increased by 17% to 360,000, and sequential net additions accelerated to 17,000 from 7,000 last quarter, with one-third of the additions driven by the introduction of the Flex 25 product introduced in October of last year. Subscriber revenue increased by 11% to 85.4 million, and subscriber revenue represented 43% of revenues, our highest ever. Average revenue per customer increased by 4% to $355 on a year-over-year basis and decreased 3% on a sequential basis. The decline in ARPU sequentially was driven by our inclusion of TurboSquid revenues and customers in this metric for the first time this quarter. Paid downloads were down 2.5%, and revenue per download increased to $4.22 per download. We are maintaining our guidance for the full year at 8 to 10 percent revenue growth, with margins flat to up 50 basis points, despite the headwinds we've experienced related to foreign exchange and the war in Ukraine. At current spot rates, projected through the end of the year, FX represents an additional 0.5 percent headwind to reported revenue growth for the full year as compared to when we gave guidance in the fourth quarter. We've also taken into account the loss of revenues from both Russia and Ukraine representing 1% of revenues for the full year. So these headwinds are approximately 1.5% in total. Regardless, we feel quite good about our first quarter revenue performance and our growth prospects for the year. We're off to a great start with our EBITDA margins above our own expectations at 27.5% in the first quarter. Should that positive margin outperformance continue, we will adjust our guidance accordingly. Overall, we're thrilled as a team with the progress we've been making towards evolving our business into a subscription model and integrating data and creative tools and workflow into our content offerings over the past year. We are pleased with our margins to start the year giving us the flexibility to invest for growth while still delivering on our commitments around annual margin expansion. And with that, operator, we'd now like to open the line for any questions.
If you'd like to ask a question at this time, please press the star, then the number one key on your touchtone telephone. To withdraw your question, press the pound key. Our first question comes from Joseph Squally with Truist Securities.
Great. Thank you very much. Hey, Stan, Jared. Just two questions for me. First, maybe just on the FX impacts on Russia and the headwinds from Russia on the quarter, if you look at it on a sequential basis, can you maybe just quantify the impact? I think so relative to FX you just said earlier that for the year it's 50 bps, so that assumes that it was about 50 bps for the quarter as well. And Russia, I know you guys, I think, conducted business in Russia until maybe end of February. So just what was the net-net, just so that we can back into a number relative to the expectations that you guys set up back in February? And then, Stan, thanks for all the color that you gave about product sales. that you guys are planning to second half, but where are you in maybe plans to integrate PicMonkey into the bundles? I'm thinking the Flex 25, there's a talk of maybe a Flex 10, and any early feedback on retention or on any other metric from this integration? Thanks.
Sure, and Yusuf, if I can help with the first part of your question, then I'll turn it over to Stan. Just in terms of FX impact, as we think about it, we have about a third of our revenues that are denominated in euros and GBP. Year over year, we saw the euro depreciate about 7% year over year, and the GDP depreciate about 3% year over year. We had factored into our guidance in the fourth quarter when we gave the full year guidance about a 2% impact to revenues from foreign exchange. We've seen that accelerate by about 50 basis points per my prior remarks. If you look at that impact of 50 bps on the first quarter, that would be approximately a million dollars of revenue. We also have about 1% of our revenues from Russia and Ukraine. that would be about $8 million of annual revenue. We saw some of that revenue come off in the month of March. Going forward, we'll have the full annualized impact of that in our numbers. And so we've factored that into our guidance. Our reported revenues for the quarter was really right in the middle of our guidance. And so despite that percent and a half headwind, we do still feel comfortable with our current guidance and feel good about the growth prospects of the business.
Hey, Youssef, and this is Stan. To answer your question on the applications, and I realize that we went into some detail about all of the applications and kind of the launch of the application. So just a quick reminder, Catalog and Plan was released in early April. And then AI-powered search was also just released this past week. And then our Predict application is currently out in beta with some of our enterprise customers, and then we're a couple weeks away from the Create application, which is the PicMonkey integration into the Shutterstock sort of core experience. This quarter is very much focused on learning and continuing to follow with additional features. In fact, the rest of the year will be like that. However, we will be doing a lot more marketing in the second half of the year around these applications. As far as retention goes, which is sort of what's most important about these applications, For the applications that we've launched, we're seeing about a 20% engagement with the applications already. For new customers that are coming and engaging with the apps, they have about twice the engagement of customers who don't engage with the apps. And your question about Flex and how we're going to be making the Creative Flow suite of applications available, they will be available to all of our subscription products. This includes our Flex products as well. And then we will also have a standalone Creative Flow subscription with a free tier of content for those that maybe previously have not had a need for stock content. And what this allows us to do is to capture a completely new audience and also start to introduce them to the effectiveness of being able to leverage not just stock content, but being able to leverage stock content with data that tells them what content will actually perform. So the way we're thinking about it is it's a value add for all of our existing subscriptions. And then for customers who want the Creative Flow applications without a content subscription, we will make that available as well.
Excellent. Thank you. And just on the bundles, so your Flex 25, which I think you launched last year, you seem to be very happy with the outcome. There was a talk of maybe a Flex 10. Can you give us an update on that?
Yeah. So we are testing and going to be testing a Flex 10 product as well. We're still in the planning stages of that. Part of... the testing that we do is we do AB testing on all major releases. Some of that has to do with just ensuring that especially given our content products are becoming much more robust with the combination of video and music within the subscriptions and then the fact that we're also launching individual subs that are tied to each of our content categories. We have to do a lot of testing and a lot of thinking around how to best support these products, what audiences we should target with these products, the pricing of the product. But, yes, we do plan to test that this quarter.
Great. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Andrew Boone with JMP.
Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. Can you talk about, you mentioned this just off of Yusuf's question, but can you talk about how you plan to educate users on the apps themselves? You know, AI and Predict is somewhat of a new feature in terms of users on the platform. How are you educating users on it? And then more broadly, as we think about these tools as kind of a new on-ramp in terms of marketing, can you talk about, just double-click on the marketing plans that you mentioned in terms of the back half of the year, and how big should we think about the investment being made in these newer tools? Thanks. Yeah.
Hey, thanks for the question. Great question. So right now, the way that we're learning is through customers discovering these applications effectively on their own. And the way that they're discovering these applications is that if you go to Shutterstock today, whereas previously you just had a search bar, today you start to see a sidebar that also has applications as part of the experience. As we move forward to the back half of the year, we have a complete go-to-market plan, which will include everything from specific site marketing, so call-outs that we will have, videos that we will have in terms of help, you know, things that our UX team is responsible for in sort of helping our consumers based on where they are across the site. So whether they're on a search page, whether they're on a asset detail page, we will have unique ways to engage our customers into the application experience. We are also going to be creating an enormous amount of content and content marketing in support of these new applications. And we will be doing some upper funnel marketing as well. Jared can talk to the specifics in terms of the marketing spend as a percent of revenue, but We do have a complete plan to drive that discovery from a brand perspective to really talk about Shutterstock in a completely new way, educate both our existing subscribers, but also expand our reach to new customers who are looking for tools and templates to to help them get going from a creative perspective. So Jared, I don't know if we're providing any additional guidance at this point about marketing in the back half, but I'll turn that over to you.
Sure. So as we mentioned in the fourth quarter, we do expect sales and marketing expense to slightly decrease year over year as compared to 2021. Andrew, if you remember, towards the back half of last year, we embarked on a linear television campaign That was about $13 million of spend or about 1.8% sales and marketing spend as a percentage of revenues. We don't expect to let all of that fall to the bottom line, and we are going to be reinvesting in sales and marketing. We were at about 27% for the first quarter, and so what you'll expect to see is a more even pace of sales and marketing spend over the course of the year, but you're not going to see us tick back up to that 30% of revenue sales and marketing spend that we approached in the fourth quarter of last year. So sales and marketing overall year-on-year to be slightly lower than last year as we redeploy some of those linear advertising dollars into other investments. However, a more even pace of sales and marketing spend this year as compared to last year where it was more second-half weighted.
Thanks so much, guys.
As a reminder, that is star then one if you'd like to ask a question. Our next question comes from Bernie McTernan with Needham.
Great. Good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. Maybe to start just on guidance, so called out the 150 basis point impact to revenue growth, but keeping revenue guidance the same, so what is outperforming expectations or offsetting tailwinds that impacted the original guide?
Bernie, just a couple points. I think, one, clearly our enterprise channel is really executing very strongly. And I think Stan dove into some of the backdrop and reasons for that. But you can look at multiple data points, including the deferred revenue growth on the balance sheet. You can look at sequential improvements in the growth of that business. We just have a lot of confidence in that business continuing to perform well. Secondly, we feel quite good about our product roadmap. We've invested in this very heavily over the course of the past year, first through our acquisitions, our organic efforts in really evolving into a creative platform, as well as the migration towards becoming a subscription revenue business, which gives us better revenue visibility because of the better net revenue retention associated with subscribers. And quite frankly, we started off the year with a healthy degree of conservatism. And so we've built in enough cushion for ourselves to be able to absorb these lumps and still meet and exceed our expectations for the business. So I think despite that percent and a half headwind, we feel quite good about the top line growth prospects of the business. And lastly, we really put up a great quarter in terms of profitability. And while that's great in terms of margin expansion, it also gives us dry powder to be able to reinvest in our business to accelerate the revenue growth even further. There's a bit of a virtuous cycle when you put up a great profitability to be able to put those monies back into your business and pick up the growth. So I think it's our execution on top line. It's the enterprise channel. It's the evolution towards the subscription business. And lastly, strong profitability gives us that dry powder to be able to put back in the business and make sure we can meet and exceed our numbers.
Understood. And maybe just going further in on Europe and rest of the world, both were flat year over year in 1Q22. I think there were some difficult comparisons there maybe. But was there anything else to call it from like a macro standpoint that was impacting revenue growth in Europe aside from Ukraine and Russia?
So one of the things that's important to note in Europe is when you think about the 2% FX headwind to revenues, all of that is as a result of depreciation in the GBP and the euro, which is in our European geography that we disclose externally, which is about a third of our revenues. So if you think about a 2% headwind to revenue growth on a third of your revenues, the constant currency growth of that European division is closer to 6% to 7%. So it's actually not flat year over year. What I would say, broadly speaking, is that we've had better success with our evolution and our sell-through of our subscription products in the U.S. as compared to Europe and Asia. I think we're making some headway in that regard, and we're very focused on it. But I do think that, you know, the European business on a constant currency basis is growing at that 6% to 7% growth rate. And quite frankly, we feel quite good about some of the things we're doing in Asia, and particularly in our enterprise channel going forward.
Understood. And then just lastly for me on competition, there was some news flow that happened over the past month or last few weeks at least. with some AI-based content competitors like Dolly 2, you know, potentially coming into this stock imaging market. Just any thoughts in terms of, you know, what competition looks like in the stock imaging market if it's still the – or stock content market, is it still kind of like the big three, or are there other maybe competitors out there we should be focused on as well too?
Well, and hey, Bernie, good talking to you. I think when you look at our category, I think there's a lot of innovation that continues in terms of how you leverage content, how you deal with the fact that cookies are going away, how to be effective as a creative and marketer. When we think about the investments that we make, we think about it from a standpoint of what is proprietary to us. So, for example, when we take our library and we have 430 million assets and we score that library based on the data acquisitions that we have against IAB segments and audience segments or segments tied to affinity, content affinity, aesthetics, et cetera, that is really unique to us. It's not like this is third-party data that somehow is equally distributed across these competitors in the marketplace. And so there's a lot of companies in the AI space. The reason we decided to make these investments is because when you think about the size of our library, when you think about the type of training sets that we've developed internally. And now when you think about our ability to actually help our customers target the audiences that they're trying to target with a content library that is unparalleled, you know, we think we definitely have a very compelling product. So you're right, it's a very, you know, we're in a very competitive space and there's going to continue to be tens and hundreds of companies that are going to leverage AI in different ways. For us, it's really about a very practical and proprietary application based on the strengths that we have at Shutterstock, which is the depth of our library as well as the data that we have acquired that is proprietary to us.
Understood. Thanks for taking all the questions.
As a reminder, that is star then one to ask a question. We have a follow-up from Yosef Squally with Truist Securities.
Thank you. Hey, guys, just two qualifications. One, did you guys include the big monkey subs in the subcalendar score? Because I think you spoke to it as part of our proof. And the other, Jared, so the Q1 EBITDA outperformance sets you up nicely for potentially delivering more than that zero to 50 bps for the year. I know you're basically keeping your guidance unchanged, but do you have plans of reinvesting that money more aggressively in other areas that you didn't think of maybe three months ago? Thanks.
So, Yusuf, we have not yet included the PicMonkey subscribers in our numbers. I think if we were to include them at a point in time in the kind of prior period comparable, we didn't include them as well as a pro forma. It would be a little bit misleading. So we're probably going to wait until we've kind of annualized the acquisition to include those subs in our KPIs. And we'll call that out specifically for investors when we do so.
Was it part of the ARPU discussion that you had before? I'm sorry.
No, it's not part of the ARPU. What was part of the ARPU was the inclusion of TurboSquid, which we had done in February of last year, so that is included in the numbers. But the PicMonk is not in either. In terms of the margins, we're very pleased with the margins in the first quarter. And by the way, that margin performance is inclusive of the donation we made in Ukraine. So we feel great, obviously, about our start to the year and our ability to do something like that while still being able to invest in our business. We realize that we have made commitments around margin expansion. We have some pretty important growth opportunities in our business, and we've been executing on those in terms of our product roadmap. And you may have also seen our press release that we put out yesterday about our new CMO and head of brand. So we're very excited about the prospects of our team and what we can do from a marketing and branding perspective. So we're going to have that balance of investing in our business for growth while also adhering to our commitments around margin expansion.
I'm showing no further questions in queue at this time. I'd like to turn the call back to Stan Pawlowski for closing remarks.
I want to thank you all for joining us today. And as always, we want to express our gratitude to our customers, our contributors, and employees. That ends our call for today. Thank you.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.