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spk17: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by and welcome to the third quarter 2023 Shutterstock Inc. Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a 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 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker today, Chris Hsu, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Development. Please go ahead.
spk16: Thanks, Michelle. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Shutterstock's third quarter 2023 earnings call.
spk07: Joining us today is Paul Hennessy, Shutterstock's CEO, and Jared Yays, Shutterstock's CFO. 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 the 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 2023 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 file 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 make on the 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. I'd now like to turn the call over to Paul Hennessy, Chief Executive Officer.
spk12: Thank you, Chris. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today, and I wish everyone a happy Halloween. In the third quarter, Shutterstock's data and creative engines fueled faster growth and furthered the transformation of our business. Enterprise demand picked up, and we expect a further acceleration into the fourth quarter. We are seeing stabilization and are executing operationally to drive a recovery in e-commerce over the next several quarters, supported by marketing and product innovation. On top of strong operational performance, Shutterstock also delivered exceptionally strong financial performance this quarter, with record revenues of $233 million, representing growth of 14% year on year. We continue to be highly profitable, generating 65 million of EBITDA, or 28% margins. EBITDA has exceeded 60 million every quarter for three consecutive quarters, and we are on track to grow EBITDA by double digits this year. Based on our strong year-to-date performance and improved confidence and visibility in our business, we are again raising both revenue and EBITDA guidance for 2023, which Jared will discuss in more detail. Q3 also marked the first quarter where enterprise revenues exceeded e-commerce revenue for Shutterstock. Our enterprise channel is posting consistent growth and in the third quarter grew 60% in total and grew 4% excluding data. We continue to experience strong growth in subscription offerings for medium-sized enterprises with our Flex product, which grew 9% in the third quarter. And we also saw strong momentum at Shutterstock Studios signing our two largest deals ever. Studios has a strong beachhead in virtual production, leveraging 3D assets for gaming ecosystem. We view this market opportunity as having tremendous legs as the gamification of entertainment and interactive media continues. Strength in SMB products and studios is expected to drive accelerated enterprise growth of between 10 and 15% in the fourth quarter, excluding data. On the 3D front, Shutterstock and NVIDIA are making good progress on our generative 3D offering and will be testing in the fourth quarter. As we communicated at the outset of the partnership earlier this year, we believe that our generative 3D offering will lower the cost of 3D model production and drive wider adoption across diverse use cases through simple text to 3D model generation capabilities, as well as expand our library of models available for purchase. Meanwhile, our e-commerce channel declined 15% on a year-over-year basis in Q3 2023. We have confidence that our initiatives will drive a recovery in e-commerce over the next several quarters, including marketing changes driving growth in the top of funnel traffic, improvements in both conversion effectiveness and customer retention, and the recent launch of our low-cost essentials plan featuring unlimited content and our latest in generative AI capabilities. As we mentioned on our last earnings call, we believe that we underinvested in marketing in the last several quarters. We have since increased our paid marketing spend in both brand and SEM and expanded our affiliate channel with a significant new partner. As a result, in October, we have seen traffic growth accelerate to 9% and believe this trend of accelerated traffic growth will continue. We have numerous future opportunities in SEO to drive additional top of funnel traffic improvements and will continue to spend on marketing, which will drive growth in the fourth quarter and into next year. Second, we are seeing conversion effectiveness and retention begin to improve. Our conversion rates in October have improved by over 10%. We are also seeing improvements in retention in our subscription products with churn rates at their lowest point over the past three and a half years. We believe that we have likely given up some of the lower quality customer growth we may have acquired during the pandemic and are now building off a more stable base of core customers. Third, we have just brought to market an exciting new e-commerce product that marries all of our capabilities in generative AI, including image generation and generative editing tools with unlimited content at an attractive price point. Shutterstock Essentials. Shutterstock Essentials plan is a $9.99 monthly plan that is simple and low cost and targets small business and casual creative customers by giving them access to our AI-powered image generation and our recently launched AI-powered editing tools, unlimited access to a library of over 3.5 million wholly owned images, and a discount on our premium tier of images and other content types. In addition to Essentials serving as a customer acquisition product, we believe there is an opportunity to serve the evolving need of our customers by upselling and cross-selling higher-priced premium images, videos, music, and 3D assets to these Essentials customers. We also launched Creative AI, our generative AI-powered editing suite last week, which will be included in Shutterstock's Essentials plans. As a result, customers can both generate new images and use AI-powered tools to edit any pre-existing images to make stock their own. Creative AI includes five generative features that are on par with or better than anything available in the market today. A magic brush function to modify a specific portion of an image. Automated variations to quickly generate lookalike alternatives. a zoom-out function to generate a wider lens perspective, a smart resizer to ensure components of image are correctly proportionate to each other, and a background remover. In terms of generative AI image generation through our collaboration with OpenAI, Shutterstock has priority access to the latest technology, including DALI 3, and our teams are finding the preliminary results best in class. As a result of improving quality and a shift in the marketplace, we believe that monetization is in sharper focus across image generation and editing platforms. And Shutterstock is positioned to benefit as the ecosystem starts to change more for licensable, high-quality images. Beyond our e-commerce and enterprise content businesses, I'd like to discuss two of the most exciting growth areas in GIPHY and in data, both of which are important parts of our strategy. To remind investors, Giphy is a scaled content platform that sits at the intersection of personal communications and shared moments revolving around events and emotions. It enjoys massive audience reach and generates billions of monthly impressions through over 14,000 API partners. All of this translates into a unique and exciting opportunity for brands. To that end, Giphy is now officially open for business. and we are up and running with our first customers on the ad platform with multiple other proposals out. We are seeing strong receptivity by brands in CPG, retail, food and beverage, and financial services. The idea that Giphy's content is something you share rather than something you skip has strong resonance with these advertisers. We expect exciting developments from Giphy in the quarters that come, As advertiser interest in the platform grows and we scale our ability to execute on customer campaigns. Turning to data, it is now clear that data sales for AI and ML model training is an explosive growth opportunity for Shutterstock. Scraping proprietary data to train generative AI models for commercial application is now universally recognized as an unsustainable business tactic It's fraught with legal, financial, and reputational challenges. This plays to Shutterstock's strengths because we offer ethically sourced and licensable metadata at unique scale across media, including images, video, music, and 3D. The scale and quality of our data is evidenced by our incredible roster of customers and partners. This quarter, I'm pleased to report we have signed a new multi-year deal with Amazon, as well as expanded relationships with multiple existing strategic customers. Our customers have reviewed our data in detail, conducted extensive due diligence and evaluation testing, and ultimately decided that Shutterstock was the key partner from which to source this critical ingredient for their AI needs. Thus far, we've had tremendous success in working with the world's largest technology platforms, but we believe the next tier of potential customers who are looking to train their own proprietary generative AI models and build applications will require a different approach to consumption and distribution. In closing, we are seeing some really encouraging signs across our business. Our future engines of growth in Giphy and data are showing extremely strong demands. Our e-commerce business is stabilizing, and we expect recovery over the next several quarters. And our enterprise business picked up and is expecting an even stronger finish to the year. We have some exciting new products that will be rolling out in the fourth quarter, and we see tremendous potential future upside in our business with our creative and data engines taking the lead in Shutterstock's transformation. With that, I'll turn the call over to Jared.
spk05: Thank you, Paul, and good morning, everyone. Shutterstock reported an exceptionally strong third quarter with revenues of $233 million and revenue growth of just over 14%, a record quarter and well beyond our expectations. Q3 adjusted EBITDA was $65 million with 28% margins, showcasing the strong profitability of our business. The enterprise channel was up 60% in the third quarter, driven by revenue from our data engine, which grew to 46 million, a record performance, and driven by our recent win with Google, as well as a new win with Amazon. We are in the process of booking an additional $40 million in total contract value with multiple new and existing data customers. On these new bookings, we are structuring our deals in a manner that will result in more consistent quarterly revenue recognition over an extended period of time. And so, while the new bookings will not impact 2023, most of the revenue will flow into 2024 and beyond. Over time, this approach creates a more significant bookings backlog, greater visibility and predictability, and ultimately a more scalable and sustainable data business. Our enterprise channel growth, excluding data, was driven by strong 9% growth from Flex subscriptions, as well as Giphy starting to ramp up. As Paul mentioned, we expect revenue growth to accelerate further into the fourth quarter to 10 to 15% based on some landmark wins at Shutterstock Studios and overall bookings momentum. The growth of our creative and data engines that we discussed at our investor day in February is clearly accelerating and positively impacting our enterprise channel. Our e-commerce channel was down 15% in the third quarter. As Paul discussed, we are seeing stabilization in the business and expect a recovery in the quarters to come based on current initiatives. Subscriber revenue was up for the quarter with subscriber counts slightly down but having stabilized sequentially, indicating that new customer additions and customer attrition are beginning to match and a meaningful improvement from the past several quarters. We've also seen improvements in churn rates, and we believe that many of the cohort of customers that came into the business in 2021 have left the business, resulting in a more durable base of customers. We expect the fourth quarter revenues in e-commerce to be stable sequentially, reversing the recent trends that we have seen. Reported gross margins declined by just over 1%, driven by higher royalties related to revenue generated through data sales, non-cash M&A amortization, and GIPHY retention compensation. GIPHY retention compensation had minimal net cash impact to Shutterstock in the quarter, as these costs were reimbursed. Sales and marketing expense in the third quarter was 24% of revenue compared to 23% of revenue in the third quarter of 2022. We expect full year marketing spend of 25% consistent with 2022 as we dial up performance marketing spend in our e-commerce sales channel significantly in the fourth quarter. Sales and marketing spend in the fourth quarter is expected to be at least $10 million higher than Q3 with additional spending on branding and SEM. As Paul mentioned, with conversion effectiveness up, this gives us the opportunity to spend further to grow our business. Product development was 12% of revenue compared to 9% of revenue in the third quarter of 2022. Nearly all of the increase is due to GIPHY related retention compensation costs that were reimbursed in addition to 1.5 million of severance incurred in the quarter. G&A expenses were 16% of revenue, compared to 15% in the third quarter of 2022, driven by higher non-cash stock compensation costs, severance costs, and GIFI retention compensation that was reimbursed. Stock compensation costs are higher due to greater expectations around annual performance this year. Severance cost totaled $2.1 million as we ensure that we have the right cost structure for strong profitability going into 2024. As an executive team, we are squarely focused on driving both revenue growth and profitability, and we consistently manage costs across our expense structure. We grew Q3 adjusted EBITDA by 15% year over year to $64.6 million. Adjusted EBITDA margins were up 20 basis points year over year to 27.7% driven by revenue growth. This margin improvement was despite a 3% impact from GIFI costs that were reimbursed in cash but included in reported adjusted EBITDA. We are well above where we expected from a margin perspective year to date at 29.6%. and have the flexibility to invest across our business to accelerate growth. While we are encouraged by our margin performance year to date, we expect a more normal margin profile in the coming quarters. Turning to our balance sheet, we had $75 million of cash at the end of the quarter, Free cash flow is negatively impacted by customer receipts of $12 million that were received just after the quarter closed, and we expect cash balances to grow meaningfully into the fourth quarter on the back of record free cash flow. Our deferred revenue balance was $203 million, down from $207 million last quarter. However, the reduction in deferred revenues is largely due to amortization of acquisition balances from GIPHY. Our focus is to amplify revenue growth and strong profitability with attractive shareholder returns. During the quarter, we paid $10 million related to our quarterly dividend, providing a yield of over 3%. We also repurchased 351,000 shares for $15 million. And with our current share repurchase authorization, we can repurchase 7% of our shares annually. For the full year, we are raising our revenue growth guidance from a range of 3% to 5% to 5% to 7% and our adjusted EBITDA from a range of 227 million to 235 million to 240 million to 245 million. Our third time raising revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance this year. In the fourth quarter, We expect our enterprise channel excluding data to accelerate to 10 to 15% growth. It's best performance this year. And we expect to see stable sequential revenues in e-commerce. We expect another strong quarter in data, slightly above the quarterly revenues in the first half of the year. We are increasing revenue expectations to over $100 million in data revenue in 2023 up from the prior expectations of 70 million. The increase in our expectations for growth is coming from new customers we have signed, such as Google and Amazon, but also from significant land and expand wins with multiple existing customers. Furthermore, our bookings and pipeline for next year has grown dramatically, already providing us line of sight to over $60 million in revenue, in 2024 from contracts that are already in place or being completed now. And this is before 2023 is even complete. It is clear that our data business is seeing demand accelerate dramatically. Our EBITDA guidance factors in the significant ramp of at least $10 million in marketing in Q4. as well as $16 million per year of full year GIPHY expenses that will be reimbursed, making them cash neutral for the business. With some of the client inflows received just past the third quarter, we also expect Shutterstock to generate record fourth quarter free cash flows. Suffice it to say that we are excited about how the year has progressed and the demand signals we are seeing. Our e-commerce channel is stabilizing and expected to turn the quarter with new products and improved marketing support. And enterprise is steadily growing at mid single digits, soon to be bolstered by the Giphy ad platform that is now officially open for business. We are excited about the dramatic uptick in demand for data from new customers, as well as existing clients, and the potential for the total addressable market for clean, ethically sourced metadata for generative AI model training to broaden out as these capabilities become core to a range of business applications. We are focused as a team on executing against some of these extremely exciting growth opportunities that are emerging for Shutterstock in real time. And with that, operator, we'll open the line for any questions.
spk17: Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw the question, please press star 11 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. The first question comes from Bernie McTernan with Needham & Company. Your line is open.
spk08: Great. Good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. Maybe to start, Paul, in your prepared remarks, it seems like the industry crossed a line in the sand on their attitude towards web script content for training purposes. Am I interpreting your comments correctly? And if so, what really caused that change?
spk12: Yeah, I think there's a variety of reasons, Bernie, that the largest players in the industry have crossed that. And I articulated some of them in my prepared remarks. There is brand reputation issues. There are legal and regulatory issues. And I think what the large players have found, and we believe the second tier players will also find, is that ethically sourced metadata like Sutterstock has uniquely positions us to be able to meet their, you know, emerging needs around AI. So we're pleased that, you know, good is winning out.
spk11: And we're pleased that we have the assets, the content, and the position to leverage that.
spk08: Understood. Thank you. And then appreciate the comments on some of what's going on in the e-commerce platform. But we'd love if you could provide some more context in terms of traffic growth of 9% in the quarter, conversion 10% higher, just where those kind of stand relative to historical norms.
spk12: Yeah, clearly they're an improvement. I think we've told everyone about the level of experimentation we're doing, and I articulated the new product launches that we're putting and testing in the market now. And I think what you're, in addition to, by the way, work that we're doing to drive incremental traffic, as articulated in my prepared remarks, and what you find is When you're converting better and you've got new products that are attractive to customers, combined with better retention overall, the business starts to trend better. And that's what gives us confidence in calling a stabilization of e-commerce with improvement on the e-commerce.
spk08: Understood. And maybe just, oh, sorry, didn't mean to cut you off.
spk05: No, Bernie. One other thing I would just add is, you know, we've been delivering really strong profitability year to date. We're at almost 30% EBITDA margins year to date. That's given us the ability to invest in sales and marketing. Sales and marketing was up $8 million sequentially in the third quarter. And we expect it to be up another $10 million from those levels in the fourth quarter. So when you're running a highly profitable business, One of the outcomes of that is that you do have the ability to reinvest, and we're doing both at the same time. We're running a highly profitable business, and we're significantly reinvesting in the company.
spk08: Maybe just lastly for me as a follow-up there, is second half of next year the right time to assume e-commerce can get back to year-over-year constant currency growth?
spk12: Yeah, Bernie, it's... It's Halloween, so we're in October still. We're not calling the day or the month on when we, you know, we cross over. But I'm bullish on our performance, and I like the trend. Understood. Thanks for taking the questions. Thank you.
spk17: Please stand by for the next question.
spk14: The next question comes from you, Seth Squally, with Truist.
spk17: Your line is open.
spk09: Great. Thank you very much, and good morning, all. So, Paul, on the legal, ethically sourced metadata topic, yesterday there seems to have been a court case that seems to have biased favorably the journey stability AI and human art in their copyright case. So, can you maybe just comments on how that may impact your view, or more importantly, maybe the data buyer's view of demand and reliance on Shutterstock as that place would be to source the metadata?
spk12: Sure. And I'll tell you that the inputs in our thinking come from the largest players in the space. So we're having dialogues at the highest level of some of the largest companies in the world, and they're giving us direct feedback about why they're buying from Shutterstock. And it's really for the reasons that I've articulated. Current course cases notwithstanding, they're coming to us because we've got the goods, and the goods are clean and ethically sourced. And you know, we value that input. And these large companies are quite literally voting with their strategy and voting with their wallets and engaging Shutterstock to suit their needs. So I think there's going to be a lot of emergence of multiple court cases, but there's nothing truer than the actual customers engaging with our brand.
spk09: Okay, that's great to hear. And staying on that topic for a sec, can you elaborate on your comments about um working on uh next tier of potential customers with maybe a slimmed down version of your of data deals for maybe smaller companies that cannot afford the seven or eight digit type of deals yeah we we we articulated that um there will probably be a different approach
spk12: And as you might expect, you know, we're not going to give out the playbook, but we are in discussions and the needs of the customers, the size of the customers, the approach of the customers is different than the largest companies in the world. And so you can expect Shutterstock, as it always does, to adapt and be customer centric in the way we put together our products and services. So we like the hand that we've got, and we're playing it to meet the customer demand.
spk09: All right, super helpful. And maybe lastly, Jared, on your Q4 guidance, if my math is correct, it implies growth in low single digits and margins in the low to maybe mid-20s. Can you just go over again, I think you mentioned some of them in the prepared remarks, and maybe can you just walk through the math there, and maybe more importantly, as we look at 2024, is the assumption that we're on a year-on-year basis, do margins go back to their, you know, most recent trend line?
spk05: Sure. So, Yusuf, I think you're correct both in your overall assessment on Q4, both revenue as well as EBITDA. I think EBITDA, if you sort of do the math, you look at the guidance for the full year and you look at the $10 million of incremental sales and marketing spend, you'll get to EBITDA on the low 20s in percentage terms. And I think you'll get to mid-single digits in terms of revenue growth for the quarter. I think this is clearly putting $10 million of incremental sales and marketing spend on the back of $8 million of incremental sales and marketing spend, a very heavy investment period for us. We are doing that on the back of exceptional year-to-date profitability. I do not think that our Q4 EBITDA margin level is sort of the stable run rate for the business that you expect going forward. I think at this point, if you look back on the history of the company over the last three or four years, you've seen a very consistent focus on both revenue growth and profitability. I would not expect that to change.
spk06: Awesome. Thank you so much.
spk17: Please stand by for the next question. The next question comes from Andrew Boone with JMP Securities. Your line is open.
spk09: Good morning, and thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to go back about the 2024 disclosure that you guys had in terms of the $60 million. It sounds like revenue from new data contracts will be more recurring going forward. Can you just give us more details there and talk about maybe the tradeoffs of recognizing more revenue up front versus elongating that? Thank you.
spk05: Sure, Andrew. So, you know, there's two disclosures that we made in our prepared remarks that are, I think, incremental and helpful. One is beyond the two new customers that have been driving in-year revenues, there's about $40 million of total contract value of pipeline that is either booked or in the process of being booked. that will largely contribute to revenues in both 2024 and beyond. And so we have line of sight today into at least $60 million of revenue in 2024. And that's really before we end the year and continue to sell and deliver in 2024 itself. So we're clearly in a very good position to continue to build this business and build it from a position of strength and stability. Whenever you transition from a perpetual license deal to more of a ratable revenue recognition model, there can be an impact on revenue growth. We've seen that with other companies over the years. But we do believe that this is a model that will create greater visibility for Shutterstock. We think it's a model that we'll be able to invest behind because we will have a much greater sense of the forecastability of the business and where we are. And I think this trend towards a greater number of smaller customers will also benefit our ability to forecast and have visibility in this business. So I think this is part of the natural maturation that any new service line undergoes. And we feel really good about the way this business is evolving with respect to demand, with respect to the way the customers are coming in and the way we'll be servicing and delivering against their needs.
spk09: Great. Thanks for that. And then enterprise X data partnerships revenue accelerated in three to 23. The question that I want to ask is, can you talk about the difference of adoption between enterprise versus self-service? Why the divergence and what's different on the enterprise side X data partnerships?
spk05: Sorry, Andrew, just to clarify your question, you're talking about adoption of, of what specifically?
spk09: what I want to get out is stock media, right? You're seeing the enterprise just much more stable on enterprise revenue X data partnerships versus e-comm. And so just talk about the difference between the two. And again, why do you think that's the case? And how do we think about that going forward? What's the opportunity? What's the risk?
spk12: Great question, Andrew. Here's how we think about it. If you think about... the e-commerce side, you have a, you know, a stable set of small and medium customers that are, that are, you know, consistent users of our, of our product, whether it's images, video, you know, music or other. And on the enterprise side, you've got very large scale customers that have been with us for a very long time with very high retention rates because Shutterstock is just clearly front and center and a critical aspect of their workflow. And so what you see is high retention, high growth as we bring more products and services to bear for our enterprise customers. And there tends to be on the e-commerce side a level of infrequent use, which is exactly why we created the new product that I talked about, Shutterstock Essentials. So that customers can engage at a lower price point and still get a high value product that meets their needs. So they're just two different kinds of customers. And even within the super categories of e-commerce and enterprise, you have subclassifications of segments of customers. And our goal is to make sure that we've got the right product mix for each one of those segments.
spk09: Great. And just for my last question, in 2Q, you saw gross margins decline 50 basis points. You saw 100 points in 3Q. Can you just talk about the gross margin profile? Is there any changes as newer products enter the mix? Thanks so much, guys.
spk05: So, Andrew, this quarter we did see a slight compression in the gross margin, but as we called out in the prepared remarks, some of that is as a result of some of the GIPHY compensation that flows through our P&L. It's also as a result of stock compensation expense, and that stock compensation expense picks up because we do compensate our team partially through performance restricted stock units and when the expected results for the year improve which they have the expense ticks up and that partially flows through our gross margins there is nothing structural in our business today that is impacting the gross margins and as we've mentioned in the past our data deals have very comparable gross margins to our core content business and because we're paying our contributors royalties that are commensurate with our core content business. There are interesting opportunities in the future, however. Giphy has the potential to be a higher gross margin business for Shutterstock, and that's something that we're keenly aware of and quite excited about as we move into an advertising-based model. Thank you.
spk17: Please stand by for the next question. The next question comes from Curtis Nagel with Bank of America. Your line is open.
spk03: Great. Thanks very much for taking it. Maybe just staying on that line. You know, Paul, maybe as much as you can, I know it's early days, but just talk a little bit about, I guess, the monetization potential for Giphy. You know, obviously it could be a really big business given, you know, the level of impressions you're getting and, you know, kind of the team in place. But, yeah, just would be very curious to hear how you guys are thinking about it, and then I'll follow up after that.
spk12: Yeah, we're enthusiastic. You know, we said that we would be kind of relaunching our advertising platform in Q4. We were ahead of schedule in the delivery of that. We started to alert customers that we are officially open for business And when you have not only the size and scale, but the level of engagement with the asset that is Giphy, advertisers are enthusiastically including us in their campaigns for Q4 and are thinking very seriously about us throughout 2024. So all of the early signs are very encouraging. And as we start to get these campaigns up and running and start to deliver performance, we think that that spreads and the advertisers get even more enthusiastic. So we remain bullish. And in fact, seeing the quality of the team and the level of our execution, I'm more bullish than when we bought the asset back in June.
spk03: OK, very helpful. And then a question for Jared. You know, as much as you can, would be curious to hear a little bit more about the structure of the new data deals, right? You know, the kind of original ones were very front-loaded. It sounds like they're more spread, but any guidance on kind of the duration would be helpful. And then, if you could, just what were the data revenues in 4Q of 22?
spk05: Sure, Curtis. And Curtis, thanks for joining. We look forward to working with you and thanks for joining our call. Data revenues in the fourth quarter of 2022 were $15 million. And I think you specifically asked about the fourth quarter. The third quarter of 2022 was much lighter, was about $2 million. And then I think your second question was just on how we think about the data deals. Ultimately, there are going to be a range of duration of contracts that we look at, depending on the specific needs of our customers. Those contracts could be one year in duration, two years in duration. We've done contracts as long as five years and six years in duration. So we are going to look at a range of customer contract lengths. And it really depends on their expected pace of consumption of metadata for building generative AI applications and training models. We also plan on providing incremental training data to our customers, and we've seen significant growth in our library with fresh data. If you look back at our library, that growth was traditionally high single digits. We've seen a fairly consistent acceleration in that growth over the course of the past year. And both we and our metadata customers are very excited about that fresh incremental data that's coming in that is reflective of the world around us today as it exists. Ultimately, we think this is going to create a more visible revenue stream for our data business. It's going to give us a waterfall of contracts to build upon and better visibility for revenues in the years to come.
spk03: Got it. Okay. Thanks very much, and yeah, looking forward to working with you guys, too.
spk05: Appreciate it.
spk17: Thanks, Chris. Please stand by for the next question. The next question comes from Karen Kinney with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.
spk13: Hi, thanks for taking my questions. I have two. First, can you provide some examples on the types of expansion deals you're signing? And I'm specifically wondering if you're seeing any expansion into different content types that weren't included in the original deals. And then second, Jared, can you comment on how the deal count and TCV composition changed in 3Q relative to the first half of the year? Thank you.
spk15: Karen is Paul. Great question.
spk12: We see across our large partners exactly as you described. Some start with a particular content type and come back and say, give us a lot more of it. and some that are taking a large portion of a particular content type are now moving from one content type to the other. And so by going both vertical and horizontal, that creates both a revenue and profit opportunity for us, but also allows our large partners and customers to better train their models. So it's the comprehensive nature of the entire asset library that we have, as well as the underlying metadata, and the cleanliness of that data and the ethically sourced nature of that data that makes it so compelling.
spk05: Karen, just to add on to that, when you think about our customers and the demand we're seeing from existing customers, a fairly significant component, I would estimate about half of the $40 million of incremental bookings is actually existing customers that are electing to purchase from us new content types or additional volumes of existing content types. So there's very significant incremental demand that's coming from existing customers. The remainder would be from new customers that we've secured. So we're very, very excited about that. Nothing materially different to report in terms of customer count. This is still not a business that has hundreds of customers. It's a business where our customer count is growing. Our customer list is growing. We're announcing a new customer every quarter at least, if not more. We do have plans to expand the TAM and expand the offerings that we provide to make this a more attractive and more affordable proposition for different types of customers. But we're very excited about the demand we're seeing, obviously, and existing customers being a significant part of the new TCV pipeline build is a very exciting demand signal for us in terms of land and expand.
spk13: Great. That's really helpful. Thank you.
spk17: I show no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back to Paul Hennessy for closing remarks.
spk12: Thank you very much. And as always, we want to express our gratitude to our customers, our contributors, and especially our employees. Thank you for joining us. This ends our call for today.
spk17: Thank you for participating. This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. music music
spk01: Bye.
spk17: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the third quarter 2023 Shutterstock, Inc. earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a 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 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker today, Chris Hsu, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Development. Please go ahead.
spk16: Thanks, Michelle. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Shutterstock's third quarter 2023 earnings call.
spk07: Joining us today is Paul Hennessy, Shutterstock's CEO, and Jared Yays, Shutterstock's CFO. 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 the 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 2023 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 file 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 make on the 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. I'd now like to turn the call over to Paul Hennessy, Chief Executive Officer.
spk12: Thank you, Chris. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today, and I wish everyone a happy Halloween. In the third quarter, Shutterstock's data and creative engines fueled faster growth and furthered the transformation of our business. Enterprise demand picked up, and we expect a further acceleration into the fourth quarter. We are seeing stabilization and are executing operationally to drive a recovery in e-commerce over the next several quarters, supported by marketing and product innovation. On top of strong operational performance, Shutterstock also delivered exceptionally strong financial performance this quarter, with record revenues of $233 million, representing growth of 14% year on year. We continue to be highly profitable, generating 65 million of EBITDA, or 28% margins. EBITDA has exceeded 60 million every quarter for three consecutive quarters, and we are on track to grow EBITDA by double digits this year. Based on our strong year-to-date performance and improved confidence and visibility in our business, we are again raising both revenue and EBITDA guidance for 2023, which Jared will discuss in more detail. Q3 also marked the first quarter where enterprise revenues exceeded e-commerce revenue for Shutterstock. Our enterprise channel is posting consistent growth and in the third quarter grew 60% in total and grew 4% excluding data. We continue to experience strong growth in subscription offerings for medium-sized enterprises with our Flex product, which grew 9% in the third quarter. And we also saw strong momentum at Shutterstock Studios signing our two largest deals ever. Studios has a strong beachhead in virtual production, leveraging 3D assets for gaming ecosystem. We view this market opportunity as having tremendous legs as the gamification of entertainment and interactive media continues. Strength in SMB products and studios is expected to drive accelerated enterprise growth of between 10 and 15% in the fourth quarter, excluding data. On the 3D front, Shutterstock and NVIDIA are making good progress on our generative 3D offering and will be testing in the fourth quarter. As we communicated at the outset of the partnership earlier this year, we believe that our generative 3D offering will lower the cost of 3D model production and drive wider adoption across diverse use cases through simple text to 3D model generation capabilities, as well as expand our library of models available for purchase. Meanwhile, our e-commerce channel declined 15% on a year-over-year basis in Q3 2023. We have confidence that our initiatives will drive a recovery in e-commerce over the next several quarters, including marketing changes driving growth in the top of funnel traffic, improvements in both conversion effectiveness and customer retention, and the recent launch of our low-cost essentials plan featuring unlimited content and our latest in generative AI capabilities. As we mentioned on our last earnings call, we believe that we underinvested in marketing in the last several quarters. We have since increased our paid marketing spend in both brand and SEM and expanded our affiliate channel with a significant new partner. As a result, in October, we have seen traffic growth accelerate to 9% and believe this trend of accelerated traffic growth will continue. We have numerous future opportunities in SEO to drive additional top of funnel traffic improvements and will continue to spend on marketing, which will drive growth in the fourth quarter and into next year. Second, we are seeing conversion effectiveness and retention begin to improve. Our conversion rates in October have improved by over 10%. We are also seeing improvements in retention in our subscription products with churn rates at their lowest point over the past three and a half years. We believe that we have likely given up some of the lower quality customer growth we may have acquired during the pandemic and are now building off a more stable base of core customers. Third, we have just brought to market an exciting new e-commerce product that marries all of our capabilities in generative AI, including image generation and generative editing tools with unlimited content at an attractive price point. Shutterstock Essentials. Shutterstock Essentials plan is a $9.99 monthly plan that is simple and low cost and targets small business and casual creative customers by giving them access to our AI-powered image generation and our recently launched AI-powered editing tools, unlimited access to a library over 3.5 million wholly owned images, and a discount on our premium tier of images and other content types. In addition to Essentials serving as a customer acquisition product, we believe there is an opportunity to serve the evolving need of our customers by upselling and cross-selling higher-priced premium images, videos, music, and 3D assets to these Essentials customers. We also launched Creative AI, our generative AI-powered editing suite last week, which will be included in Shutterstock's Essentials plans. As a result, customers can both generate new images and use AI-powered tools to edit any pre-existing images to make stock their own. Creative AI includes five generative features that are on par with or better than anything available in the market today. A magic brush function to modify a specific portion of an image. Automated variations to quickly generate lookalike alternatives. a zoom-out function to generate a wider lens perspective, a smart resizer to ensure components of image are correctly proportionate to each other, and a background remover. In terms of generative AI image generation through our collaboration with OpenAI, Shutterstock has priority access to the latest technology, including DALI 3, and our teams are finding the preliminary results best in class. As a result of improving quality and a shift in the marketplace, we believe that monetization is in sharper focus across image generation and editing platforms. And Shutterstock is positioned to benefit as the ecosystem starts to change more for licensable, high-quality images. Beyond our e-commerce and enterprise content businesses, I'd like to discuss two of the most exciting growth areas in GIPHY and in data, both of which are important parts of our strategy. To remind investors, Giphy is a scaled content platform that sits at the intersection of personal communications and shared moments revolving around events and emotions. It enjoys massive audience reach and generates billions of monthly impressions through over 14,000 API partners. All of this translates into a unique and exciting opportunity for brands. To that end, Giphy is now officially open for business. and we are up and running with our first customers on the ad platform with multiple other proposals out. We are seeing strong receptivity by brands in CPG, retail, food and beverage, and financial services. The idea that Giphy's content is something you share rather than something you skip has strong resonance with these advertisers. We expect exciting developments from Giphy in the quarters that come, As advertiser interest in the platform grows and we scale our ability to execute on customer campaigns. Turning to data, it is now clear that data sales for AI and ML model training is an explosive growth opportunity for Shutterstock. Scraping proprietary data to train generative AI models for commercial application is now universally recognized as an unsustainable business tactic It's fraught with legal, financial, and reputational challenges. This plays to Shutterstock's strengths because we offer ethically sourced and licensable metadata at unique scale across media, including images, video, music, and 3D. The scale and quality of our data is evidenced by our incredible roster of customers and partners. This quarter, I'm pleased to report we have signed a new multi-year deal with Amazon, as well as expanded relationships with multiple existing strategic customers. Our customers have reviewed our data in detail, conducted extensive due diligence and evaluation testing, and ultimately decided that Shutterstock was the key partner from which to source this critical ingredient for their AI needs. Thus far, we've had tremendous success in working with the world's largest technology platforms, but we believe the next tier of potential customers who are looking to train their own proprietary generative AI models and build applications will require a different approach to consumption and distribution. In closing, we are seeing some really encouraging signs across our business. Our future engines of growth in Giphy and data are showing extremely strong demands. Our e-commerce business is stabilizing, and we expect recovery over the next several quarters. And our enterprise business picked up and is expecting an even stronger finish to the year. We have some exciting new products that will be rolling out in the fourth quarter, and we see tremendous potential future upside in our business with our creative and data engines taking the lead in Shutterstock's transformation. With that, I'll turn the call over to Jared.
spk05: Thank you, Paul, and good morning, everyone. Shutterstock reported an exceptionally strong third quarter with revenues of $233 million and revenue growth of just over 14%, a record quarter and well beyond our expectations. Q3 adjusted EBITDA was $65 million with 28% margins, showcasing the strong profitability of our business. The enterprise channel was up 60% in the third quarter, driven by revenue from our data engine, which grew to 46 million, a record performance, and driven by our recent win with Google, as well as a new win with Amazon. We are in the process of booking an additional $40 million in total contract value with multiple new and existing data customers. On these new bookings, we are structuring our deals in a manner that will result in more consistent quarterly revenue recognition over an extended period of time. And so while the new bookings will not impact 2023, most of the revenue will flow into 2024 and beyond. Over time, this approach creates a more significant bookings backlog, greater visibility and predictability, and ultimately a more scalable and sustainable data business. Our enterprise channel growth, excluding data, was driven by strong 9% growth from Flex subscriptions, as well as Giphy starting to ramp up. As Paul mentioned, we expect revenue growth to accelerate further into the fourth quarter to 10% to 15% based on some landmark wins at Shutterstock Studios and overall bookings momentum. The growth of our creative and data engines that we discussed at our investor day in February is clearly accelerating and positively impacting our enterprise channel. Our e-commerce channel is down 15% in the third quarter. As Paul discussed, we are seeing stabilization in the business and expect a recovery in the quarters to come based on current initiatives. Subscriber revenue was up for the quarter with subscriber counts slightly down but having stabilized sequentially, indicating that new customer additions and customer attrition are beginning to match and a meaningful improvement from the past several quarters. We've also seen improvements in churn rates, and we believe that many of the cohort of customers that came into the business in 2021 have left the business, resulting in a more durable base of customers. We expect the fourth quarter revenues in e-commerce to be stable sequentially, reversing the recent trends that we have seen. Reported gross margins declined by just over 1%, driven by higher royalties related to revenue generated through data sales, non-cash M&A amortization, and GIPHY retention compensation. GIPHY retention compensation had minimal net cash impact to Shutterstock in the quarter as these costs were reimbursed. Sales and marketing expense in the third quarter was 24% of revenue compared to 23% of revenue in the third quarter of 2022. We expect full year marketing spend of 25%, consistent with 2022, as we dial up performance marketing spend in our e-commerce sales channel significantly in the fourth quarter. Sales and marketing spend in the fourth quarter is expected to be at least $10 million higher than Q3, with additional spending on branding and SEM. As Paul mentioned, with conversion effectiveness up, this gives us the opportunity to spend further to grow our business. Product development was 12% of revenue compared to 9% of revenue in the third quarter of 2022. Nearly all of the increase is due to GIPHY related retention compensation costs that were reimbursed in addition to 1.5 million of severance incurred in the quarter. G&A expenses were 16% of revenue, compared to 15% in the third quarter of 2022, driven by higher non-cash stock compensation costs, severance costs, and GIFI retention compensation that was reimbursed. Stock compensation costs are higher due to greater expectations around annual performance this year. Severance cost totaled $2.1 million as we ensure that we have the right cost structure for strong profitability going into 2024. As an executive team, we are squarely focused on driving both revenue growth and profitability, and we consistently manage costs across our expense structure. We grew Q3 adjusted EBITDA by 15% year over year to $64.6 million. Adjusted EBITDA margins were up 20 basis points year over year to 27.7% driven by revenue growth. This margin improvement was despite a 3% impact from GIFI costs that were reimbursed in cash but included in reported adjusted EBITDA. We are well above where we expected from a margin perspective year to date at 29.6%. and have the flexibility to invest across our business to accelerate growth. While we are encouraged by our margin performance year to date, we expect a more normal margin profile in the coming quarters. Turning to our balance sheet, we had $75 million of cash at the end of the quarter, Free cash flow is negatively impacted by customer receipts of $12 million that were received just after the quarter closed, and we expect cash balances to grow meaningfully into the fourth quarter on the back of record free cash flow. Our deferred revenue balance was $203 million, down from $207 million last quarter. However, the reduction in deferred revenues is largely due to amortization of acquisition balances from GIPHY. Our focus is to amplify revenue growth and strong profitability with attractive shareholder returns. During the quarter, we paid $10 million related to our quarterly dividend, providing a yield of over 3%. We also repurchased 351,000 shares for $15 million. And with our current share repurchase authorization, we can repurchase 7% of our shares annually. For the full year, we are raising our revenue growth guidance from a range of 3% to 5% to 5% to 7% and our adjusted EBITDA from a range of 227 million to 235 million to 240 million to 245 million. Our third time raising revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance this year. In the fourth quarter, We expect our enterprise channel excluding data to accelerate to 10 to 15% growth. It's best performance this year. And we expect to see stable sequential revenues in e-commerce. We expect another strong quarter in data, slightly above the quarterly revenues in the first half of the year. We are increasing revenue expectations to over $100 million in data revenue in 2023 up from the prior expectations of 70 million. The increase in our expectations for growth is coming from new customers we have signed, such as Google and Amazon, but also from significant land and expand wins with multiple existing customers. Furthermore, our bookings and pipeline for next year has grown dramatically, already providing us line of sight to over $60 million in revenue, in 2024 from contracts that are already in place or being completed now. And this is before 2023 is even complete. It is clear that our data business is seeing demand accelerate dramatically. Our EBITDA guidance factors in the significant ramp of at least $10 million in marketing in Q4, as well as $16 million per year of full year GIPHY expenses that will be reimbursed, making them cash neutral for the business. With some of the client inflows received just past the third quarter, we also expect Shutterstock to generate record fourth quarter free cash flows. Suffice it to say that we are excited about how the year has progressed and the demand signals we are seeing. Our e-commerce channel is stabilizing and expected to turn the quarter with new products and improved marketing support. And enterprise is steadily growing at mid single digits, soon to be bolstered by the Giphy ad platform that is now officially open for business. We are excited about the dramatic uptick in demand for data from new customers, as well as existing clients, and the potential for the total addressable market for clean, ethically sourced metadata for generative AI model training to broaden out as these capabilities become core to a range of business applications. We are focused as a team on executing against some of these extremely exciting growth opportunities that are emerging for Shutterstock in real time. And with that, operator, we'll open the line for any questions.
spk17: Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw the question, please press star 11 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. The first question comes from Bernie McTernan with Needham & Company. Your line is open.
spk08: Great. Good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. Maybe to start, Paul, in your prepared remarks, it seems like the industry crossed a line in the sand on their attitude towards web script content for training purposes. Am I interpreting your comments correctly? And if so, what really caused that change?
spk12: Yeah, I think there's a variety of reasons, Bernie, that the largest players in the industry have crossed that. And I articulated some of them in my prepared remarks. There is brand reputation issues. There are legal and regulatory issues. And I think what the large players have found, and we believe the second tier players will also find, is that ethically sourced metadata like Sutterstock has uniquely positions us to be able to meet their emerging needs around AI. So we're pleased that good is winning out.
spk11: And we're pleased that we have the assets, the content, and the position to leverage that.
spk08: Understood. Thank you. And then appreciate the comments on some of what's going on in the e-commerce platform. But we'd love if you could provide some more context in terms of traffic growth of 9% in the quarter, conversion 10% higher, just where those kind of stand relative to historical norms.
spk12: Yeah, clearly they're an improvement. I think we've told everyone about the level of experimentation we're doing, and I articulated the new product launches that we're putting and testing in the market now. And I think what you're, in addition to, by the way, work that we're doing to drive incremental traffic, as articulated in my prepared remarks, and what you find is When you're converting better, and you've got new products that are attractive to customers, combined with better retention overall, the business starts to trend better. And that's what gives us confidence in calling a stabilization of e-commerce with improvement on the comp.
spk08: Understood. And maybe just, oh, sorry, didn't mean to cut you off.
spk05: No, Bernie. One other thing I would just add is, you know, we've been delivering really strong profitability year to date. We're at almost 30% EBITDA margins year to date. That's given us the ability to invest in sales and marketing. Sales and marketing was up $8 million sequentially in the third quarter. And we expect it to be up another $10 million from those levels in the fourth quarter. So when you're running a highly profitable business, One of the outcomes of that is that you do have the ability to reinvest, and we're doing both at the same time. We're running a highly profitable business, and we're significantly reinvesting in the company.
spk08: Maybe just lastly for me as a follow-up there, is second half of next year the right time to assume e-commerce can get back to year-over-year constant currency growth?
spk12: Yeah, Bernie, it's... It's Halloween, so we're in October still. We're not calling the day or the month on when we cross over, but I'm bullish on our performance, and I like the trend. Understood. Thanks for taking the questions. Thank you.
spk17: Please stand by for the next question. The next question comes from Yusef Squally with Truist. Your line is open.
spk09: Great. Thank you very much and good morning all. So, Paul, on the legal ethically sourced metadata topic, yesterday there seems to have been a court case that seems to have biased favorably the journey stability AI and human art in their copyright case. So, can you maybe just comments on how that may impact your view or, more importantly, maybe the data buyer's view of demand and reliance on Shutterstock as that place would be to source the metadata?
spk12: Sure. I'll tell you that the inputs in our thinking come from the largest players in the space. So we're having dialogues at the highest level of some of the largest companies in the world, and they're giving us direct feedback about why they're buying from Shutterstock. And it's really for the reasons that I've articulated. Current course cases notwithstanding, they're coming to us because we've got the goods, and the goods are clean and ethically sourced. you know, we value that input. And these large companies are quite literally voting with their strategy and voting with their wallets and engaging Shutterstock to suit their needs. So I think there's going to be a lot of emergence of multiple court cases, but there's nothing truer than the actual customers engaging with our brand.
spk09: Okay, that's great to hear. And staying on that topic for a sec, can you elaborate on your comments about um working on uh next tier of potential customers with maybe a slimmed down version of your of data deals for maybe smaller companies that cannot afford the seven or eight digit type of deals yeah we we we articulated that um there will probably be a different approach
spk12: And as you might expect, you know, we're not going to give out the playbook, but we are in discussions and the needs of the customers, the size of the customers, the approach of the customers is different than the largest companies in the world. And so you can expect Shutterstock, as it always does, to adapt and be customer centric in the way we put together our products and services. So we like the hand that we've got and we're playing it to meet the customer demand.
spk09: All right, super helpful. And maybe lastly, Jared, on your Q4 guidance, if my math is correct, it implies growth in low single digits and margins in the low to maybe mid-20s. Can you just go over again, I think you mentioned some of them in the prepared remarks, and maybe can you just walk through the math there, and maybe more importantly, as we look at 2024, is the assumption that we're on a year-on-year basis, do margins go back to their, you know, most recent trend line?
spk05: Sure. So, Yusuf, I think you're correct both in your overall assessment on Q4, both revenue as well as EBITDA. I think EBITDA, if you sort of do the math, you look at the guidance for the full year and you look at the $10 million of incremental sales and marketing spend, you'll get to EBITDA on the low 20s in percentage terms. And I think you'll get to mid-single digits in terms of revenue growth for the quarter. I think this is clearly putting $10 million of incremental sales and marketing spend on the back of $8 million of incremental sales and marketing spend, a very heavy investment period for us. We are doing that on the back of exceptional year-to-date profitability. I do not think that our Q4 EBITDA margin level is sort of the stable run rate for the business that you expect going forward. I think at this point, if you look back on the history of the company over the last three or four years, you've seen a very consistent focus on both revenue growth and profitability. I would not expect that to change.
spk06: Awesome. Thank you so much.
spk17: Please stand by for the next question. The next question comes from Andrew Boone with JMP Securities. Your line is open.
spk09: Good morning, and thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to go back about the 2024 disclosure that you guys had in terms of the $60 million. It sounds like revenue from new data contracts will be more recurring going forward. Can you just give us more details there and talk about maybe the tradeoffs of recognizing more revenue up front versus elongating that? Thank you.
spk05: Sure, Andrew. So, you know, there's two disclosures that we made in our prepared remarks that are, I think, incremental and helpful. One is beyond the two new customers that have been driving in-year revenues, there's about $40 million of total contract value of pipeline that is either booked or in the process of being booked. that will largely contribute to revenues in both 2024 and beyond. And so we have line of sight today into at least $60 million of revenue in 2024. And that's really before we end the year and continue to sell and deliver in 2024 itself. So we're clearly in a very good position to continue to build this business and build it from a position of strength and stability. Whenever you transition from a perpetual license deal to more of a ratable revenue recognition model, there can be an impact on revenue growth. We've seen that with other companies over the years. But we do believe that this is a model that will create greater visibility for Shutterstock. We think it's a model that we'll be able to invest behind because we will have a much greater sense of the forecastability of the business and where we are. And I think this trend towards a greater number of smaller customers will also benefit our ability to forecast and have visibility in this business. So I think this is part of the natural maturation that any new service line undergoes. And we feel really good about the way this business is evolving with respect to demand, with respect to the way the customers are coming in and the way we'll be servicing and delivering against their needs.
spk09: Great. Thanks for that. Um, and then enterprise X data partnerships, revenue accelerated in three to 23. The question that I want to ask is, can you talk about the difference of adoption between enterprise versus self service? Why the divergence and what's different on the enterprise side X data partnerships?
spk05: Sorry, Andrew, just to clarify your question, you're talking about adoption of, of what specifically?
spk09: what I want to get out is stock media, right? You're seeing the enterprise just much more stable on enterprise revenue X data partnerships versus e-comm. And so just talk about the difference between the two. And again, why do you think that's the case? And how do we think about that going forward? What's the opportunity? What's the risk?
spk12: Great question, Andrew. Here's how we think about it. If you think about... the e-commerce side, you have a, you know, a stable set of small and medium customers that are, that are, you know, consistent users of our, of our product, whether it's images, video, you know, music or other. And on the enterprise side, you've got very large scale customers that have been with us for a very long time with very high retention rates because Shutterstock is just clearly front and center and a critical aspect of their workflow. And so what you see is high retention, high growth as we bring more products and services to bear for our enterprise customers. And there tends to be on the e-commerce side a level of infrequent use, which is exactly why we created the new product that I talked about, Shutterstock Essentials. So that customers can engage at a lower price point and still get a high value product that meets their needs. So they're just two different kinds of customers. And even within the super categories of e-commerce and enterprise, you have subclassifications of segments of customers. And our goal is to make sure that we've got the right product mix for each one of those segments.
spk09: Great. And just for my last question, in 2Q, you saw gross margins decline 50 basis points. You saw it 100 points in 3Q. Can you just talk about the gross margin profile? Is there any changes as newer products enter the mix? Thanks so much, guys.
spk05: So, Andrew, this quarter we did see a slight compression in the gross margin, but as we called out in the prepared remarks, some of that is as a result of some of the GIPHY compensation that flows through our P&L. It's also as a result of stock compensation expense, and that stock compensation expense takes off because we do compensate our team partially through performance restricted stock units and when the expected results for the year improve which they have the expense takes up and that partially flows through our gross margins there is nothing structural in our business today that that is impacting the gross margins. And as we've mentioned in the past, our data deals have very comparable gross margins to our core content business because we're paying our contributors royalties that are commensurate with our core content business. There are interesting opportunities in the future, however. Giphy has the potential to be a higher gross margin business for Shutterstock, and that's something that we're keenly aware of and quite excited about as we move into an advertising-based model. Thank you.
spk17: Please stand by for the next question. The next question comes from Curtis Nagel with Bank of America. Your line is open.
spk03: Great. Thanks very much for taking it. Maybe just staying on that line. You know, Paul, maybe as much as you can, I know it's early days, but just talk a little bit about, I guess, the modernization potential for GIPHY. You know, obviously it could be a really big business given, you know, the level of impressions you're getting and, you know, kind of the team in place. But yeah, just would be very curious to hear how you guys are thinking about it.
spk02: And then I'll follow up after that.
spk12: Yeah, we're enthusiastic. You know, we said that we would be kind of relaunching our advertising platform in Q4. We were ahead of schedule in the delivery of that. We started to alert customers that we are officially open for business. And when you have not only the size and scale, but the level of engagement with the asset that is Giphy, advertisers are enthusiastically, including us, in their campaigns for Q4 and are thinking very seriously about us throughout 2024. So all of the early signs are very encouraging and as we start to get these campaigns up and running and start to deliver performance, we think that that spreads and the advertisers get even more enthusiastic. we remain bullish and in fact, seeing the quality of the team and the level of our execution, I'm more bullish than when we bought the asset back in June.
spk03: Okay. Very helpful. And then a question for Jared, you know, as much as you can would be curious to hear a little bit more about the structure of, of the new data deals, right? You know, the kind of original ones were very front loaded. Sounds like they're more spread, but any guidance and kind of the duration would be helpful. And then, If you could, just what were the data revenues in 4Q of 22?
spk05: Sure, Curtis. And Curtis, thanks for joining. We look forward to working with you, and thanks for joining our call. Data revenues in the fourth quarter of 2022 were $15 million. And I think you specifically asked about the fourth quarter. The third quarter of 2022 was much lighter, was about $2 million. And then I think your second question was just on how we think about the data deals. Ultimately, there are going to be a range of duration of contracts that we look at, depending on the specific needs of our customers. Those contracts could be one year in duration, two years in duration. We've done contracts as long as five years and six years in duration. So we are going to look at a range of customer contract lengths. And it really depends on their expected pace of consumption of metadata for building generative AI applications and training models. We also plan on providing incremental training data to our customers, and we've seen significant growth in our library with fresh data. If you look back at our library, that growth was traditionally high single digits. We've seen a fairly consistent acceleration in that growth over the course of the past year. And both we and our metadata customers are very excited about that fresh incremental data that's coming in that is reflective of the world around us today as it exists. Ultimately, we think this is going to create a more visible revenue stream for our data business. It's going to give us a waterfall of contracts to build upon and better visibility for revenues in the years to come.
spk03: Got it. Okay. Thanks very much, and yeah, looking forward to working with you guys, too.
spk05: Appreciate it.
spk17: Thanks, Chris. Please stand by for the next question. The next question comes from Karen Kinney with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.
spk13: Hi, thanks for taking my questions. I have two. First, can you provide some examples on the types of expansion deals you're signing? And I'm specifically wondering if you're seeing any expansion into different content types that weren't included in the original deals. And then second, Jared, can you comment on how the deal count and TCV composition changed in 3Q relative to the first half of the year? Thank you.
spk15: Karen is Paul. Great question.
spk12: We see across our large partners exactly as you described. Some start with a particular content type and come back and say, give us a lot more of it. and some that are taking a large portion of a particular content type are now moving from one content type to the other. And so by going both vertical and horizontal, that creates both a revenue and profit opportunity for us, but also allows our large partners and customers to better train their models. So it's the comprehensive nature of the entire asset library that we have, as well as the underlying metadata, and the cleanliness of that data and the ethically sourced nature of that data that makes it so compelling.
spk05: Karen, just to add on to that, when you think about our customers and the demand we're seeing from existing customers, a fairly significant component, I would estimate about half of the $40 million of incremental bookings is actually existing customers that are electing to purchase from us new content types or additional volumes of existing content types. So there's very significant incremental demand that's coming from existing customers. The remainder would be from new customers that we've secured. So we're very, very excited about that. Nothing materially different to report in terms of customer count. This is still not a business that has hundreds of customers. It's a business where our customer count is growing. Our customer list is growing. We're announcing a new customer every quarter at least, if not more. We do have plans to expand the TAM and expand the offerings that we provide to make this a more attractive and more affordable proposition for different types of customers. But we're very excited about the demand we're seeing, obviously, and existing customers being a significant part of the new TCV pipeline build is a very exciting demand signal for us in terms of land and expand.
spk13: Great. That's really helpful. Thank you.
spk17: I show no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back to Paul Hennessy for closing remarks.
spk12: Thank you very much. And as always, we want to express our gratitude to our customers, our contributors, and especially our employees. Thank you for joining us. This ends our call for today.
spk17: Thank you for participating. This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.
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