Earnings Labs

Angi Inc. (ANGI)

Q2 2020 Earnings Call· Tue, Aug 11, 2020

$7.45

-1.13%

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Transcript

Glenn Schiffman

Management

Good morning, everyone. Glenn Schiffman here and welcome to the ANGI Homeservices second quarter earnings call. Joining me today is Joey Levin, Chairman of ANGI Homeservices and CEO of IAC; and Brandon Ridenour, CEO of ANGI Homeservices. Joey and I will also address any questions you may have on IAC's second quarter results and its investment in MGM. Similar to last quarter, supplemental to our quarterly earnings releases, IAC has also published its quarterly shareholder letter. We will not be reading the shareholder letter on this call, it is currently available on the Investor Relations section of IAC's website. I will turn the call over to Joey shortly to make a few brief introductory remarks, and then we will open it up to Q&A. Before we get to that, I'd like to remind you that during this call, we may discuss our outlook and future performance as well as the prospects for IAC's investment in MGM. These forward-looking statements typically may be preceded by words such as we expect, we believe, we anticipate or similar such statements. These forward-looking views are subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results could differ materially from the views expressed here today. Some of these risks have been set forth in IAC's, ANGI Homeservices and MGM's second quarter press releases and our respective reports filed with the SEC. We'll also discuss certain non-GAAP measures, which, as a reminder, include adjusted EBITDA, which we'll refer to today as EBITDA for simplicity during the call. I'll also refer you to our press releases, the IAC shareholder letter and again, to the Investor Relations section of our websites for all comparable GAAP measures and full reconciliations for all material non-GAAP measures. Joey, let's jump right into it.

Joseph Levin

Management

Thanks, Glenn. The big news this quarter, on top, I think, a very strong quarter for IAC generally, is the MGM investment. And we've gotten, as you'd imagine, a lot of questions and curiosity around that. And the big thing I think I want to hit on is while the form of this investment is a little different than what we've done historically in the sense of it's a public security, it's a minority of investment, the concept is totally consistent with what we do and what we've always done, which is be opportunistic and seize opportunities when we see them. That means -- and opportunities of a theme: We look for very large market. We have that in gaming, for sure, $450 billion globally, maybe 1/3 of that in the U.S. and still less than 10% penetrated online at which is a good segue to the next one, off-line to online transition and natural tailwinds. That 10% penetration is definitely getting we'll pick the wrong horse or maybe the execution won't be there, but there's no question that the 10% gets bigger over time, and you can -- you benefit from those natural tailwinds. The other thing is scale dynamics here. It's not a typical marketplace business, but this business, the customer experience improved in this business, actually, both their off-line business and their online business, as more customers are there, it improves for every individual customer. And lastly, which is something that's always been important to us and certainly important to us here is great value. This is a time where there's a, we think, a temporary dislocation. We do believe we don't have any idea when the world comes back to normal, but we do believe the world eventually comes back to normal. And we do believe…

Mark Schneider

Operator

Thanks, Joey. We're going to start with the first question from Ross Sandler at Barclays.

Ross Sandler

Analyst

Thanks for doing the call this way. I really appreciate it. So maybe we can start with MGM. Knowing you guys, you probably looked at the digital gaming space for a number of years, and there's been a bunch of interesting transactions. So the question is, what drew you specifically to MGM? Was it the licenses, the loyalty program that they have? And given their partnership with GVC, what does IAC bring to the table that they maybe don't already have? And then, Glenn, lastly, what's the cost basis on the investment?

Joseph Levin

Management

Yes. Ross, it's a little bit of all of that and more. And in -- I'll probably do that in reverse order. But in the question of what do we bring to the table that they don't already have. The answer is, we don't know. When we entered travel, we didn't bring anything to the table in travel. When we entered home services, we didn't bring anything to the table in home services and when we entered dating, we didn't bring anything to the table in dating. What we looked at is who is -- what do we think the future looks like. And I talked about that in the opener a little bit of is 10% penetration is going to be the case 10 years from now, then our answer with high confidence is no, it will be meaningfully higher than that. And when we get into it, we'll learn more and we'll figure out where we can help. There are some general dynamics that I think that we're very familiar with that we hope to share with MGM and try and be helpful in terms of things we've seen on conversion channels, we think, that have been valuable to us, things we've learned in direct marketing, things we've learned in performance marketing. What kind of metrics we view as successful metrics in certain channels and what kind of metrics we view as unsuccessful metrics in certain channels. And those general learnings have been helpful to us as we've entered new categories. But we'll learn. And so one of the things that's great about MGM in what they're doing in digital is they have this partnership with GVC and GVC seems to be quite capable. They're a top 3 player in I think 20 countries or more than 20…

Glenn Schiffman

Management

And then just some of the housekeeping items. We own 59 million shares. We paid $1.018 billion for that. So our basis is about $17.25 or so. And we're left after that investment with $2.9 billion of cash. So don't forget to put that 59 million in your sum -- 59 million shares in your sum of the parts. And then also from a housekeeping perspective, you saw in our balance sheet, that was in marketable securities. In this quarter, going forward, it will be in long-term investments given our posture. And it will be on a quarterly basis, marked-to-market. So you'll see the ebb and flow of that investment going through the other income [ for expense ] line in the income statement.

Joseph Levin

Management

Basically means net income will be useless from here on out. Not that everyone really focuses on that particular metric, but I do view that as a relatively useless data point here.

Glenn Schiffman

Management

There will be volatility for sure.

Mark Schneider

Operator

Our next question, we'll go to Cory Carpenter at JPMorgan.

Cory Carpenter

Analyst

Great. Thanks for the question. On ANGI, Brandon, I was hoping you could give us some more color on what drove the demand and supply trends we saw in July, maybe how do those track versus your expectations? And also how to inform your thinking into the back half of the year?

Brandon Ridenour

Analyst

Thanks. So obviously we finished Q2 strong with May and June in particular being strong. In July, we saw a continuation of those same trends. In particular, if you just look at overall revenue, globally, revenue in July was about flat to June and is actually up a bit in North America. That's relatively in line with how we expect the business to perform on a sequential basis and was, in fact, perhaps incrementally better than our internal views. From an operating metric standpoint, SR volume and consumer demand continues to be elevated in July relative to the post-COVID trends. And on the SP sales front, we continue to see a blistering pace of new sales originations. The last 4 months, including July, have been the highest 4 months in the history of the company. And then in particular, in July, we were up 53% in new SP sales year-over-year. So July was, in fact, a strong month, really a continuation of the trends we saw in the late part of Q2. If you look at the year-over-year sort of headline number, as Joey alluded to earlier, there's -- are a number of things that can affect that. Last year was a particularly volatile year with weather. If you guys recall, the first half of the year saw a really damp and wet spring. So July was a bit of an outlier in terms of strong growth and makes for a difficult comp. Where we sit today, I think the consumer demand trends, as we've seen them, are both strong and likely to sustain at this level for the foreseeable future. What -- the key for us and what's been most difficult is that we have seen the provider side of the equation under some pressure as an industry. And…

Glenn Schiffman

Management

Just a couple of numbers, Cory, to support what Brandon said. Our SRs in July at 24% growth was actually the third highest monthly growth rate in SRs since 2018. So I think that's nice and elevated. Second of all, Brandon talked about the volatility. As you know, last year, we grew revenue 20%. The dispersion of the monthly growth rates went from 15% to 26% throughout the year. So as Brandon said, it depends on the year-over-year comps. Mondays, for example, are a big day for us. And last July, we had 5 Mondays in the calendar. This July, we had 4 Mondays in the calendar. And the 26% growth rate actually was July of last year. And the difference between the 15% and the 20% (sic) [ 26% ] was over a 3-month period. You asked about the back half of the year, and we expect it to accelerate clearly off of the July levels. And we're optimistic the third quarter will slightly accelerate off of the 9% that we clocked in the second quarter. And then in the fourth quarter, we expect to continue to accelerate. Why? Because, as Brandon said, we think our COVID induced supply constraint where the SPs are, to some extent, impaired, we expect that to lift during the year. And as it does, our ability to monetize each transaction and continue to add value to our SPs. We think that will increase during the year, especially given the strong sales performance of which Brandon spoke.

Mark Schneider

Operator

Okay. Our next question will be from Eric Sheridan at UBS.

Eric Sheridan

Analyst

Brandon, maybe I'll follow-up on Cory's question and pull the frame out a little bit. When we see the environment you're sitting in right now, how do you think about aligning your strategic priorities about what's in your control versus what's out of your control on both the demand and the supply side, when you sort of try to align those investments against your medium to long-term goals for where you try to take the business?

Brandon Ridenour

Analyst

That's a great question. Our goals and sort of pipeline of initiatives haven't changed from the beginning of the year. Obviously COVID has presented some additional supply challenges. But our 2 primary goals remain. First, creating a stickier relationship with homeowners and more durable relationship. And then second obviously we need to bring more provider capacity to the marketplace. When I think about the key investments we're making, first of all, we have plans to rapidly grow our sales force in the second half of the year. We were intending to do that in Q2, but as we moved our workforce remote, we had to learn all over again how do you actually hire and onboard salespeople in a remote fashion. So we've been working through that for the last few months and are deeply scaling that at this point. We continue to scale fixed price. That is a huge lever to bring more capacity to the marketplace. This is another situation where in the later days in March, it -- we pulled back perhaps on our pace of scaling providers. When if we had had perfect foresight, we would have actually ramped our investment. We've corrected that as of late Q2 and are working feverishly to bring on as many providers as possible. We also have a number of new monetization models that we've already got live and are testing. It's hard to say exactly which of those are going to work. But I think the theme here is we're going to bring a number of different tools and methods to the marketplace to get SPs engaged as we have -- as we all know, an enormous amount of consumer demand that's currently going unmonetized. On the consumer side and provider side. We've introduced a new payments platform, HomeAdvisor…

Glenn Schiffman

Management

Eric, another great data point this quarter that we think bodes really well for the future is our SRs from new consumers to the platform grew 25% this quarter and actually accelerated through the quarter. That used to be about flat. And that shows us that either we're taking share from other solutions in the marketplace. Or we're driving offline to online conversion, given all the great product work that's going on with Brandon and his team. And that is really interesting because that creates tomorrow's repeat use and that creates tomorrow's customer as well. So we think we have an opportunity here to steal a march on our competitor, be it -- competitors, be it someone else or off line.

Brandon Ridenour

Analyst

Yes. I'll just add to that. We do a sentiment survey every week at scale with SPs. And surprisingly, about 50% of them are telling us they're seeing lower consumer demand. And that obviously does not match up with what we are seeing in terms of our marketplace and the overall level of consumer demand. So we believe that we're really sitting at the nexus of 2 different trends. One is obviously people are focusing more on their home. But as they look for solutions and services, they're I think disproportionately coming online and looking for digital means to accomplish that. So those are obviously both very positive in terms of providing a structural tailwind for us.

Mark Schneider

Operator

Our next question will come from Brad Erickson at Needham.

Bradley Erickson

Analyst

Just a couple of follow-ups for Brandon. We've kind of talked about this a little bit, but I wanted to go a little deeper on the SP constraints. I guess something like 50% of SRs went unmonetized this quarter. Is there any concern that if that level of 0 accepts persists, that you're maybe losing some of those customers maybe forever? And then second, just related to Google, are you going after -- when you think about HomeAdvisor, is HomeAdvisor going after the same types of SPs that Google is? Or do you think there's maybe been sort of a separation in terms of the types of SPs to draw value from a platform like HomeAdvisor versus Google? Just any thoughts there would be great.

Brandon Ridenour

Analyst

Yes. Those are both great questions. So first of all, whether or not we monetize a request doesn't indicate whether or not we've satisfied a customer. And even if we're not able to monetize, we still have a deep reservoir, the deepest reservoir of providers to draw upon and to connect consumers with. So the fact that we are seeing such significant growth in consumer demand in such an elevated level of service request today is sort of filling our database and filling our CRM pipeline and our e-mail pipeline and will drive further growth for the remainder of the year and into next year. If we weren't able to satisfy those customers, that might be a different story, but monetization really is not an indication of whether or not we make those customers happy. And in fact, with the offering of fixed price we now offer, I can't think of the percentage off the top of my head, but of the 200 to 500 projects, we're always offering a solution. Even if folks decide not to engage or pull a trigger, they still had a good experience and we still offered a viable [ solution ]. I would think of that a little bit like, if you go to Google and search, you don't necessarily need to see an ad at the top or Google doesn't need to monetize for you to have had a successful outcome and finding what you're looking for. And we treat it a little bit in some way, which is we're going to try to make that consumer happy and fulfilled even if we -- even if we aren't able to monetize. So the fact that we have this huge influx of demand is going to pay off for quite a while for us.…

Mark Schneider

Operator

Our next question will be from John Blackledge at Cowen.

John Blackledge

Analyst

Great. Thanks. On Vimeo, the mid-teen ARPU growth was a great outcome, particularly with the enterprise ARPU as a key driver at plus 20% year-over-year. Could you guys discuss the enterprise adoption during COVID-19 in enterprise demand signals thus far in the third quarter? And then should we expect the enterprise ARPU growth levels to be sustained in 3Q and as we head towards the end of the year? And Glenn, if you could just talk about the gross margins of Vimeo, what you saw in the quarter, that would be great, too.

Joseph Levin

Management

Enterprise is doing very, very well right now. And the product works, and certainly, the timing works. When you think about it, just using IAC as a microcosm, and this is -- we're as harsh on our own businesses as we are on external businesses. But going into COVID, I was saying to the Vimeo team, if anybody at IAC tried to expense $10,000 for town hall software, I'd say we've got a big problem with that individual paying $10,000 for town hall software. And now if somebody says we don't have the best town hall software, I'd say, "Well, we've got a big problem with that individual if they weren't able to find us the best town hall software independent of price." And I don't think that changes, right? Now we're accustomed to this. We've got this format in this call where we're all using video and we're not using Vimeo for this, but we're using video. This is just a better way of doing it. We're going to do that going forward. Town halls, we never had everybody in the same room. You could do it in one location, but you can't have all locations. And we're going to continue to do that forever, and we're going to want to use the best software to do that. The system that is flawless, the system that has all the features that you want. And I think that is true of most enterprises now. So what we're seeing is we're going into these enterprises where we already have somebody or a group of people using it, and they're using it in just charging it on the credit card or using it in disparate ways. And we're going to that enterprise and saying we can now be your video solution where…

Glenn Schiffman

Management

Yes. On the numbers, enterprise was clearly our fastest-growing line of business. This quarter, it actually grew greater than 70%. And then bookings were triple digits. So we have a nice runway there. And as you articulated, one of the reasons why it's growing at that clip is because of ARPU. And I think we had a case study in Anjali's recent presentation, it might have been at your conference where we talked about a retailer that used to be spending $660 with Vimeo on the self-serve because 40% of our enterprise customers have graduated from self-serve. So this retailer used to spend $660 with us. We converted them to an enterprise customer. As Joey talked about, that more people in that organization said, "Wow, this is a great solution." And now we're getting $660,000 (sic) [ $220,000 ] from that enterprise customer. And that has lift ARPU -- that will lift ARPU. In terms of gross margin, we laid out, I think, about 2 years ago, the target of 70% and we're closing in on that. And we're making such progress there that we think 70% may ultimately prove to be conservative.

Mark Schneider

Operator

Our next question will come from Youssef Squali at SunTrust.

Youssef Squali

Analyst

Okay. Great. Joey, a couple of questions maybe on MGM again. How do you effect change by being a minority investor in a public company like MGM? You've been -- you guys have been known best as basically taking over entire companies, extracting more value, using your tried and true playbook. Just trying to understand how you guys do that as a minority shareholder. And then will you, as a minority shareholder, actually need a license -- be licensed by gaming authorities or you don't need to -- I know there is a certain threshold. I don't know what that threshold is, maybe you can help us with that. One of the things we've heard is that it was just very expensive and burdensome process to go through that has traditionally stopped other companies from that -- from getting into this space. So any clarity there would be great.

Joseph Levin

Management

Sure. The second one, yes, we're going to -- it varies by state, but the -- there are some rules at a 5% ownership threshold and some other rules at a 10% ownership threshold. But in each state basically, we're going to have to go through a regulatory process, which is, as we understand it, quite burdensome. And we are prepared for that, and that will go through in its course. We're not -- other than the hassle of it, we're not particularly worried about that, but that is a process that we're going to have to go through. On your first question as it relates to minority investment affecting change. Again, our goal here is not to "affect change." Our goal here is to be helpful. And I think that we can be helpful in a number of ways as a minority investor. MGM did say that they intend to invite us to the board, which we think is fantastic, and we think we can be very helpful in that way. And separately (sic) [ secondly ], we can help through access to our people, our businesses, our learnings. Remember, one of the things I always say with our internal businesses, whether we own 100% or less than 100%, is the biggest synergy between our businesses, the biggest synergy that exists in IAC is we never force the businesses to work with each other. We do force the businesses, and it doesn't need to be forced because everyone wants to do it, it's to share data, share information, share learnings. People like sharing what they know and they like learning from others, especially in areas where people have been successful in showing off things that they've done well. And we -- I had a call with the CEOs of IAC's businesses yesterday, and I said we should treat MGM in this area in the same way in the sense of it's a totally open book. Share anything you want to the extent -- to the extent there's anybody who wants to learn something of anything that we're doing, which they may not, but to the extent they do, we're a totally open book. We've got $1 billion into this investment. That's more cash capital than actually we've invested in any of the other IAC businesses that are currently in the portfolio. And using that information, we should use that information liberally for anyone's benefit, for -- or sorry, I mean anyone at MGM's benefit wherever we can. So that's something that we certainly can and will do. And hopefully, that's helpful. And as we get more involved, as we learn more, we'll try and find other ways to add value and help the business, reach what we think is enormous potential, again, not dissimilar from other areas where we've tried to help businesses involved with IAC reach enormous potential.

Mark Schneider

Operator

Our next question will come from Jason Helfstein at Oppenheimer.

Jason Helfstein

Analyst

Two questions. One, if you could talk a bit about the Vimeo product pipeline for the second half. Any color on kind of what the team is working on? And then second, maybe just broadly on acquisition direction, Joey, so you did Turo, minority investment, you just did MGM, minority into a public. Should investors expect you to get back to kind of, again, historically, what you've done, which is more like a Care.com, finding something that you can control that time works in your favor to kind of fix broken -- or businesses that have more opportunity?

Joseph Levin

Management

Yes. Again, I'll do it in reverse order. The short answer to your second question is, yes, you should expect us to focus on buying businesses, buying entire businesses and shaping those businesses. That's where we would -- what we would expect to put the bulk of our capital and potentially share repurchases and all the other places where we have historically put cap. I think that is more likely than minority investments from here. Again, anything is possible. We always say anything's possible. We always say we'll be opportunistic and look at things, but I do think that it's more likely more of our capital goes into those things, which you've seen more historically. In product at Vimeo, there is a very robust pipeline. One of the things that we're focused on right now is how to verticalize the product a bit in certain categories. So to go deeper in faith, to go deeper in fitness, go deeper in education, whatever it might be, the areas where we're going to prioritize to make sure that the tools that we're building are -- really work for verticals. We're not building any bespoke tools for any individual customer, but we are starting to think about what are tools we could build that make -- really help in the relevance for a vertical. We want to do that because we think that's really good for our customers. We want to do that because we don't want to open up the competitive opportunity for someone else to come in and start picking off verticals. So we're doing a bunch in that area. There's also, with the world now in -- remote, a lot of the tools are -- there's new tools that are relevant. So for example, one thing we're using right now, is screen recording and things like that, where you can access more of the enterprise or find new entry points into the enterprise. We've got products along those lines that we're working on. And one of the other things we're talking about right now, this is more generic, but because we are generating more, I'll say cash flow at Vimeo, we are -- we can be investing more every quarter. And so we're very focused right now on Vimeo and how can we put more in, where can we put more every month now, every quarter. There's more dollars to invest there before we -- even before choosing to go negative, there's more dollars we can be investing there. And so we're trying to grow the product pipeline right now and grow the product resources to release more products and invest some of this incremental benefit that we're seeing at the business.

Mark Schneider

Operator

Our next question we'll go to Benjamin Black at Evercore.

Benjamin Black

Analyst

Great. Could you guys talk a little bit about the marketing environment at ANGI? Does it remain as favorable as you mentioned just last month? And if some of the supply tightness remains intact, how willing are you to lean into marketing investments in the back half of the year? And then on fixed price, you mentioned it's available on 200 tasks or so. I'd be curious to hear how high that could go. And do you think -- what do you think about fixed price revenue contribution at ANGI over the next, call it, 12 to 18 months?

Brandon Ridenour

Analyst

Great question. So the marketing environment, I think, just broadly, remains really favorable. And that's a combination of, I think, just generally lower rates across most channels, combined with organically higher levels of consumer intent and consumer demand. And so when you look at things like the TV environment, I think rates are favorable, 20% or 30% relative to where we thought they would be. And you see -- you see similar levels of favorability in other channels as well. We definitely pulled back in Q2. It was just -- particularly early in Q2. It was obviously a highly uncertain environment. But by June, we had begun to lean in and ramp up, particularly on TV. But I would say the answer to this question is for most channels, we manage them clearly on an ROI basis. And so we will spend as much as the channel will return on a profitable basis. With a channel like TV, it's a longer payback period, and there are secondary and tertiary benefits that are long-lasting. We've started to lean in in June. I think we'll continue to spend there for the remainder of the year, particularly if rates remain in the ballpark where they are now. So that will be a difference on a go-forward basis relative to the expense line in the second quarter. For fixed price, we're on 200 tasks, that makes up about 30% of the requests we get. I mean, 30% of the customers are coming to submit their requests are exposed to a fixed price offering. What we've been doing over the course of this year is launching into some much higher-priced categories. And we did that in Q1 originally, and our first proof point was to figure out if consumers and homeowners would actually buy a…

Glenn Schiffman

Management

And look, in terms of our investments in marketing, of which Brandon spoke, as well as fixed price, that's why we stand by our EBITDA posture for the year, and that is we do not expect margins to go up this year. We're going to continue to invest to take share throughout the marketplace. And then just to frame up the opportunity that we see in fixed price and the opportunity when our supply constraint gets lifted. You saw we did 9.4 million service requests this quarter. And on the latest 12-month basis, about 29 million. You saw our 0 accepts were 50%. Just divide monetized transactions by service requests, okay? If we only get from that 50% to 40%, our historical average, and our goal is a lot lower than 40%, that's 940,000 SRs. You saw we monetized SRs at $30 a click. That's nearly $30 million of quarterly revenue. A vast preponderance of it, if not all of it, falls to the bottom line. So that's our opportunity going forward. That's why we're so focused on product. That's why we're so focused on marketing. And that's why we're so focused on penetrating the category because that's our opportunity, and that's just 1 quarter.

Mark Schneider

Operator

Our next question will be from Michael Ng at Goldman Sachs.

Michael Ng

Analyst

I just had a couple on MGM. First, could you discuss your views on the incrementality of online betting? And if it ends up being somewhat cannibalistic, is that a net positive for MGM? And then second, Joey, to your earlier point, it's clear that online gaming penetration should continue to increase over time. Do you think MGM is well positioned to capture more than its share of online gaming relative to its traditional gaming base?

Joseph Levin

Management

Yes. I do think a significant portion of that actually is incremental, but it's -- who knows? I think there is always potential for cannibalization, but I do think it's meaningfully potentially incremental. And their ability to take share is -- and as I said earlier, I think that the combination of off-line and online in this category in that whole experience, where somebody who's playing and a customer of the company in a digital capacity, has the ability to enter a physical place and get some benefit of their digital play, I think, is a real advantage. And we expect that to accrue to MGM's benefit in share. That is -- when you think about the category, it's all the same sports. It's generally roughly the same lines, odds, payouts, things like that. So how do you differentiate? You got to differentiate with a customer experience. And we think that MGM has lots of tools in its toolkit to differentiate meaningfully in a customer experience. And that's the thing that excites us there. So we would hope that they can take real share there.

Michael Ng

Analyst

And a follow-up. Could you just talk about your long-term plans with the MGM stake in success, 3 to 5 years from now? Do you expect that stake to increase over time? Is there an opportunity to do something with the online betting joint venture? I would just love to hear your thoughts around that.

Joseph Levin

Management

Sure. It's an important question, and I don't have a great answer for it in the sense of -- we haven't thought that far ahead. We've said that we are -- once we're in this, we're in it for the long term. And in it for long term, could mean anything. Before COVID, MGM was very much focused on repurchasing shares with the excess capital that they generated in the asset-light strategy. So if there's a time where MGM has the ability to repurchase shares, then we'd hope that our ownership would accrete over time. And who knows, lots of other things could intervene in there that could accelerate or decelerate that or -- really, anything can happen. So we're totally open to the range of options here. And anything I'd say is we are -- we're certainly not flipping it. We're certainly not in this to try and flip for a quick pop.

Mark Schneider

Operator

Our next question will be from Brian Fitzgerald at Wells Fargo.

Brian Fitzgerald

Analyst

A quick one on ANGI and then one on Dotdash. Any update on consumer intent or comfort levels that you're seeing with indoor jobs versus outdoor jobs, discretionary versus nondiscretionary? What's been the trend there over the last couple of months? And then on Dotdash. We saw a number of advertisers pause advertising coming through Q2 as they made adjustments to and make sure they weren't clashing with messaging with current events. Can you talk to the trends there? What you're seeing in terms of resurgence in brand maybe substituting out of performance?

Brandon Ridenour

Analyst

This will be brief. We've seen a strong recovery in really every category of work, but it's definitely disproportionately over-indexing in outdoor work and then required work. Some of the big projects like bathroom and kitchen remodels and large indoor discretionary projects have returned to, I'll call it flat to up modestly year-over-year from a consumer demand standpoint, which I think is great given the context and given the fact that there's close personal contact related to those projects. But it's lagging where we would have otherwise thought it would be in our general 20% sort of growth goal. So we're happy with the recovery, but it's not quite where we think it would be otherwise. And there does continue to be some impact there that will resolve as the fear around COVID resolves.

Joseph Levin

Management

On Dotdash. The thing -- I can't speak to the broader ad market, or I can at least see some data on that. But Dotdash has certainly defied my expectations and odds generally in the category in that they have -- they continue to generate advertising dollars, continue to see real interest from advertisers. Obviously, travel, there's no travel advertising right now. And so that category is basically short-term gone. But other categories have more than made up for it. So this business is growing ad dollars. It's seeing interest among advertisers. One of the issues that we don't need to confront is we are not in the -- at Dotdash, we're not in the news business. So we're not in controversial stories. We're in -- we have this intent-based media, which is people trying to get specific things done. And so people are advertising around those specific things, people are trying to get done, and there's always providers, advertisers who want to reach the consumer when they're trying to get that specific thing done, whether it's pharma around health or whether it's CPG around cooking, things like that. There seems to be advertisers there and engaging. And I keep waiting for -- don't tell him, Neil Vogel, to say that we're not growing and we're struggling with the ad dollars, and it's going to be rough. And he keeps saying the opposite of that, which is I think a amazing testament to what they've built and how well they're executing.

Mark Schneider

Operator

And our next question will come from Ygal Arounian at Wedbush.

Ygal Arounian

Analyst

I have 2 questions. One on MGM and M&A and then one on ANGI. So historically, after you enter a space, you noted travel, homeservices, dating, kind of continue to consolidate there, continue to be active in the space. With taking a minority stake here in MGM, is that road map still applicable to you guys? Can continue to be active? Does the partnership allow you to take full stakes in other areas and kind of skirt around the regulatory environment or you kind of hitched to MGM and the path that they go on? And then on ANGI, I just wanted to ask about the partnership with Lowe's. I would love to hear a little bit more about that. Expectations on how that could drive both SP and SR growth in the near term and long-term?

Joseph Levin

Management

Yes. Look, I think anything is possible, on MGM and more in the space, our goal would certainly be to help MGM or participate as MGM is as aggressive as we would be when we believe in a space. And they seem to be very keen on being aggressive and winning. And so you use all the tools that are available in being aggressive and winning. And I think that is a great vehicle to do it, but we have flexibility and options and we will always maintain flexibility and options. I think that answers the MGM question. The other one was ANGI.

Brandon Ridenour

Analyst

Yes. So the new partnership with Lowe's is something we're very excited about. It's new and it's multi-faceted, and I'll talk a bit about it. I think first, just understanding it conceptually. If you look at ANGI Homeservices, we've had 29 million requests for service submitted by homeowners over the last 12 months, which is obviously enormous scale. If you think about that services-led approach that we have, combined with Lowe's as one of the premier retail offers of supply -- building supplies, materials and products for the home, it's natural that there's opportunities to combine those 2 together and create value. First, we offer fixed price services, I think, in their retail environment. So that's one opportunity for us to drive consumers through our experience via Handy. And then secondly, with the partnership we explicitly announced, Lowe's is able to offer a membership to ANGI Homeservices and HomeAdvisor to their Pros as a benefit of being a customer of Lowe's. So that creates -- the intent there is to create some loyalty amongst service providers to Lowe's and obviously be the destination they go to get building materials and [ products ]. And that then ultimately drives those providers to ANGI Homeservices and HomeAdvisor to join at a discounted rate. And so this is a situation where the provider wins, Lowe's is able to build a more loyal relationship with those providers. And then we, hopefully, will be able to expand our network as well. I think we're in the early stages of this. Obviously we just announced it. I personally feel like the opportunity -- the synergy opportunities are pretty extensive. Hopefully, this works out well and leads to bigger, better things over time.

Mark Schneider

Operator

Yes. We'll take our last question from Dan Salmon at BMO.

Daniel Salmon

Analyst

Great. Joey and Glenn, we know you'll keep plans for the cash to yourself. Would it be fair to say that another big acquisition is a lower probability now? Or is another multibillion acquisition [ still a likely outcome amongst the different options you're looking at ]? And for Brandon, I can't remember if you mentioned it today, but at the Investor Day, you talked about having separate sales teams from the traditional SPs versus the ones coming in at fixed priced. And that you're planning to integrate those more in the back half of the year. Can you just talk a little bit more about that? I hope I got the details right and the impact we expect from it? And how that may relate to the comment you made earlier about picking up sales hiring in the back half?

Joseph Levin

Management

Yes. Dan, you faded it a little bit, but I think I got the gist of it, which is do we have a mega acquisition planned? Are we less likely on mega-multibillion acquisition? I think nothing massive planned right now. I don't know that it's any more or less likely right now. I think we're always doing something very large has a very high bar here. We prefer smaller things, tuck-in things. I think the things that we're working on very actively right now are quite small and add-ins to our existing businesses. But we'll be as likely, which is not highly likely, but we'll be as likely now as we were previously to look at things that are larger. I think again, going to the overall environment, it is -- things are not generally particularly cheap right now. There's -- everything has only gone up for a very long time. That is what it is. There's a whole SPAC situation going on, where there's this avalanche of SPACs taking companies public. We actually think is long-term, very good for us in the sense that the -- getting a company public via SPAC is not a very high bar because the people who are -- because the way the incentives work in that system, I'll just say it that way. So there's going to be a lot of companies that can go public that may not have otherwise been able to go public. And we view the public markets generally, and we've talked about this or written about this, we view the public market as generally much more honest than the private markets or much more true than the private markets. And so I think if all these companies, if all these SPACs can bring companies that are in or around our area or Internet, consumer technology companies public that, that will, over the medium-term, not immediately but over the medium term, give us a much better landscape of companies to look at, and we'd be excited about a trend like that. I mean, I think it would take a little while to play out. But we're cheering the SPAC parade on with more capital being raised and more of these companies coming out and into the light and us and others getting a chance to look at them for good or for bad.

Brandon Ridenour

Analyst

And just briefly on the fixed price question. You did have that right. We run these sales forces separately for fixed price versus our traditional advertising or leads model. It's likely that we'll always run separate sales forces because they really are very different. And the challenge of going out and selling fixed price, which is, frankly, not selling at all. It's offering people to get paid to do jobs is very different from selling advertising. So I think those will stay separate. But what you're touching on, which I think is important, is we do plan to bring the offerings together so that once a provider comes into the ecosystem, let's say they're sold on a leads model, a leads advertising model, that they can also receive offerings for fixed price services. And our general -- we will bring those things together so that every provider has the opportunity to engage in all of these products once in the environment. And I think the key there, the way we think about it is that once you do come into the HomeAdvisor ecosystem, you actually will never leave. You may decide to stop advertising on leads, but you stay because why not see the fixed price opportunities that come across from time to time? And you can choose to take on those when you want and not when you don't want. So that's the concept. And I think that is perhaps last quarter of the year or first part of next year, where we'll begin to bring these things together.

Joseph Levin

Management

Great. Thanks, Brandon. Thank you all for joining us again and again, embracing the new format, which I really like, and we're definitely going to stick with it going forward. And I hope everyone stays safe and healthy, and we'll talk to you again soon.

Glenn Schiffman

Management

Terrific to see you.