Jonah Peretti
Analyst · TD Collins. Please go ahead
Thank you, Amita. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We continue to face a tough operating environment for digital media. However, our value proposition is consistently resonating in the marketplace. With iconic brands and a massive audience and a differentiated technology platform, we occupy a unique position in the ecosystem of audiences, creators, platforms, and advertisers. Our premium brand-saved content reaches millions of young people each day and appeals to hundreds of advertising clients, the biggest tech platform, and emerging creators all looking to break through in a crowded market. We are a scale-diversified digital media company that is poised to cash them on the future of the industry and deliver long-term value to shareholders. And we have a lot of exciting work underway, some of which I will share today. Before I turn to that, let me briefly discuss our performance. 2022 was a challenging year for our business, and we navigated the dual headwinds of a weakening digital ad environment and the ongoing shift to short-form vertical video while also integrating complex networks into the company. First, on the operating environment. Over the course of last year, many of our clients were forced to constrain ad budgets in order to navigate deteriorating macroeconomic conditions, which pressured year-over-year growth in our advertising and content retires. In this operating environment, our global teams also work to integrate complex networks into the business. While that integration resulted in meaningful cost synergies, we believe we have not yet reached our full revenue potential as a combined company. We have enough more work to do in order to overcome these challenges, which Marcela will speak to shortly. Turning to the ongoing shift to short-form vertical video, A year ago, at our first earnings call, I discussed the implications of the rapid rise of short-form vertical video on our business, namely as we shift focus to building large, highly engaged audiences around our short form media content across the platform. and we made great progress in 2022. As a result of this shift in focus, we nearly doubled our output in terms of short form vertical video across TikTok, Instagram, Reels and YouTube sports. We continue to surpass 1 billion quarterly views on both Reels and Shorts, with multiple videos consistently earning millions of use each on par with premium globally recognized brands like the NFL and Louis Vuitton. Q4 viewership of short-term content across platforms more than tripled year-over-year. As I discussed before, it takes time to monitor content formats. Recently, we have seen certain platforms such as YouTube Shorts begin to open up opportunities for partners to monetize their short-term content on the platform. Although we are in the first stages of operationalizing this change, we expect this momentum to continue, which is why I believe we are driving the right strategic focus to position the business for long-term growth and monetization. In December, we made significant adjustments to our cost structure to focus on the platforms and formats with the highest initial for long-term monetization aligned with the weaker demand environment and accelerate our progress on the integration of complex networks. Execution across -- against our cost initiatives has allowed us to focus on the areas that I believe drive long-term growth across our combined portfolio of the brand, specifically, creators and artificial intelligence. I believe the future of digital media will be defined by the rise of creator-led and AI-powered content. As we have seen over the course of the past year, the rapid rise in popularity of content formats like Reels, TikTok and Shorts have proven that audience consumption behavior continues to favor creators-led content. To capitalize on the audience momentum, we have built around the creator-led content. We are building the premier creator platform to attract the next generation of Internet talent. This includes expanding our suite of technologies, tools and recent power creator end-to-end content creation and monetization engine. We have spent creator-led publishers since BuzzFeed's inception with a proven track record as a discovery engine for the next generation of Internet creators. In fact, some of the biggest careers in media and culture have started BuzzFeed and complex. This commitment to creators has helped us develop a form mbedded competitive advantage in the marketplace. We are able to offer our trusted network of talent to cover advisers, struggling to navigate the world of influencers and creators. Our platform also allows creators to build a sustainable monetization engine with access to our massive audiences and best-in-class tools and resources. We've made great strides in growing our network or creator, which further strengthens our content flywheel with higher quality content that reaches a wider audience across more platforms and helps us capture deeper data and insights. BuzzFeed has always lived at the intersection of technology and creativity and recent development and artificial intelligence represent an opportunity to take this convergence to the next level. As the creative process becomes increasingly AI-enabled, we are continually looking to maximize the creativity of our writers, creators and producers. We view AI as an exciting new creativity tool, one that humans can harness to open up new avenues for imagination, storytelling and engagement and explore new premium product offerings that will appeal to our clients and partners on the new frontier of media. And our work in this area is off to a good start. In 2023, you'll see air power content move from an R&D phase to part of our core business, enhancing the quiz experience, informing our brainstorming and personalizing and curating our content for our audience. I could not be more excited for us to explore these transformative new frontiers in digital media. As creator led and AI power content creates and continue to gain audience share, BuzzFeed is well positioned to both influence and benefit from these trends. And we hope you will join our Virtual Investor Day on May 11, where we will have time to fully communicate what we are working on. Thank you. Now I'll hand the call over to Marcela.