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Snap Inc. (SNAP)

Q4 2019 Earnings Call· Tue, Feb 4, 2020

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Snap Inc.'s Fourth Quarter and Full-Year 2019 Earnings Conference Call. At this time all participants will be in a listen-only mode. After the prepared remarks, there will be a question-and-answer period. [Operator Instructions] This call will be recorded. Thank you very much. Mr. David Ometer of Investor Relations, you may begin your presentation.

David Ometer

Analyst

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Snap's fourth quarter and full-year 2019 earnings conference call. With us today are Evan Spiegel, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder; Jeremi Gorman, Chief Business Officer; and Derek Andersen, Chief Financial Officer. Earlier today, we made a slide presentation available that provides an overview of our user and financial metrics for the fourth quarter and full-year 2019, which can be found on our Investor Relations Web site at investor.snap.com. Now, I will cover the Safe Harbor. Today's call is to provide you with information regarding our fourth quarter and full-year 2019 performance in addition to our financial outlook. This conference call includes forward-looking statements. Any statement that refers to expectations, projections, guidance, or other characterizations of future events, including financial projections or future market conditions, is a forward-looking statement based on assumptions today. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed in these forward-looking statements, and we make no obligation to update our disclosures. For more information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements, please refer to the press release we issued today, as well as risks described in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2019, particularly in the section titled Risk Factors. This information can be found in our other filings with the SEC, when available. Our commentary today will also include non-GAAP financial measures, and we believe that the use of these non-GAAP financial measures provides an additional tool for investors to use in evaluating ongoing operating results and trends. These measures should not be considered in isolation from, or as a substitute for, financial information prepared in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP metrics for our reported results can be found in our press release issued today, a copy of which can be found on our Investor Relations Web site. Please note that when we discuss all of our expense figures they will exclude stock-based compensation and related payroll taxes as well as depreciation and amortization and non-recurring charges. At times in our prepared remarks, or in response to questions, we may offer additional metrics to provide greater insight into our business or our quarterly and annual results. This additional detail may be one-time in nature, and we may or may not provide an update in the future on these metrics. Please refer to our filings with the SEC to understand how we calculate our metrics. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Evan.

Evan Spiegel

Analyst

Hello everyone, and thank you for joining our call. 2019 was a transformative year for Snap. We saw momentum across the board as we grew our community, accelerated our revenue growth, and made progress towards profitability and free cash flow. We continued the momentum we developed early in the year through the fourth quarter, and we are excited about growing our business into 2020 and beyond. Our community grew to 218 million daily active users in Q4, we accelerated year-over-year revenue growth to 44% compared to 36% in Q4 of 2018, and we generated $42 million of adjusted EBITDA. Throughout the course of 2019, we added 31 million daily active users, largely driven by investments in our core product and improvements to our Android application. Our full-year adjusted EBITDA improved by 65% year-over-year, and we are working towards full-year adjusted EBITDA profitability in 2020. The strength and momentum in our underlying business fundamentals gives us confidence in our long-term growth and profitability as we invest in growing our business for the future. We've recently completed our 2020 strategic planning process, and have aligned our teams and resources around our goals of supporting real friendships on Snapchat, expanding our service to a broader global community, investing in our AR and content platforms, and scaling revenue while achieving profitability in order to self-fund our investments in the future. We have always believed that supporting real friendships and creating products to serve our community are core to building a long-term, sustainable business. On any given day, most people have something to share with their family and close friends, and using Snapchat allows them to communicate together in a way that is efficient and expressive. This means that our camera has become an important tool for maintaining relationships through visual communication and storytelling, creating…

Jeremi Gorman

Analyst

Thanks, Evan. We are so excited with the progress we made in 2019 and see significant opportunities for our business moving into 2020. Our teams are well aligned, enabling our business to grow revenue alongside our community through performance improvements on Android and iOS, world-class augmented reality experiences, and engaging made for mobile content. Over 2019, we generated full-year revenue of $1.7 billion dollars, an increase of 45% year-over-year, compared to 43% in 2018. In Q4 2019, we generated revenue of $561 million, an increase of 44% year-over-year, compared to 36% in Q4 2018. These results are a byproduct of the hard work being done across all teams at Snap, and validate decisions we've made around the structure of our sales teams and the products we have built for our advertisers and our community. As a result, we believe that we have the opportunity to continue growing annual revenue at a pace significantly faster than our peers. We are fully focused on making progress against our ARPU opportunity, which we believe in the short to medium term will be largely driven by advertiser demand. We have significant headroom in our business given our high levels of engagement and ample supply of available impressions globally. As a result, we are focused on driving demand from advertisers to improve CPMs in our self-serve auction. Looking at our current ad products and applying comparative industry CPMs to our own inventory, we are in a position to meaningfully close the ARPU gap relative to our peers. In addition, not only does demand growth increase contestation in our auction, driving up CPMs, but it also increases the number of ads available to choose from for each impression, improving relevance per impression and ultimately yielding higher ROI for our advertising partners, even at increased prices. To…

Derek Andersen

Analyst

Thanks, Jeremi. Our Q4 financial results reflect our priorities of making focused investments in the future of our business, and scaling our operations efficiently in order to drive towards profitability and positive free cash flow. As Evan mentioned earlier, our community grew to 218 million daily active users in Q4 2019, which represents an increase of 31 million or 17% year-over-year. We are pleased to see that the year-over-year growth rate of our community accelerated from 13% in Q3 2019 to 17% in Q4 2019, and that the sequential growth in DAU exceeded our expectations entering the quarter. We continue to benefit from the cumulative impact of improvements we have made to our application, which are contributing to higher levels of engagement and the sustained retention of new Snapchatters. The growth in our community continues to be broad based, with year-over-year and sequential growth on both iOS and Android platforms, as well as year-over-year and sequential growth across each of North America, Europe, and Rest of World. As we are now lapping the period when DAU stabilized near the end of 2018, we are focusing once again on the year-over-year growth rates in DAU, which tend to better illustrate the underlying trends within the community compared to the sequential growth patterns that are often skewed by seasonality within regions. In North America, DAU grew by 7 million or 9% year-over-year, up from 5 million or 6% in the prior quarter. In Europe, DAU grew by 7 million or 12% year-over-year, up from 6 million or 9% in the prior quarter. In Rest of World, DAU grew by 17 million or 36% year-over-year, compared to 13 million or 28% in the prior quarter. We are pleased to see that a pattern of solid year-over-year growth has developed across all regions, and…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. That concludes the prepared remarks for today's earnings call, and we will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator instructions] And our first question comes from Ross Sandler of Barclays. Please go ahead.

Ross Sandler

Analyst

Hey, guys. Just a question on revenue trajectory in Q4 and Q1, so, Jeremi, you flagged how the ad load is pretty low, and that there's plenty of available impressions on any given day, given the engagement here. So, the question is more on the demand side, how much of the growth that you're seeing in the fourth quarter, the 44%, is from new versus existing advertisers, and I guess what's the team doing to increase the pace of onboarding new advertisers on to the platform? And then, looking at the Q1 revenue range, Derek, you mentioned, there's acceleration at the high-end, we can all see that. So I guess what's giving you the confidence that the revenue growth is going to pick up in Q1? Thank you.

Jeremi Gorman

Analyst

Thanks for the question, Ross. A couple different things, so from the advertiser account perspective, as we don't break it out specifically, we are continuing to see strong demand for down funnel bid optimizations, such as app install, and then increased demand for our premium ad units from brand advertisers like commercials and AR. Our advertisers are generally retaining well and increasing their spend as we continue to demonstrate this meaningful ROI, which is really critical in terms of advertiser growth. I'm pleased to let you know that in Q4 of 2019, we did have our highest number of active advertisers ever, and there's still a lot of room to grow there. We have a lot of opportunity to get new advertisers, primarily through education of the market, through our sales teams, and our work with our agency partners as well, and in addition, in Q4, we started a deliberate approach to buying B2B marketing to reach the media planning community, and that's still early days, but we really like what we're seeing. So, all in, we continue to continue to deliver ROI. We are really, really focused on the market ensuring that we bring the best solutions to them and have the exact right products to continue to grow the advertiser base.

Derek Andersen

Analyst

Hey, and it's Derek speaking, Thanks for the question, Ross. I'll take the second half of it with respect to the Q1 guide. I think a couple things, one, when I look at the growth rate in Q4, obviously, we pointed out some one-time factors there that are impacting the revenue around the timing of the holiday season and whatnot. And so, one of the things, I think when we think about the revenue going forward, we're really confident in the trajectory of the business fundamentally for all of the reasons that Jeremi just mentioned, but as in terms of our personality around guiding, we want to make sure that we're factoring into our range, not only the things that we're optimistic about that we're seeing materializing in the business, but also the potential for some risk to materialize in the environment and so on. So, our guide tries to reflect both -- the momentum we see in our business and the confidence we have about our long-term trajectory, but also the potential for risk to materialize throughout the course of the quarter, and hopefully, that gives you a little bit of a sense of why we point a little bit optimistically to the higher end of the range and the potential for us to bounce off that our Q4 number.

Operator

Operator

Our next question is from Michael Levin of Pivotal Research Group. Please go ahead.

Michael Levin

Analyst

Thank you for the question. I wanted to understand how big of a driver for 2019 and conceivably in Q4 native direct-to-consumer advertising has been for the business? It's definitely a question we get a lot of inbound from investors.

Jeremi Gorman

Analyst

Thanks for the question, Michael. I would say that we're very, very fortunate to have both a strong brand-based business and a strong [DRO-based] [ph] business. So, we're not concerned relative to the fact that we have that diversification, and a suite of products is meant to serve advertisers of all types. We love what we're seeing in the verticalization efforts and that broad-based swath of success across verticals like entertainment, tech, CBG, and more. So, we are not as heavily reliant on that [D2C] [ph] group, because we have products and services to be as diversified as possible.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Heath Terry of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Heath Terry

Analyst

Great, thank you. When you look at the improvements that you're seeing in ARPU in the quarter, how would you disaggregate that between usage and monetization? There was a lot of great detail about monetization in the prepared remarks, but can you quantify the contribution from the investments that you're making in advertising, technology, better targeting, and measurement, and are there specific components in that [ad tech] [ph] that you'd call out is contributing, whether it's specific ad formats or specific tools that you're seeing advertisers use, and then just when you mentioned that ARPU gap in the transcript, can you quantify what you see as the right measurement of that gap between sort of where you are and who you're using? Not necessarily who, but the level that you're using as the benchmark?

Derek Andersen

Analyst

Hey, it's Derek speaking. Thanks for the question. There're sort of two components there, I'll take them in reverse order. The first one is just about the ARPU gap, and what gap are we trying to close. I think when we think about our ARPU opportunity near-term and longer term, we're really looking at the audience we have, the engagement we have, the ad products that we have today, and the yields that we see in the marketplace for the inventory that we have, and what we're really excited about is the opportunity to just continue to drive demand into our ecosystem and get market-based eCPMs and yields for the inventory in the audience that we have. So, we're trying to drive towards that, and of course, we look at peers in the marketplace near-term like a Twitter, which we think is a benchmark we want to drive towards, and obviously, we've got opportunity to go beyond that, and that's where we get into some of the discussion about how excited we are about the improving engagement on the user side. We pointed in some of the prepared remarks and highlights for the growth that we're seeing in engagement on Discover, with the time spent being up there growing and engagement with Premium Shows, and in general the health of the ecosystem, and of course, when we see the growth in our DAUs accelerating year-over-year versus prior quarter, all of that just adds to our opportunity. And so, when we think about closing the gap, that's the kind of stuff we're looking at, and then to your other question, which is how much of the ARPU growth is being driven by usage, versus, say, optimization, and I think at this point, because we're not supply-constrained, we're looking at predominantly just trying to build absolute demand into the ecosystem. And so, what you see when we're able to improve our optimization and serve the right ad to the right user at the right moment, and we can bring more diversity of advertisers into the ecosystem, that just allows us to use our inventory more efficiently and it takes some of the pressure off yields, which is great for our advertising customers who would benefit from really low yields in ecosystem today, because we're not supply-constrained. So, that's how we see the marketplace yielding out, and hopefully that gives a little bit more color to your question there.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Mark Mahaney of RBC. Please go ahead.

Mark Mahaney

Analyst

Okay. Two questions, please. One, Evan, in the quarter or two ago, you called out the impact particularly of some of the new features on the gender filters on the DAU growth, and this last quarter, you had this nice innovation in terms of Cameo, was it just not isn't material so there wasn't a need to call it out, if you will talk about that? And then you talked about full-year EBITDA profitability, but Derek, you didn't mention that at the end. So, just -- is that a goal, is that not wishful thinking, but is that like a nice to have goal, or is that actually you're trying to run the business to generate full-year profitability, just if one or two, where you will adjust that? Thank you.

Evan Spiegel

Analyst

Hey, Mark. Yes, lot of exciting innovation for us, Cameo is included, it's very early for Cameo that are part of our chat service, and so I think over time, as more and more members of our community discover Cameos, they'll get really excited about them, and I think that has a lot of potential to drive growth in the future, but I think one of the really interesting thing that's happening in our business is that as we start turning our products into platforms, for example, whether that's our content business or augmented reality, we see a lot of opportunity for durable innovation. So, one of the things we're seeing on the augmented reality side is this, the community created lenses are really growing in engagement and popularity, and what's great about that is that we don't have to come up with all the ideas here at Snap, our community is coming up with great ideas every day, and they're actually building them and then sharing them with everyone, and that's driving a lot of recurring engagement and growth for us. And so, we're excited about that going into the future.

Derek Andersen

Analyst

And then, Mark, thanks for the question, and obviously on the full-year profitability side look, obviously Evan and I are 1000% aligned. This is an objective for the company, we don't guide beyond the current quarter, but as you can see, we've been investing in the company in order to accelerate our revenue growth, try to close these ARPU gaps faster, and as we pour those investments on, we'd like the returns that we're seeing. And so, we're driving the scale on the business in order to make that possible. And so, it's obviously an objective that an entire leadership team is pushing towards. We just don't guide beyond the current quarter, and that's why you don't see me talking to it in my section there.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Rich Greenfield of LightShed Partners. Please go ahead.

Rich Greenfield

Analyst

Hi, thanks for taking the questions. I guess just kind of maybe the start with from Evan kind of philosophical. I think, if you look back a year ago, quality of discovery was something we spent a lot of time harping on. And I think if you look a year forward, you've made a lot of progress in improving the quality of the content that's there, but I'm just wondering like as you think about the tension between what the algorithm wants to suggest to drive the most clicks versus improving the quality, how does that battle take place in Snap every day. And is some of it, what we're seeing in terms of revenue growth or ARPU growth, is part of the constraint of like you're improving the quality of the experience, and it takes time to onboard all the advertisers to benefit from the improvement in quality, and then, just kind of a follow-up to the question that was asked earlier about number of advertisers. Facebook disclosed, I think over 8 million advertisers now up from 7 million. Jeremi, is it fair to say that you're still in hundreds of thousands of advertisers? And I guess the biggest single question that everyone is thinking about is, is that the single greatest driver of closing the GAAP is just bringing on more advertisers to buildup competition in the auction, is that what gets you 50-60 type percent revenue growth relative to where you are now? Thanks.

Evan Spiegel

Analyst

Thanks for the questions, Rich. We're really excited about the momentum we're seeing on the content side of business. And I think there's still a lot of room to improve the service, there's going to be some announcements we're making later this year around new innovations to that effect, and I think the tension is always going to be there, but one of the really neat things about Snap is that all of that content and discovery is curated. And so, we're really defining the pool of content that served to our community, and that's how we try to get the right balance between, content that's really relevant, but also content that's high quality. And so, I think that's sort of the right trade off to make for now, but we're doing some experimentation around to merchandising things like our shows more effectively, you see that if you swipe over from Discover, one page over, we're doing a lot of experimentation there, and we're learning a lot. So we hope to bring some of those learnings more broadly to our community as we go forward.

Jeremi Gorman

Analyst

And then, I'll take the second part of your question Rich. Yes, absolutely. Definitively advertiser account is the single best way to grow demand including onboarding new advertisers of all types. We have products for all of them. And we are very comfortable with how we're onboarding those, but tons and tons of opportunity ahead. We do have fewer than 8 million advertisers, but a lot of headroom to grow. We have the supplies to do it and the products to do it and bring on advertisers of all types. So yes, that is where we are myopically focused on the sales team to ensure that we have a breath of advertisers to close the ARPU gap relative to our peer side.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Doug Anmuth of JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Doug Anmuth

Analyst

Thanks for taking the question. I just want to follow-up on Discover. Evan, you talked about the 35% increase in time spend. And more than that among users 25 plus, can Discover help Snap age up more over time here and then can you just talk more about what the shift in usage toward Discover means for monetization and closing that ARPU gap. Thanks.

Evan Spiegel

Analyst

Well, at a high level, there are really interesting shifts happening in content consumption overall, as you know, the viewing behavior moves from linear television to mobile content consumption. And I think the content offerings really across the board have not caught up to this behavioral shift. And that's why we see so much opportunity here and why we're continuing to invest in, creating new shows, creating new content types, because we see so much demand from our community so that behavior shift I think happened first with young people, and it's increasingly happening with older folks as well. And we're excited about the growth that we're seeing there. So I do think it plays an important role in closing the ARPU gap, but frankly, the ARPU opportunity is so broad at Snap, given the current level of advertiser demand and the amount of inventory that's available. I think, we'd have to grow something north of 50%, full-year revenue for several years to just to get close to a Twitter level of ARPU. So we're very focused on accelerating revenue growth, which we think is possible.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Justin Post of Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Please go ahead.

Justin Post

Analyst

Great. A couple of questions, first, you're guiding to possible acceleration in Q1. I know the comps get tougher both on DAUs and revenue growth this year progresses. How do you feel about the year and your revenue initiatives and just kind of the setup for the year, if you can help with that at all? And then secondly, I thought it was interesting that your revenue share costs are up 49% year-over-year, but your commercials I guess were up three x. So, maybe you could just help us a little bit about the gross margins of the Discover business, if those are really attractive to you and the operating margins there? Thank you.

Derek Andersen

Analyst

Hey, Justin, it's Derek speaking. Thanks for the question. In terms of the setup for the year on revenue to store momentum, heading into it, I think we've really been focused on our long-term opportunity. You know, both Evan and I've touched on it here today around the longer term, ARPU opportunity. And we've been investing in the business in a lot of different ways around the monetization time in terms of our sales teams, the engineers that support those teams on optimization, and then of course, in the product. And so, we feel like we've been putting the inputs into the business in order to set ourselves up. And so, I think we are really pleased with the momentum we're seeing in the business and the absolute revenue, growth opportunity there. And so, we're going to keep -- you're going to see us continue to invest in the business in order to make it possible to close that gap faster. In terms of the scaling on the cost of revenue, there's really three big components of the cost structure they are obviously infrastructure, which you can see separately. And then, of course, the content side, and then of course, on certain costs and so on or on ads. And, when I think about the scaling there, the biggest we do report that within revenue share, so it probably gives you a little bit of in a sense of the structure of a lot of that cost, but we're also investing in our own shows and/or own content. Some of that structure is a little bit different and scales frankly quite well for us. As our audience grows, and as the engagement grows, and so that also contributes to our ability to expand our margins, as we scale the business, and so you're seeing a really good flow through there. The 8-percentage point expansion is really healthy, and we expect that, we can continue to scale efficiently. Having that infrastructure cost number get more efficient, on a unit cost basis over time really opens it up for us to invest in the future of the business on the content side, which expands our monetization opportunity while still growing those margins. And so, that cost structure has been working nicely for us, we're going to stay focused on being operationally efficient, so we can make those investments.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Stephen Ju of Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.

Stephen Ju

Analyst

Hey. So, thank you. So, Evan, some of the ROW regions have lower GDP per capita. So your ARPU may ultimately be lower, but would you say that the cost to serve in those regions may be that much lower as well, given the data cost constraints you called out, and the use case for the app might be different. And Derek, your DSOs are down every quarter this year, relative to the prior year. So can you talk about the shifting mix between revenue that is more self-service versus agency driven, and ultimately where that DSO can ultimately go as the advertiser base continues to shift? Thanks.

Evan Spiegel

Analyst

Hi, Stephen. Thanks for the questions. To the first one, in terms of U.S. managing, our infrastructure costs by DAU and any of the long-term around the cost per DAU by region relative to ARPU, obviously, we've got a lot of opportunity to grow ARPU, as we've been talking about, and we've been able to grow ARPU much faster than our cost per DAU. You can see that, this quarter with the growth and revenue and flat across for DAU you and so that's allowing us to expand our efficiency overall and our margin. Typically, as you're thinking through the cost per -- of infrastructure, user engagement is obviously a driver. The costs to deliver impressions are also a factor in there, and of course, it's going to vary based on user engagement. It's going to vary based a little bit on ARPU because of the impressions being a component of that. And so, generally speaking, there's some alignment there between your ARPU and your cost per DAU when you look at different regions. And so, that helps you a little bit as you've got your ARPU varying by country. And importantly, we're getting better and better at managing those costs and getting them scaled appropriately. And so, that's been working pretty well for us. And I think you can see that coming through in the margins, even as our rest of the world DAU has been growing a little faster than our more mature markets. The margins have still been expanding, and so, I think you can see that coming through any outputs. In terms of DSO, yes, we've put a lot of attention on just you scaling our business efficiently and making sure that we're managing our DSO efficiently and working capital making sure it scales well. Obviously Q4 working capital was a drain quarter-over-quarter seasonably higher revenues and know that we've got to collect those in, but generally speaking, we've been able to expand the working capital structure pretty efficiently over the course of the last year, and you can see that starting to come through any outputs.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Eric Sheridan of UBS. Please go ahead.

Eric Sheridan

Analyst

Thanks. Maybe two topics if I can. On the shorter holiday period, there I just wonder if you could quantify how that might have impacted Q4 and whether that outperformed or underperformed versus your expectations that we knew the calendar was going to be less days? And then on the -- always on demand, and thinking about the [values that's filled] [ph] into the self-serve auction you're calling that out as a headwind in Q4, looking back over Q1 to Q3 of '19 as we looked at year-on-year comparisons going forward, are there any comparisons we should be aware of that create either tougher comps or easier comps now as we look forward over the next couple of quarters that we should be aware of just versus the way you'll be communicating on the business going forward? Thanks so much.

Evan Spiegel

Analyst

Hi, Eric, thanks for the questions. Yes, shorter holiday period, I mean, the way I think about that, as I look at the revenue to the quarter, and similar to what we've seen in prior years, we saw elevated holiday spending and the period between Black Friday and Christmas. That period is just a little shorter for us, and one of the things that's really important to understand about our businesses, because we're not supply-constrained, we're more sensitive to fluctuations in demand, you know, whereas other platforms if you're more dense, when you have that kind of demand fluctuating, it's going to trade off against yield a little bit more, and so, the expectations that we had for that impact in Q4 pretty much lined up with what we saw. So, it was as expected, which is why you saw us coming real close to our guide. And then in terms of the impact of the always on going forward, for sure, we saw the business accelerate throughout the course of 2019, and of course, that just makes the expectations higher, but as we were seeing our business improve over the course of 2019, we were investing in the business, and you can see that where we were investing in our sales teams and our engineering and product organizations that support the business overall, and content, and so on, and so, as our businesses improved, we've been investing in the business. Typically, you'll see a lag effect between the investments that you put into the business and the monetization that results from all of that. We're pleased with the early results that we're seeing from those investments, and we're doubling down on what's working, and so, that's what's making us optimistic about our ability to realize our ARPU opportunities as we move forward, because those investments appear to be looking good. Thanks for the question. I hope that helped to illustrate.

Operator

Operator

Our last question will come from Brian Nowak of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Brian Nowak

Analyst

Great. Thanks for taking my questions. I have two, the first one, Jeremi, I appreciate sort of the detail on your key strategic priorities, I guess, sitting in your seat now, what do you think are sort of one or two of the most important aspects to really improve -- to improve the direct response advertiser adoption, and the pace of which DR dollars can flow over the platform? What's the biggest area of friction you need to improve in 2020? And then the second one, for Derek, I guess it was interesting to hear sort of your guidance philosophy or your service of assuming some risks to the upside and downside, so just as we're thinking about the first quarter guide, maybe talk us through some of the potential risks to the downside, though they are incorporated into the guide that could perhaps go better or worse? Thanks.

Jeremi Gorman

Analyst

Thanks for the question, Brian. So, we are absolutely focused on optimization and ranking alongside improvements for advertising tools and products for our more sophisticated advertisers. There is not a lot of huge hurdles remaining in the business, I think we're structurally sound, and I think really importantly, one of the things is that advertisers really just want us to win. They want us to succeed. They want options. They think they are looking for brand safe environments for their messages. They want to reach Gen Z and millennials, where they're forming lifelong habits. They want performance media. They want video, and they want creative canvases, and we have all of those things. So, I think in terms of fundamentals, we have everything we need in the building to reaccelerate revenue, and we're extremely optimistic about our ability to do that. So, we're looking forward to a great 2020.

Derek Andersen

Analyst

Brian, it's Derek speaking. Thanks for the question. Yes, the Q1 guide, I think when you're thinking about risks and opportunities, a lot of that really comes down to our execution and how quickly we can capitalize on our opportunity. Obviously, we talked about keys to growth being bringing more and new demand into the platform, diversifying our advertisers and continuing to deliver optimizations, and that allow us to use our inventory more effectively and deliver ROI for our advertisers, and that's really the focus, and how quickly we can execute on that, and how quickly our customers react to the ROI that they're seeing, and we're really excited about our opportunity and the momentum we have in the business, and we're trying to give you a good estimate of where we think things can come out, and obviously, when you're growing at the rates we are, there's a little bit of a range around what that possibly is, and we're trying to deliver in the short-term, but also keep our eye really focused on investing for the long-term so that we're accelerating the business to capture the longer term opportunity as quickly as we can. And the Q1 guide reflects that and the range around what we think the execution could be. Thanks for the question. Hopefully that helped to explain.

Operator

Operator

And this will conclude our question-and-answer session as well as Snap Inc.'s fourth quarter and full-year 2019 earnings conference call. Thank you all for attending today's presentation and you may now disconnect your lines.