Jonathan Oringer
Analyst · SunTrust. Your line is now open
Thanks, Mike. Thanks everyone for joining us today for Shutterstock's fourth quarter and year end 2017 earnings call. We continue to make solid progress in the evolution of our business from a marketplace to accretive platform. We’re seeing continued operational momentum from our many initiatives including our upgraded technology platform, the transformation of our operating structure to focus business units and the introduction of new products, features and functionality for our customers. In addition we continue to build and strengthen our team every day. Overall I am pleased with the improvement in our revenue performance in the fourth quarter. Although margins this quarter and for the full year were impacted by the infrastructure and platform investments we have made in our business. We’re confident these critical investments will have a long term positive impact on our financial results. Also while being an important long-term investment we look forward to see some of this positive impact in 2018. In the fourth quarter of 2017 on a constant currency basis revenue grew approximately 12.6%, compared to the fourth quarter of 2016 and adjusted EBITDA was $23.3 million compared to $25.9 million in 2016. In addition on a year-over-year basis during the fourth quarter of 2017, our customer base grew by 9.5% to just over $1.8 million customers. Paid downloads increased by 4% to 43.9 million, we grew revenue per download by 7% on a constant currency basis and we expanded our image library by 46%. So over 170 million images and increased our video library by 47% to more than 9 million clips. As we discussed on prior calls over the last few years we made investment that we believe transforms our marketplace into a platform that provides and enterprises, with the content types and tools they need to collaboratively design and build creative projects. While these investments have impacted our short-term profitability, we’ve already begun to see positive tangible results in the form of user growth and retention, and expect to continue to benefit from these investments over the long-term. In 2017, we achieved several important objectives more than 1.8 million active paying customers contributed to our revenue in 2017, and more than 350,000 approved contributors made their content available on our platform. By the end of 2017, we had more than 170 million images and 9 million video clips available for license. Across our products, as we continue to focus on our customers’ workflow. We launched several feature to increase engagement. We now track and test many parts of our customer experience and at times can be running many AB test simultaneously. These test measure impact to life time value, product mix, order value, download success and engagements, and the winning experiments get pushed live into production. We successfully migrated our public API to our new code [ph] base, and continue to evolve our platform for other business to directly integrate. HubSpot and Google Slides are examples of the many partners that started to use our API in 2017. We plan to continue to invest in making sure our images are available in business applications everywhere. And you can see the API developer documentation for yourself, at developer.shutterstock.com. We continue to attract amazing content through both our user generated collection, and new agreements with companies such as the World Surf League and the Associated Press. We continue to innovate our machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms that are becoming an important part of our platform. Our prototype of composition aware search is just one-way, which is helping our customers find images in new and unique way. These advance search capabilities of our nearly 180 million images, combined with our editor tool, enables customer to fully produce the creative content they need. We acquired Flashstock and rebranded Shutterstock custom, launching our custom content platform for our enterprise customers. And for our music offering, we launched our new premium beat website, as well as a mobile app, which enables on the go music discovery. As we transitioned from stock image marketplace to a global creative platform, we continue to remain laser focus on implementing our strategy around building a robust platform, enhancing the network effects exhibit throughout our product, and tracking and retaining talent that enable the successful execution of our business strategy. This means providing our customers with compelling content and innovative tools that sit at the heart of our customers’ workflow, and facilitate a seamless process for our growing contributor network. In our e-commerce image business, we’re seeing solid customer growth, and our focus continues to be on offering the right pricing and packaging to our customer, while optimizing our customer acquisition funnel. Throughout 2017, we were able to drive improvements in both product mix and customer retention. We’ve ramped up AB testing significantly, beginning in the second quarter of 2017, and have progressed on personalization efforts. This has yielded significant improvements in our user experience and enhanced our ability to track new customers. Importantly, while making these improvements in our e-commerce image business, we’ve also been able to drive down marketing cost per acquisition, as compared to 2016 and early 2017. Within our motion offering, we’ve begun simplifying our pricing structure for video and continue to make progress in building out the portfolio of products. This includes RocketStock, which produces original state-of-the-art video pack, industry leading video effect elements, and high quality after effect templates, which includes lower search and title sequences. In December, we made great strides with our premium B product offering. We launched our first music mobile experience for video producers, editors and film makers. The new application allows access to the full collection of editors, I’m sorry -- the new application allows access to the full collection of exclusive, high quality tracks on premiumbeat.com from any device. We also introduced the design overall and new discovery functionality to the premiumbeat.com site. For enterprise business, we continue to build our geographic presence and expand usage of video, music and editorial content. We’re getting very strong and positive feedback from our customers who are increasingly making multi-product purchases across content types. Revenue generated by our enterprise business grew 26% year-over-year in the fourth quarter, and represented approximately 34% of our total revenue, compared to 32% in the fourth quarter of 2016. In editorial, we continue to cover fantastic events including the Victoria Secret Fashion Show in Shanghai and on-set photography for some of UK’s biggest TV shows. During the year we covered 4,000 entertainment events and about 2,400 sports events. You may have noticed our editorial images are now visible on our e-commerce website and while today we don’t have a full editorial offering on our e-commerce -- while today we have a full editorial offering our enterprise platform we only get half of the product on the e-commerce site, but expect to launch a self-service editorial product in the near future. While our sports, entertainment and news content is in its early stages [Technical Difficulty] product in new customer friendly ways and we’ll continue to invest in the area. [indiscernible] adoption in Shutterstock is going well and we’re very [Technical Difficulty] listen to feedback from customers. As I noted last quarter we believe Custom is a large long term opportunity for us and that we’re well positioned to significantly add to our contributor communities that Custom has today. In summary, this was a solid quarter and year for our business. We continue to make progress by focusing on our tech platform, new products and launching features and functionality for our growing customer base. Additionally the strength and the talent joining Shutterstock makes me excited for what we’ll build in 2018 and beyond. Lastly, as Steven will discuss in greater detail, we had two strategic transaction to-date in 2018. First, we made a strategic investment in Zcool, our exclusive distributor in China to further expand and enhance our reach in the Greater China region. Second, we entered into an agreement to sell Webdam, a digital asset management business that we acquired in early 2014 for a purchase price of $14.4 million. Our sale price of Webdam is $49.1 million. The Webdam business was never closely integrated into Shutterstock like our other acquisitions and over the years as we try to integrate Webdam we realized that integration wouldn’t have been as productive as we had initially anticipated. Since the customer base is more distinct than we had originally thought. Ultimately we found the right place for Webdam to grow and the price was right for us to sell to Bynder. We know that Bynder is the right home for Webdam and we also win with a solid return on investment for our shareholders. And with, that I’ll turn the call over to Steven, who will provide more detailed overview of our operations and financial performance.