Earnings Labs

Zedge, Inc. (ZDGE)

Q2 2019 Earnings Call· Wed, Mar 13, 2019

$3.34

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon and welcome to Zedge’s Second Quarter 2019 Earnings Conference Call. During management’s prepared remarks, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] In today’s presentation, Tom Arnoy, Zedge’s Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer and Jonathan Reich, Zedge’s Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer will discuss Zedge’s financial and operational results for the 3-month period that ended on January 31, 2019. Any forward-looking statements made during this conference call either in the prepared remarks or in the question-and-answer session whether general or specific in nature are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those which the company anticipates. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to specific risks and uncertainties disclosed in the reports that Zedge files periodically with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Zedge assumes no obligation either to update any forward-looking statements that they have made or may make or to update the factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those that they forecast. Please note that the Zedge earnings release is available on the Investor Relations page of the Zedge website. The earnings release has also been filed on a Form 8-K with the SEC. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Tom Arnoy.

Tom Arnoy

Analyst

Thank you, operator and thank you all for joining us today. I am Tom Arnoy, Co-Founder and CEO of Zedge. Welcome to Zedge’s second quarter fiscal 2019 earnings conference call recapping the 3 months ended January 31, 2019. Joining me today is Jonathan Reich, our Chief Financial and Chief Operating Officer, who will provide additional insight into the numbers that we reported earlier this afternoon. I am excited to share with you that, over the past 60 days, we have been aggressively testing our first foray into subscription-based revenue. Specifically, we started offering our U.S. users the ability of removing unsolicited ads from the app for a fee. We are encouraged by the results that we have seen to-date. In short, the initial response rate to our Ad Free offering indicates that a decent segment of our app users are willing to subscribe and pay a fee to remove the advertising from the app. Ad Free delivers materially more revenue per subscribing user and materially higher average lifetime value when compared to our existing ad-based model. The subscription model is attractive, because it provides recurring revenue and with time and with more data, we will be able to predict revenue growth coming from subscription renewals. We also believe that building a large base of paying subscribers will represent a valuable asset for the company. We have a long way ahead of us in terms of realizing the potential of this model and are currently focused on rolling out this value-added feature to all users globally. In parallel, we are optimizing pricing, renewal duration and other variables, including discounting and product funding. I am very upbeat about the potential for this opportunity and I am personally leading its charge. If the data continues to track the early results as we scale…

Jonathan Reich

Analyst

Thank you, Tom. My remarks today will focus on our key operational and financial results for the second quarter of our fiscal year 2019. For a comprehensive and detailed discussion of our results, please read our earnings release issued earlier today and our Form 10-Q, which we expect to file with the SEC by March 18, 2019. Following my comments, we will open the call to any questions you may have. Throughout my remarks, the second quarter refers to November 2018 through January 2019 and comparisons are to the corresponding period in 2017 through 2018 or our first quarter which was August through October 2018. Monthly active users, or MAU, that is the number of unique users that opened our app during the last 30 days of the quarter, increased 3.4% to 36.7 million during January 2019 from 35.5 million in the corresponding period a year ago and increased 6% from 34.6 million in the previous sequential quarter. Year-over-year growth in the emerging markets was 16.3% offset by a decline of 11.8% in well-developed markets. On a sequential basis, we experienced an increase in well-developed markets of 1.8% and an increase of 8.9% in emerging markets. As Tom discussed, we are working on various initiatives targeted to improve MAU growth and the geographic makeup of our user base. If the initial results from our Ad Free offering continue to hold up, we expect to invest in user acquisition campaigns with a positive ROI that will initially be targeted toward more developed economies. Total revenue in the second quarter decreased 15.5% compared to the year ago quarter and increased 8.1% from the previous quarter to $2.57 million. The year-over-year decrease was primarily a result of the decline in MAU in well-developed economies, which command higher advertising rates when compared to those…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. And we’ll take our first question from Josh Goltry from Maxim Group.

Josh Goltry

Analyst

Hey guys, how are you? It’s interesting to hear about the new subscription business that’s on the horizon. I’m just wondering if you’ve thought about a pricing model for that business yet?

Tom Arnoy

Analyst

Hi, Josh, this is Tom, okay.

Josh Goltry

Analyst

Hi, Tom. How are you?

Tom Arnoy

Analyst

Yes, I’m not sure if I understood the question.

Josh Goltry

Analyst

So, I’m saying, so the new subscription business that you want to start, right, do you have a pricing model for that subscription yet, so, what are you going to charge a user for that?

Tom Arnoy

Analyst

Yes, if you go to the apps now and try it on Android, you will see the current offering and then the pricing. We – clearly part of the strategy is testing various price points and combos and doing various testing and optimization on that, so that’s something we’re working on every day, something we’ve done and something we’ve been doing, yes.

Josh Goltry

Analyst

I thought it wasn’t launched yet, but okay, got it. And I was wondering if you had any color on when you think revenue from emerging market is going to start the, meaning well enough to contribute at a revenue growth, because you’ve declined few quarters in a row, so I’m just wondering when you think that may shift?

Tom Arnoy

Analyst

Yes, it’s too early to say, it’s not to say anything about that now as part of the subscription strategy and also when it comes to Zedge Premium. We clearly hope that it will help us increase the average revenue per user in emerging markets and in the countries where we don’t see the same levels of advertising revenue as for instance in the U.S., but clearly that’s what we truly hope for and work for with subscription and other things, but I’m afraid to comment anything on that now.

Josh Goltry

Analyst

Okay, that’s fine. Do you have any potential long-term agreements with advertisers or not as of yet?

Tom Arnoy

Analyst

Yes, Jonathan, do you want to comment on that?

Jonathan Reich

Analyst

We do not have long-term agreements with advertisers. If you refer to our 10-K, you’ll see that approximately 80% plus of our revenue is generated from the three major exchanges controlled by Google, Facebook and Twitter. And as I think we do not really do a lot of direct sales to advertisers themselves. Our monetization is primarily through programmatic platforms.

Josh Goltry

Analyst

Got it. I’m just curious. Okay. So, in terms of emerging markets, which one or which ones do you think present the largest ad revenue opportunity?

Jonathan Reich

Analyst

Yes, I think that it’s a really different question going back to your question about unlocking value in the emerging markets. As we go down the path of this matrix, where we’ve now started to introduce subscription, as you know we’ve had the marketplace where there the ability to purchase coin packs and buy the content in there or go through rewarded advertising experiences, and as we roll out new content verticals, some of which Tom had alluded to, that combination will steer us in terms of how do we unlock the value from that customer base. Typically speaking, CPMs in those markets are materially less than they are in the well-developed markets.

Josh Goltry

Analyst

Right.

Jonathan Reich

Analyst

And what we’re really gunning towards is unleashing the right monetization formula for those markets while not losing focus on our need to grow the Tier 1 markets. I think Tom had mentioned in his comments that if the beta continues to support what we’ve seen to-date with the roll-out of our subscription model that, that will open the door for us to invest in paid user acquisition campaigns that carry a positive ROI with them. And we expect that we will optimize between the various monetization mechanisms that we have available to us across both the emerging and well-developed markets. In closing though, I’d like to say one other point. A lot of our ability to offer these new pricing mechanisms and new content verticals stems from the FreeForm acquisition that we’ve made a year and a half ago. A lot of what happened in terms of building the marketplace revolves around building infrastructure that can support many different types of new content verticals and multiple pricing or multiple monetization layers. So, that is something that aside from just the pure marketplace that’s user facing and GTV, that is something that has opened up the opportunity for us to engage with users in a much different fashion than what we have done historically, which has been primarily around fully ad supported business model.

Josh Goltry

Analyst

Great. And just a couple more. So, of the current user base, how many of the 36.7 million MAUs are from emerging markets?

Jonathan Reich

Analyst

Yes, let’s take a look at it from a different vantage point, approximately 25% of our user base is in North America.

Josh Goltry

Analyst

Okay, that’s helpful. Awesome. And so I think in your [Q], you said the 92% of Zedge’s MAUs are supported by Android. Is – could you provide any insight on why iOS hasn’t been as prevalent amongst your user base?

Tom Arnoy

Analyst

Sure. Let me, I can comment on that. So, if you take a look at it historically, our entry into the market was mostly around ringtones and wallpapers, but ringtones, the new iOS and Apple ecosystem does not allow users to set ringtones within or – in the apps in iOS. And we haven’t been able to – it’s impossible for us to create the same product as we have done on Android and iOS, it’s harder to create some of that – give the same type of experience for users, also including on that on wallpapers and some other things. On top of that, Apple also have policies related to user generated content, et cetera. So, I think with now – with the marketplace and licensed content and new content verticals, we do believe that we can build a product that can grow organically on iOS. Clearly, there is a demand. People are searching for Zedge like people want Zedge, people – you have friends that use Zedge, but it is – it has been hard to build the same product as we have an Android in that ecosystem.

Josh Goltry

Analyst

Got it. Okay guys, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And there appear to be no further questions at this time. This concludes our question-and-answer session and conference call. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.