Yahoo Finance Eventbrite, Inc. (NYSE:EB) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
Eventbrite, Inc. (NYSE:EB) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 2, 2024
Eventbrite, Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $-0.05, expectations were $-0.06. Eventbrite, Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Eventbrite's First Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. At this time, all lines are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Instructions will be provided at that time for you to queue up for a question. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Katie Pickett, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Katie Pickett: Good afternoon and welcome to Eventbrite's first quarter 2024 earnings call. My name is Katie Pickett, Investor Relations. With us today are Julia Hartz, our Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer; and Lanny Baker, our Chief Financial Officer. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded and will be available for replay on Eventbrite's Investor Relations website at investor.eventbrite.com. Please also refer to our Investor Relations website to find our shareholder letter announcing our financial results, which was released prior to the call. Before we get started, I would like to remind you that, during today's call, we'll be making forward-looking statements regarding future events and financial performance.
We caution that such statements reflect our best judgment as of today, May 2nd, based on the factors that are currently known to us and that actual future events or results could differ materially, due to several factors, many of which are beyond our control. For a more detailed discussion of the risks and uncertainties affecting our future results, we refer you to the section titled Forward-Looking Statements in our shareholder letter and our filings with the SEC. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made during the call to reflect events or circumstances after today or to reflect new information or the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law. During this call, we'll present adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin, which are non-GAAP financial measures.
These non-GAAP financial measures are not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles and have limitations as an analytical role. You should not consider them in isolation or as a substitute for analysis of our results of operations, as reported under GAAP. A reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure is available in our shareholder letter. We encourage you to read our shareholder letter, which contains important information about GAAP and non-GAAP results. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Julia.
Julia Hartz: Thank you to Katie and welcome everyone to our first quarter call. We've been focused this quarter on executing our strategic transformation toward becoming a consumer marketplace for live events, and I'm pleased to say that, we've made great progress. We strongly believe that adopting our two-sided marketplace strategy enhances the value proposition we offer to our customers and positions us well to deliver sustainable financial returns in the long-term. I want to hit on some of our financial headlines first and then talk about our product road map progress and customer feedback. Lanny will then fill in the rest of our financial performance and talk about the outlook. First, revenue came in toward the higher end of the range at $86.3 million.
Marketplace revenue represented 13% of total revenue, up from just 3% a year ago. Revenue per paid ticket was $4.07, which is up 21% compared to Q1 2023. Operating expenses declined from Q4 into Q1 and adjusted EBITDA margin was 12% for the quarter. Paid ticket volume was $21.2 million, 8% below a year ago, consistent with our expectations. We have since seen improved paid ticket volume comparisons as we start Q2 compared to Q1, led by higher value creators and larger events. Accelerating paid ticket growth is our number one operating priority. We discussed in our last call the softness in paid ticket volume that we observed, as we transitioned to our new two-sided marketplace model, and I want to reiterate them here before I speak to the actions, we've taken to improve the growth trajectory.
The paid ticket headwinds are caused by two main factors. First, we need higher visibility events that bring more consumers into the marketplace. And second, we introduced new pricing and packaging to reflect our enhanced marketing and demand generation capabilities, which had near-term negative impact on acquisition and retention of smaller customers. Here's where we've been focusing to successfully complete this transition cycle and drive greater growth and volume. First, we've increased the size of our sales team and improved productivity within the team using targeted consumer demand data to define our target customers. The aggregate value of new sales driven bookings in Q1 2024 was up more than 80% from Q1 2023. We added approximately 2 million annual tickets in new large event creators during Q1, most of which are already active and on sale in the Eventbrite marketplace today.
These high value events, which include well known, local venues, music and comedy shows, destination events and food and drink festivals, are great distribution drivers, as they draw large audiences of consumers to the marketplace for re-engagement. To maximize our sales investment, we are closely managing sales productivity, deal economics, bookings to sales live velocity and the effectiveness of our marketplace promotional efforts through our own unique marketing strategy and product-led growth capabilities like our creator marketing tools and Eventbrite Ads. Second, on pricing and packaging. Creators have adopted the monthly subscription plan at a faster rate than pay per event pricing, which combined with their direct feedback has given us a strong signal on how we can simplify the choice set and lean more into the subscription pathway by offering free trialing, annual discounts and promotional benefits for things like Eventbrite Ads.
In response to these changes and clear communication around the plans, subscribing creators increased by 40% across the first quarter. Further up the funnel, we're improving our self-sign-on experience to make onboarding easier and friction free. This means a cleaner UX, a more effective product tour and better experiences for logged out users and those on mobile devices. We're reinforcing our commitment to streamlining event publishing and ticket sales, which has always been an advantage of Eventbrite. During the first quarter, we have reduced the time it takes most creators to sign-up for the first time by 45% and increased first-event conversion. In addition to these transitions, we're focusing on creator satisfaction and listening carefully to their feedback.
For instance, we introduced instant payouts and tap to pay in Q1 to give creators faster access to their money and greater convenience to support at the door ticket sales. We also delivered a new creator dashboard that provides the reporting clarity they want. Creators have also asked for greater support and expert guidance and we responded by expanding customer support and account management. These action plans are the primary levers that position us to reaccelerate paid ticket volume, as we move through 2024. But we haven't taken our eye off the longer-term strategy of how we build our marketplace at scale. Our creators tell us their top need is to connect with their community and convert that community into a growing number of event goers.
In the first quarter, we brought 28 million ticket buyers together with 345,000 creators, issuing 66 million tickets across a wide variety of 1.4 million events worldwide. Over $850 million in gross ticket sales was transacted in the Eventbrite Marketplace in the quarter. Approximately half of the tickets sold in our marketplace were driven by Eventbrite, which was a record high for us and one that confirms the strength of our strategy. Eventbrite Ads is a great example of our unique ability to impact and help to drive demand. A record number of creators promoted their events via Eventbrite Ads in the quarter, as we improved ad targeting and performance to deliver a lower cost per click for advertisers. We significantly broadened availability with the launch in 43 new cities worldwide and introduced new incentives to drive creator trials of Eventbrite Ads.
On the consumer side, more event goers are looking to the Eventbrite website and our mobile app to search, shop and find things to do. Average monthly active users across our site and app rose to 85 million in the first quarter, with mobile app users up 15% and mobile purchases up 35% in the quarter. Our consumer app is the stickiest and highest conversion experience and the place most people turn to, to get their tickets. We see an opportunity to use the app to drive loyalty and repeat purchase behavior among our target consumers and we plan to invest here further in 2024. In other product surfaces, we're utilizing generative AI to remove friction in creating an event and enhance copy and imagery to drive greater sell through, when using our marketing tools and demand capabilities.
Through our AI event creation tools, roughly half of new creators have been able to publish their events in a third less time, while generating more ticket sales. In event discovery, we've deployed AI-powered trending tags to identify trending event themes in real-time locally and generate unique editorial event collections, which offers a hyper local approach at scale across top markets and categories. We are encouraged by our progress in executing our marketplace strategy because it effectively responds to creators' event marketing needs, diverses our revenue streams and enhances our unit economics and profit margins. We are working through some natural friction as we execute this transition and we are hyper-focused on re-accelerating paid ticket growth this year.
Thank you for your support and I look forward to updating you as the year progresses. I'll now turn the call over to Lanny for a deeper review of our financial results and our outlook. Lanny?
Lanny Baker: Thank you, Julia. First quarter revenue of $86.3 million was up 11% year-over-year, propelled by strong growth in marketplace revenue including organizer fees and advertising. Revenue from organizer fees which were rolled out broadly in Q3 of last year, totaled $8.5 million in the first quarter of 2024, compared to $6.6 million in the preceding quarter. An increase in pro plan subscribers drove the majority of that quarter-to-quarter revenue growth. Revenue from Eventbrite Ads was $2.5 million in the first quarter, up nearly 3x compared to a year ago, as creator adoption more than doubled and spend per advertiser rose 23% year-to-year. Improvements in relevance and targeting led to a lower cost per click and higher return on ad spending for creators, both on a year-to-year and sequential basis in the first quarter.
In the core ticketing business, paid creators were down 1%, events per creator were stable and average tickets per event was 7% lower year-to-year. This led to the 8% decline in paid tickets in the first quarter. Meanwhile, average ticket price gained 3% year-to-year. Eventbrite's revenue per ticket increased 21% year-to-year to a record $4.07, and our revenue take rate was 10.1%, compared to 8.6% a year ago. As the marketplace strategy capitalizes on demand generation to increase unit economics and monetization, gross margins have shifted higher, reaching a new record of 71% in the first quarter. Gross margins also benefited from steps we've taken to reduce the fixed portions of cost of revenue. Total operating expenses were $68.8 million in the first quarter including a small expense associated with our 2023 restructuring.
We have reduced total OpEx between Q4 of last year and Q1 of this year with reductions in sales and marketing and general and administrative expenses, partially offset by an increase in product development, as we invest in marketplace and consumer. Adjusted EBITDA was $10.4 million in the first quarter, a 12% adjusted EBITDA margin and net income was a loss of $4.5 million for the quarter. Turning to the balance sheet, cash and cash equivalents rose to $580 million at the end of the first quarter, up from $489 million at the start of the quarter. Excluding ticket sale proceeds payable to creators, the Company's available liquidity was $378 million at the end of Q1 compared to $391 million three months earlier. We have repurchased 2.6 million shares or $15 million of our stock during the first quarter.
That's under the $100 million buyback program authorized by our Board in March of this year. Finally, we had $358 million in long-term debt outstanding at the end of Q1. Overall, a solid financial foundation to support our operations and strategy. Finally, we've updated our business outlook. Based on first quarter results and current information, we now anticipate revenue for the full year of 2024 to be within a range of $360 million to $371 million. At the midpoint of the updated and slightly narrower range, our full year outlook equates to 12% revenue growth over 2023. For the second quarter of 2024, we anticipate that, revenue will be within a range of $84 million to $87 million. Paid ticket volume is expected to be down year-to-year in the second quarter, although by a smaller percentage change than in the first quarter of 2024.
For the full year, we expect paid ticket volume to be down slightly to up modestly from 2023. As comparisons become easier, we move beyond the initial marketplace changes and we execute on our product marketing and sales priorities. We plan to continue to manage expenses tightly with a focus on improving paid tickets and executing the marketplace strategy. We anticipate adjusted EBITDA margins in the low-to-mid teens for the full year 2024, which is consistent with the outlook shared earlier this year. In summary, our first quarter financial results were consistent with our expectations and we continue to make significant progress on our two-sided marketplace strategy. We believe, we are stabilizing paid ticket trends and we are listening to creators in order to drive ticket volume improvement, as the year progresses.
We believe that, gains we have made in marketplace revenue, revenue per ticket and the higher take rate have fundamentally strengthened our business model and our balance sheet remains strong. We believe, we are well-positioned to execute the marketplace transition and unlock Eventbrite's full potential in the live experiences’ economy. With that, I'll turn the call back to the operator.
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