Q3 2013 Demand Media Earnings Conference Call on November 07
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
THOMSON REUTERS STREETEVENTS EDITED TRANSCRIPT DMD - Q3 2013 Demand Media Earnings Conference Call EVENT DATE/TIME: NOVEMBER 07, 2013 / 10:00PM GMT THOMSON REUTERS STREETEVENTS | www.streetevents.com | Contact Us ©2013 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. 'Thomson Reuters' and the Thomson Reuters logo are registered trademarks of Thomson Reuters and its affiliated companies. NOVEMBER 07, 2013 / 10:00PM, DMD - Q3 2013 Demand Media Earnings Conference Call CORPORATE PARTICIPANTS Julie MacMedan Demand Media, Inc. - VP of IR Shawn Colo Demand Media, Inc. - Co-Founder & Interim CEO Mel Tang Demand Media, Inc. - CFO CONFERENCE CALL PARTICIPANTS Sameet Sinha B. Riley - Analyst Doug Arthur Evercore Partners - Analyst Pete Lowery JMP Securities - Analyst PRESENTATION Operator Good afternoon, my name is Jeremy and I will be your conference operator today. At this time I would like to welcome everyone to the Demand Media third-quarter 2013 results conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks there will be a question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions). Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Ms, Julie MacMedan, Vice President of Investor Relations. Julie MacMedan - Demand Media, Inc. - VP of IR Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. On behalf of Demand Media welcome to our third-quarter 2013 conference call. You can find our related release along with supplemental materials posted on the Investor Relations section of our corporate website located at IR. DemandMedia.com. On the call with me today are Shawn Colo, our Interim Chief Executive Officer, and Mel Tang, our Chief Financial Officer. Following the Safe Harbor statement that I will make Shawn will update you on our business; Mel will then provide details on our third-quarter financial performance and key operating metrics and finish with guidance for the fourth quarter and year ending December 31, 2013. Following the prepared remarks we will open up the lines for Q&A. Before we get started we need to make the following Safe Harbor statement. We would like to remind everyone that during today's conference call management will make certain forward-looking statements which are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations discussed in such forward-looking statements. In particular, comments about our anticipated future revenues, earnings, operating expenses, page views and growth rates as well as statements regarding our business strategy and objectives, plans, intentions, operating outlook and planned investments are considered forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from anticipated results are detailed in our press release furnished to the SEC. I would also like to point out that during this call we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures while talking about the Company's financial and operating performance including revenue ex-TAC, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EPS and certain free cash flow metrics. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparable GAAP measure can be found in the financial tables included at the end of our press release. In addition, unless otherwise noted, all references to traffic-related metrics in our remarks today on based on comScore data. Lastly, before we begin I'd like to remind everyone that today's conference call is being recorded. And that it is also available via webcast on the Internet through 2 THOMSON REUTERS STREETEVENTS | www.streetevents.com | Contact Us ©2013 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. 'Thomson Reuters' and the Thomson Reuters logo are registered trademarks of Thomson Reuters and its affiliated companies. NOVEMBER 07, 2013 / 10:00PM, DMD - Q3 2013 Demand Media Earnings Conference Call the Investor Relations section of our corporate website. A replay will be available on our website. And with that I would now like to turn the call over to Shawn Colo, our Interim CEO. Shawn? Shawn Colo - Demand Media, Inc. - Co-Founder & Interim CEO Thank you, everyone, for joining and welcome to our 2013 third-quarter results call. First let me say thank you to our employees, executive team and Board of Directors for their continued support and steady focus. As a cofounder of the Company and Head of Corporate Development, I've been intimately involved in many aspects of our business for many years. Over the past several weeks in my current role as Interim CEO I've had the opportunity to spend time with employees across the organization and I'm inspired by the dedication and commitment our teams exhibit day in and day out. I'm also very encouraged by the progress we've made towards our strategic initiatives. The long-term success of our Company depends on our ability to build relationships with end-users. It's about leveraging our platforms to allow artists, writers, photographers and experts to express themselves and reach their audiences. It's about consumers and businesses creating their Internet identities with new domain extensions, customized site builders and social tools. It's about people, not page views. When we founded Demand Media we saw the opportunity to build a new kind of media platform that was data-driven and scalable and we succeeded. But our future success will not be based solely on the number of articles we produce; it will also be based on our ability to engage the consumer in new and innovative ways. And we are confident that this will in turn drive a more stable and diversified business. Engaging the consumer will clearly demand more product innovation on our core media websites. Our team is up to the challenge. Just this past week we launched the site redesign of LIVESTRONG.com putting the community back at the forefront. The new homepage highlights a real-time community activity with five new modules [above full]. Further, we introduced new community features with topic specific guides to drive discussions. We've also recently updated our popular MyPlate app with significant enhancements and are planning additional improvements to the desktop experience. Lastly, we've significantly consolidated our article library in order to display only the most unique engaging content. Throughout this process this property has remained number three in the health category in the US and reached more than 21 million unique visitors worldwide in September. These changes are just the beginning of a broader product roadmap designed to offer consumers a best-in-class healthy living destination with informative content, helpful applications and an active community. On eHow our product investments have centered mainly around eHow Now. eHow Now is a live expert service where consumers are able to chat with an expert on demand and in real-time for a one-time or monthly fee. We are currently supporting seven topic categories and we plan to continue to expand the categories offered given the positive reception from our customers. To date we have had over 3 million questions asked and 1.4 million users have trusted us with their email address in order to answer their questions. eHow Nom now is a great example of an organic extension of eHow's content library and audience which allows us to add even more value to the user as well as diversify our business. We also see paid learning as a big opportunity and another natural extension of our core eHow property. We started with the craft category and Creativebug. During the quarter we launched an eHow class channel and we were able to drive a significant number of these visitors over to our Creativebug site. Similar to eHow Now, these efforts are in their early development and will require great execution for us to make them more meaningful financially. In addition to product extensions we continue to see a geographic expansion opportunities. eHow and Español.com, our Spanish language version of eHow, has quietly amassed an audience of 25 million unique visitors per our internal data, up nearly 6X from 4 million last year. We will continue to develop additional sites in other languages as well over the coming quarters. 3 THOMSON REUTERS STREETEVENTS | www.streetevents.com | Contact Us ©2013 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. 'Thomson Reuters' and the Thomson Reuters logo are registered trademarks of Thomson Reuters and its affiliated companies. NOVEMBER 07, 2013 / 10:00PM, DMD - Q3 2013 Demand Media Earnings Conference Call In summary, despite declines in Google referrals, eHow remains a top 25 site in the US and is a tremendous platform to extend additional products and services both domestically and on a global basis. Across all of our sites mobile continues to be a significant growth driver. Demand Media ranked as a top 25 mobile property in the US in September with over 25 million total unique visitors with eHow.com's mobile audience of over 15 million monthly uniques. The size of this audience is a function of the nature of our content as well as investments we are making in our underlying platform. For example, one investment we continue to be excited about is the development of original photography assignments within our studio. We architected our studio in a way that allows us to quickly launch new formats with minimal investment. As the Web increasingly becomes more visual our ability to launch new visual formats such as infographics, find videos and animated gifts is a strategic competitive advantage.