Eventbrite - Earnings Call - Q4 2024

Executive Summary

• Q4 2024 revenue was $76.5M, at the upper end of the company’s outlook, with gross margin 68.2% and Adjusted EBITDA $6.5M (9% margin); year-over-year declines reflect the exit of organizer fees and lower paid ticket volume, while sequential trends improved versus Q3.
• Management guided FY 2025 revenue to $295–$310M and Q1 2025 revenue to $71–$74M, with mid-single-digit Adjusted EBITDA margins, citing an approximately $20M revenue headwind from eliminating organizer fees and continued recovery in ticketing trends in H2 2025.
• Eventbrite Ads grew 35% YoY in Q4 and 83% for FY 2024, supporting take-rate and monetization as high-value creators adopt more promotion; creator re-engagement improved after reinstating the free tier (Sep) and timed entry functionality.
• Wall Street consensus estimates from S&P Global were unavailable due to a data access limit; relative to company guidance, Q4 came in at the high end and FY 2024 Adjusted EBITDA margin target (~10%) was exceeded, offering a positive signal into the transition year of 2025.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• Creator acquisition and engagement strengthened following the reintroduction of the free tier; total ticketing volume returned to YoY growth (+2%), with free tickets up 8% YoY and paid ticket trends improving sequentially from Q3 to Q4.
• Eventbrite Ads scaled materially; ads revenue grew 35% YoY in Q4 and 83% for FY 2024, with creators using ads selling 4x more tickets than those who don’t; management emphasized improved targeting and automation plans.
• Cost discipline delivered lower operating expenses (Q4 OpEx $60.0M vs $70.6M LY) as workforce actions flowed through; FY 2024 Adjusted EBITDA margin exceeded the ~10% target.
  • Quote: “We delivered revenue at the upper end of our outlook range and exceeded our Adjusted EBITDA margin target for fiscal year 2024” — Julia Hartz.

What Went Wrong

• Net revenue declined 13% YoY and paid ticket volume fell 10% YoY in Q4; gross margin compressed to 68.2% from 70.1% due to the mix shift away from organizer fee revenue.
• Net loss widened to $8.4M (vs $0.9M LY), with EPS of ($0.09) reflecting lower marketplace contribution and higher chargebacks/fraud remediation costs in S&M versus 2023.
• FY 2025 margin guide to mid-single-digits implies year-over-year compression, driven by loss of high-margin organizer fees and reinstatement of annual incentive compensation.

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Eventbrite Fourth Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode. If you have any questions or comments during the presentation, you may press star one on your phone to enter the question queue at any time, and we will open the floor for your questions and comments after the presentation. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Katie Pickett. Ma'am, the floor is yours.

Katie Pickett (Head of Investor Relations)

Good afternoon and welcome to Eventbrite's Fourth 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 Anand Gandhi, 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, February 27, 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 tool. You should not consider them in isolation or as a substitute for analysis of a result 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. I will now turn the call over to Julia.

Julia Hartz (Co-founder and CEO)

Thank you, Katie. Welcome to our fourth quarter earnings call. Before we dive in, I want to take a moment to welcome Anand to his first earnings call as our CFO. Since joining, Anand has already made a significant impact, bringing deep marketplace expertise and a disciplined approach to financial management. I'm excited to have him as a partner as we continue executing our strategy and driving long-term value. Welcome, Anand. Now, let's get into our fourth quarter and year-end results. The end of 2024 was about stabilization, and we closed out the last quarter strong, delivering $76.5 million in revenue at the upper end of our outlook range and $6.5 million in adjusted EBITDA, enabling us to exceed our 10% margin target for the fiscal year. As a reminder, in September, we made a meaningful change to our pricing model by eliminating organizer-side listing fees.

This allows all creators to publish unlimited events without upfront fees. Since then, we've seen steady improvements in creator acquisition, event volume, and ticket transactions. Total ticketing volume returned to growth, up 2% year-over-year in Q4. As we had anticipated, free ticket volume recovered faster, growing 8% in Q4, which was a 25 percentage point swing from Q3, and paid ticketing trends improved sequentially from Q3 to Q4. Additionally, paid transacting creators and paid event volume improved. That momentum has continued into 2025. Looking at January's year-over-year performance, both paid ticket sales and paid transacting creators improved over the previous month, and ticket sales per creator also continued to strengthen. We're now tracking five consecutive months of improving year-over-year paid ticket trends, adjusting for last year's leap year impact. Another key driver of momentum is Eventbrite Ads, which continues to scale.

Compared to last year, ads revenue grew 35% in Q4 and 83% for the full year, with more creators investing in promotion to expand their audiences. Creators who used ads sold four times more tickets than those who did not, creating a strong cycle where better event discovery leads to more ticket sales and deeper engagement across the platform. With stabilizing ticketing trends, growing creator engagement, and expanding ad monetization, we're confident in our ability to accelerate from here. Now, I want to take a moment to frame how we're thinking about 2025. We are guiding to a lower revenue range than last year, which may stand out at first glance. To be clear, this is purely a function of structural revenue mix changes, not a reflection of weakening fundamentals.

With the pricing changes fully reflected in our 2025 guidance, we expect to exit the year as a stronger, more scalable business in ticketing revenue and marketplace monetization. This is a year of transition, one that we believe will prepare us to scale efficiently and drive stronger growth in 2026 and beyond. Now, we're entering 2025 with momentum, as I mentioned, and that's a direct result of our disciplined execution of a clear strategy. This year, we're sharpening our focus around three things: expanding our consumer reach, deepening creator engagement, and strengthening marketplace monetization. For consumers, we're rolling out a redesigned Eventbrite app, making event discovery more immersive with video, social-driven recommendations, and enhanced tools for creators to showcase their events. We're also launching ItLists, curated event recommendations from cultural tastemakers and brands, to make finding great events easier than ever.

We are also refreshing our brand to better connect with the next generation of Eventbrite users and drive greater awareness, engagement, and retention. For creators, we are doubling down on those who drive the majority of ticket volume. High-volume creators accounted for nearly 60% of paid tickets in 2024, and we are investing in retention programs, expanding segments like timed entry, rolling out Stripe point of sale at scale, and deepening relationships with high-value creators who drive consumers to the marketplace. Take the Detroit Auto Show, for example. They recently returned to the platform and opted into our early access release of the integrated Stripe point of sale solution. They sold over 100,000 paid tickets to their event, with a third of those sales processed in person at the event using this new extension of our platform with ease. They were thrilled.

This is exactly the type of customer we want to serve: high-volume event creators who rely on Eventbrite to power their growth. We're continuing to invest in this segment by offering powerful new solutions centered around efficiency and reach, such as improving tools for audience segmentation, social integrations, and data and insights to connect creators with their audiences. We're also driving marketplace monetization through the continued expansion of Eventbrite Ads by increasing adoption among high-volume creators who already see strong ROI and ticket sales when leveraging promoted listings. We plan to enhance targeting and automation to increase advertisers' efficiency and add new placement opportunities across the consumer journey to better connect consumers with the events they love. While our revenue outlook reflects a shift in mix, it does not reflect a weakening of the business.

In fact, we're running a leaner, more efficient, and more scalable company than we were a year ago. With five months of improving ticketing trends, growing adoption of Eventbrite Ads, and a leaner operating structure, we are executing against our plan for a stronger, more scalable business. Now, I'll hand it over to Anand to walk you through our financials and provide more detail on how we're pacing towards these goals. Anand?

Anand Gandhi (CFO)

Thanks, Julia. It's a pleasure to be here with you today. I've just completed my third month here at Eventbrite, and I'm excited about the opportunity ahead. I believe we have the brand, the product, the strategy, and the team to realize our vision of transforming Eventbrite into a vibrant, two-sided marketplace. I'm looking forward to leveraging my background in scaling digital marketplaces to position Eventbrite as the go-to marketplace for live experiences. At this time, my top priority is returning Eventbrite to paid ticket volume growth while continuing to operate the business with financial discipline. I believe we're on our way. The decisive elimination of organizer fees, combined with strong execution, are positioning us to deliver our fifth consecutive month of year-over-year improvement in paid ticket trends. Now, I'm going to walk you through the numbers and what we're seeing in the business.

Note that in the following commentary, the comparisons I reference are all year-to-year versus 2023, unless I specify otherwise. Let's first start with revenue and tickets. We reported Q4 revenue of $76.5 million, which was down 13% and was at the upper end of our outlook range. Ticketing revenue declined 10% to $70.4 million, primarily driven by paid ticket volume, which continues to recover from the impacts of the organizer fees introduced in late 2023. marketplace revenue declined 35% to $6 million. This decline was expected as a result of the loss of organizer fees, which was partially offset by the strength in Eventbrite Ads, which was up 35%, reflecting strong continued adoption by Eventbrite creators. As Julia and I have mentioned, we've seen improved business trends since we eliminated organizer fees in September. Let's walk through some of those specifics now.

First, total ticketing volume was $72 million in Q4, which represents a return to growth as we had expected and was up 2%. This was driven by a strong rebound in free tickets, which was up 8% to $50 million. This represents a 25 percentage point sequential improvement from the 17% year-over-year decline we reported in Q3. Paid ticket volume totaled $21.6 million in Q4, also a 10% decline. Importantly, this represents an improvement in the year-over-year trends from Q3, which was down 14%. Transacting paid creators totaled 166,000 in Q4, a decline of 9%, which was also an improvement in year-over-year trends from Q3, which was down 12%. Now, let's turn to gross profit. In Q4, gross profit was $52 million, down 15%. This reflects a gross margin of 68.2% versus 70.1% a year ago.

This margin decline reflects the Q4 mix shift away from organizer fee revenue, partially offset by the continued growth in Eventbrite Ads. Now, looking to expenses. Total operating expenses were $60 million in Q4, compared to $71 million a year ago. This decrease was largely driven by lower personnel costs due to the workforce reduction in Q3, as well as due to the absence of the annual performance bonus for the year 2024. Note that we have budgeted an annual performance bonus in 2025. Now, breaking out OpEx, product development expenses were $20 million in Q4, down 21% from $25 million, driven primarily by lower personnel costs. Sales, marketing, and support expenses were $23 million in Q4, which was an increase of 10% from $21 million. This increase was driven primarily by increased chargebacks and fraud remediation expenses, partially offset by a decrease in marketing personnel costs and other expenses.

General and administrative expenses were $17 million in Q4, down 31% from $25 million a year ago, driven primarily by lower personnel costs and by lower costs for third-party professional services. Now, we'll move to net loss and adjusted EBITDA. Q4 net loss was $8.4 million, compared to a net loss of $900,000 in the same period a year ago. Adjusted EBITDA in Q4 was $6.5 million, compared to $8.8 million in the prior year. For full year 2024, reported adjusted EBITDA was $35.1 million, which included a net impact of $1.2 million in workforce reduction costs, partially offset by legal settlement benefits. For 2023, full year reported adjusted EBITDA, that was $28.7 million, which included restructuring and other costs totaling $10.1 million. Now, turning to the balance sheet.

Cash, cash equivalents, and restricted cash totaled $465 million at the end of Q4, down from $531 million at the end of Q3. Excluding ticket sale proceeds payable to creators, the company's available liquidity at the end of Q4 was $230 million, compared to $237 million as of the end of Q3, reflecting $3 million shares repurchased during Q4. Total debt at the end of Q4 was $241 million. Managing our maturities of our debt is a key priority in the year ahead, and we've made significant progress in Q3 with the repurchase of $120 million of our 2025 notes. Now, turning to our outlook for the year ahead. First, looking at Q1. Based on current information, we anticipate net revenue for the first quarter of 2025 to be within a range of $71-$74 million, with adjusted EBITDA margin in the mid-single-digit % range, excluding non-routine items.

Looking at the full year, I'm going to walk you through how we are thinking about the model. It's important to keep in mind that 2025 will be a year of transition, as we fully lap the multiple impacts of the introduction and then the elimination of organizer fees. Going forward, ticketing and ads will essentially comprise Eventbrite's revenue. We expect to see continued recovery in ticketing trends, with paid ticket volume returning to growth in the second half of the year. Also, we anticipate Eventbrite Ads to continue to deliver growth throughout the year. Looking at our deprecated revenue stream, organizer fees, on a full year basis for 2025, we expect the elimination of this revenue stream to result in an approximately $20 million revenue headwind compared to 2024.

As a result of these impacts, including the continued recovery in ticketing revenue and the elimination of organizer fees, we expect full year net revenue to be within a range of $295 million-$310 million. We expect an adjusted EBITDA margin percentage in the mid-single digits for the year, excluding non-routine items. This decline in year-over-year margin is primarily driven by the loss of high-margin organizer fee revenue. Now, to recap, and as Julia highlighted, 2025 is a year of transition. We believe that the progress we make and the financial discipline we maintain throughout the year will enable us to scale efficiently and provide us a strong foundation for long-term growth. Now, I'll turn it back to the operator.

Operator (participant)

Certainly. Everyone at this time will be conducting a question and answer session. If you have any questions or comments, please press star one on your phone at this time. We do ask that while posing your question, please pick up your handset if you're listening on speakerphone to provide optimum sound quality. Once again, if you have any questions or comments, please press star one on your phone. Your first question is coming from Naved Khan from B. Riley. Your line is live.

Naved Khan (Managing Director)

Great. Thanks a lot. Two questions. One, maybe just talk a little bit about the TikTok partnership. Last time, you guys gave an update there. It seems like you're getting pretty good volume, but not a lot of conversion. Has there been any improvement in the conversion side of things? The other question I have is just around the annual outlook, Anand. You guided to mid-single digit kind of EBITDA margin. If I look at the top line outlook for the year, adjusted for the $20 million impact from the discontinued offering, it kind of compares to where you were in 2023. Back in 2023, you had close to, I want to say, 9% EBITDA margin. Why mid-single digit? Why not in the high single-digit sort of margin range?

Julia Hartz (Co-founder and CEO)

Thanks, Naved. Our partnership with TikTok continues to be an important channel for driving event discovery and ticket sales, especially when you consider the strong engagement from younger audiences who are actively discovering and purchasing tickets to events directly through the TikTok integration. Overall, we will prioritize our distribution channels and integrations with places where people are convening communities, so where creators are organizing people around their niche interests, and also where commerce is actively happening through contextual discovery. With our partnership, we are focused on expanding discovery. Obviously, TikTok helps our creators reach new audiences organically, especially in the categories that we are prioritizing: music, nightlife, and cultural experiences. We are working with them to put the native ticket integration into places like search, where you can more efficiently drive viewers and impressions to conversion. Still working on the conversion side.

Happy with the native integration. Still think that we can make the ticketing more seamless. We are working with their product team to cut down the number of clicks it takes to actually get that ticket. From a risk perspective, we certainly saw some slowdown in their product partnership throughout the last maybe 60 days. We believe that we have successfully diversified across multiple social discovery channels, including Google, Bands in Town, Facebook, Instagram, so that TikTok is, while it's a very important growth lever, it's one of many. We are balancing our focus and our investment to be prudent and also to just follow the creator where they are and whatever they're doing to put the right event in front of the right consumer at the right time. They are now inactive, again, very active in building with us.

Anand, do you want to take the margin question?

Anand Gandhi (CFO)

Yeah. Hi there. As we're looking at 2023 versus 2025, I believe, and the guide for 2025, 2023 did have $325 million of revenue. And about 9% EBITDA margin. A big factor there is really where we're guiding on revenue for 2025. Since we are taking account the $20 million reduction in organizer fees, and that itself comprises, say, 600 basis points of margin compression, that's a big piece in particular. One other big piece, there are some other puts and takes, for example, in terms of incentive bonus compensation. We did not pay that in 2024, but we are budgeted for that in 2025. That itself would be another 500 basis points of margin compression.

Those together, plus if you just take into account a little bit of just scale and deleverage from ticketing revenue, which, as we say, we're returning growth in H2, which implies there will be some year-over-year decline in ticketing revenue this year, all those pieces compress the margin. Now we are guiding to mid-single digit EBITDA margin despite the margin pressure that adds to over 1,000 basis points. That is reflecting the financial discipline and cost controls that are a big priority for this year. Part of that is we did do a reduction in force in August. We did see half of that benefit, though, last year.

The rest of it is really tied to how we're managing the business day-to-day and how we are very conscious of adding costs or only tied to revenue growth or controlling costs, reducing costs to make sure they're at an appropriate level relative to revenue. In our view, with those big movements and those big headwinds on margin, we could have been, from those two pieces, just significantly worse year-over-year in margin comparison. That's why we're guiding to mid-single digits this year. Again, these are dynamics that we feel are really part of this transition year. We're not going to be going through the situation of a $20 million decline in organizer fee revenue that is the highest margin revenue, right? That is a one-time kind of piece that we're lapping. By the end of 2025, we will have fully lapped that.

To start 2026 without that pressure. Plus, we will not have an issue, hopefully, of having a bumpy situation in terms of annual performance comp, right? You have those two pieces. Plus, if you take into account the fact that where our cost structure is today and the fact that we do believe that we have very healthy staffing levels, as we scale and as we end this year in growth, so end this year in growth, both ticket revenue growth and starting to back half the year, plus the sustained growth in ads, those are really the ongoing piece of the business. If you kind of try to set aside the deprecated piece that's basically gone away, that's the past.

If you look at ticketing and ads and how those are set up to grow when we exit 2025, you have 2026 trajectory of growth with a lower cost base that we believe can contribute significant operating leverage because it does not need to scale to drive incremental revenue. You are setting yourself up for margin expansion, clear margin expansion as you see revenue scale. That model we plan, that is part of the model that makes us believe that long-term, this business has very high EBITDA margin potential because of the ability that we have to scale with operating leverage and the fact that we are not relying on external things like very expensive acquisition marketing and things like that to pay for growth. Altogether, we believe it sets us up for a good, strong long-term margin profile despite this year of transition.

Naved Khan (Managing Director)

Thank you for the clear. Thank you, Julia. Thank you, Anand.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Your next question is coming from Cameron Mansson-Perrone from Morgan Stanley. Your line is live.

Cameron Mansson-Perrone (Lead Analyst)

Thank you. Anand, welcome to the earnings calls. I do have one question for you, but I'm going to start with Julia. Julia, a great recovery in free tickets in 4Q, but I was wondering if you could help us think about how free ticket activity ultimately translates into revenue growth for the business. Is it important just in terms of growing kind of consumer brand and adoption over the longer term, or is there a successful track record of kind of free creators or organizers developing into paid organizers in a way that we should view the free ticketing growth as kind of more of a leading indicator for paid ticket volume to some extent? Any insight there would be helpful. Second, on winning back creators in general, historically, you guys have talked about the importance of frequent creators.

I was wondering if you could unpack a little bit what you saw with organizer fees and creators leaving the platform, and more importantly, what you've been seeing in winning back creators, specifically with regard to frequent creators. Thanks.

Julia Hartz (Co-founder and CEO)

Sure. Cameron, thanks so much for the question. We're driving ticket volume recovery through a multifaceted approach focused really on creator retention, consumer engagement, and marketplace monetization. As you brought up, free is a big part and the first step of that recovery since we reintroduced the free tier. That's helped us win back creators and increase event supply, which increases our consumer engagement. Things that I can point to there are Eventbrite discovery tickets being up 10% year-over-year is a healthy sign of us being able to match supply and demand no matter whether or not it's a paid or free event. That 25-point swing on free tickets is, to us, a very clear leading indicator that paid ticket volume will follow. It does have to do with the virtuous cycle and the word of mouth of Eventbrite as well as our brand expansion.

What gives us confidence in the consistent month-over-month improvement in paid ticket trends are those two factors: free ticket volume as well as the discovery-driven ticket sales, but also the fact that we're seeing paid transacting creators sequentially improve, and we're really seeing win-back accelerate. When we think about how we take these signals and make the marketplace recover as quickly as possible, we're really focused on making sure that we improve event discovery and demand generation through things like the launch of our new consumer app experience, which enhances personalized recommendations and simplifies ticket purchasing, and expanding Eventbrite Ads, which has proven to drive higher ticket sales per event. Those who use ads sell four times more tickets than those who don't in our marketplace. We're impatient, as I'm sure you are as well.

The first thing we had to do to recover is really to remove the friction from our pricing changes, rebuild creator retention and event supply, which is already improving, and scale consumer engagement through our product and marketing efforts. We know that will increase not just total ticket volume, but importantly, paid ticket volume. We really expect this flywheel to fully regenerate by the second half of 2025 and lead to sustainable ticket volume expansion in 2026. We have seen this over five consecutive months of improvement. There is proof in the pudding, so to speak.

Cameron Mansson-Perrone (Lead Analyst)

Got it. Any comment on what you're seeing with frequent creators?

Julia Hartz (Co-founder and CEO)

Yeah. Sorry about that. Frequent creators are returning to the platform in line with large creators. I would be remiss not to point out that we've launched a core product feature focused on frequent creators, which is the ability to host timed entry events. We've been happy with the progress thus far. We launched in the U.S., and we now are expanding to Canada and will expand to Australia and the U.K. within the year. With that brings a couple of key benefits to us. One is the content. For example, we just went on sale with the Smurfs exhibition in San Francisco, and RuPaul's Drag Con is coming back to the marketplace. These are the types of events that our consumers want to buy tickets to and that drive traffic to Eventbrite. First and foremost, the high-quality commercial content that comes with timed entry.

The second thing is that we launched with timed entry the ability to consolidate the payout for the creator. That's a bit technical, but it's a big change to our product and to the end-to-end creator experience. Instead of getting a payout on whatever schedule they've chosen for every event, they're getting one account-level payout, which just eases up their bookkeeping capacity and time. It just makes it super easy for them to use Eventbrite as their operating system. Actually, there's a third, which is frequent creators, and especially timed entry experiences, are ripe for Eventbrite Ads and driving the value in that evergreen content to use Eventbrite as a promotional channel. We're seeing some really healthy adoption from frequent creators of our Eventbrite Ads product.

Cameron Mansson-Perrone (Lead Analyst)

Got it. That's helpful. Anand, sorry, one for you as well. When we look at the $200 million-plus of available liquidity you're ending the year here with, I know you mentioned near-term maturities being a focus this year, but I was wondering if you could comment big picture on how we should think about capital allocation evolving. Should we expect you still have $50 million left, I think, on the authorization? Should we expect you to be less active from a share repurchase perspective as a byproduct of focusing more on debt maturities, or will it be balanced? Any color on kind of how you're weighing those two uses of capital would be helpful.

Anand Gandhi (CFO)

Hey, Cameron. Thanks for the question. For the year ahead, we're going to take a balanced approach to capital allocation, specifically with two priorities: managing our debt maturities and executing the share buyback program. As you know, we repurchased $50 million of shares, $10 million of which in Q4. We're authorized for an additional $50 million. Obviously, we feel our shares are priced quite attractively. Over time, we do expect to complete these repurchases. Looking at the near term, we're mindful of managing our maturities, and we've made significant progress with the December 2025s, repurchasing $120 million of that, just $30 million left. We're mindful of September 2026 maturities, and we have multiple options available there. We have a healthy balance sheet, strong cash position, a lot of options available for the 2026s. We're just going to balance all of that.

I think, yeah, for long-term, shares are attractively priced. Obviously, completing that authorization is quite appealing. In the near term, though, we're going to pay attention to these maturities. We're still well ahead for the 2026s, but we like the idea of kind of taking a look, start kicking the tires earlier than we need to there.

Cameron Mansson-Perrone (Lead Analyst)

Understood. Thank you both.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Your next question is coming from Dae Lee from JPMorgan. Your line is live.

Dae Lee (Equity Research and VP)

Great. Thanks for taking my questions. I have two. The first one, in your letter, you showed the marketplace flywheel with real loyalty on the consumer side. I was curious to hear your thoughts on what loyalty means for Eventbrite and how you plan on building the loyalty given that you've historically been a more supplier or creator-focused platform. Secondly, Anand, given your transition from a full-fledged marketplace platform to Eventbrite that is relatively early in the transformation, curious to hear what surprised you the most when you first joined Eventbrite, and where do you see the opportunity to drive bigger changes?

Julia Hartz (Co-founder and CEO)

Thanks, Dae. Consumer loyalty and engagement is obviously a critical driver for our marketplace flywheel. When we think about the most engaged and loyal consumers, we think of our monthly active app users. We've grown app users, I think, in Q4 up 17%. We're continuing to build that engaged audience and community of buyers. Why that matters is because once somebody has the Eventbrite app on their phone, typically they're downloading it to get their ticket for an event, they're actually logging about two and a half times more sessions and orders than someone who's just using Eventbrite on the web. While we want to convert all of our consumers into app users, we're really focusing our consumer loyalty and engagement efforts on the app user to make the highest impact yielding investments with the most efficiency.

What we want to do is drive higher repeat attendance, fueling event demand. We want almost half of the attendees on Eventbrite are buying tickets to multi-category events. They are not just going to music events in New York. They really come to Eventbrite because we have that breadth of opportunity in our marketplace. We want to connect the dots for them faster. We also want to really be able to incentivize them and reward them and recognize them for sharing their event profile and their event graph, as it were, through the app and really helping their community discover great events.

One of the ways that we're leaning into curated content to drive consumer discovery is we're launching a new section of the app called ItLists, which is really leveraging local niche interest influencers to create discovery lists and recommendations for consumers for particular events that are related to their interests. We see this functionality as something being one that we could open up to all users of the app to create their own micro-lists of events that they recommend. That's just an example of what we're thinking about as we engage consumers and really build loyalty through our work on the consumer app.

Anand Gandhi (CFO)

I'll jump in. Thanks for the question, Dae. One thing I'll also add just to piggyback on Julia's answer, just based on my experience with marketplaces, everything we're seeing about building loyalty on both sides of the marketplace, specifically repeat behavior retention, as you know, for marketplaces is really gold. That's really the big drivers of the flywheel. It is really gratifying, it's really encouraging to see already we're seeing better retention from creators, paid creators, just since we eliminated organizer fees. Also, we're seeing already higher MAUs. We're seeing all those green shoots that are logical for building a strong, vibrant marketplace that has the flywheel in effect. All those trends are there in the right direction. That's a good tie into your question about my background coming from marketplaces and what I've seen here, potentially been surprised about here.

For me, actually, the opportunity to join Eventbrite and help accelerate the marketplace transition was the most compelling and exciting aspect here. It was immediately clear to me that Eventbrite does have a really compelling opportunity to become an even much bigger two-sided marketplace than it is today. Eventbrite, first of all, is close to two decades of cultivating deep relationships on both sides with the supply creators and the consumers on the demand side. As a snapshot, there are some stats that I think really emphasize that. Just since 2012, for instance, over two million creators have sold tickets on Eventbrite. They have then had over 35 million events. They have sold over 375 million tickets. Sorry, over 375 million consumers have bought tickets on the platform, and over two billion tickets have been sold.

That depth of history, that broad reach, and really what's built such a ubiquitous brand is itself such an important foundation for a compelling two-sided marketplace. That is an advantage that I would say most companies striving to be powerful marketplaces, except for the really big ones that are in existence today, those are numbers that anyone would be proud to be able to cite in their lifetime, right? Just for reference points, I have seen companies need to spend a lot of money to build powerful, large-scale marketplaces, but needing to do so in a very expensive way because they don't have that reach and they don't have that history. That sets up a company that you have to question whether you're buying your growth. That's not a situation, fortunately, that we have to worry about.

Obviously, there's already all those opportunities to grow more and tap into different marketing channels, but the fact is this reach and this brand awareness is really powerful. Second, the company is in a leadership position in a large and growing market. Being the clear established leader in the space for mid-market events with the strongest product, the best tools for creators, that also sets us up well to continue to power this flywheel. Part of the flywheel, going back to the consumer side, is the fact that we have all this organic traffic again. You have all this organic traffic from the consumer side. You have this loyalty built of over two million creators who have sold tickets on Eventbrite. We have all this awareness that's also helping with acquisition.

You think about the fact that we have cohorts built in both on the creator side and consumer side. As we continue to prove acquisition for both sides and retention of both sides, it leads to a really compelling story of cohorts that stack over time and help contribute to scale and operating leverage. I guess the thing in terms of what I was surprised about coming here is really that the company, with the current resourcing and with the current scale today, has such strong foundations in place to capitalize on this transformation to its two-sided marketplace. What I've seen in the past is usually in the past, I've seen often companies that are really starting much more from the ground up, much more where each kind of element in the marketplace is really struggling to gain traction.

Operator (participant)

The fact that that is not the case at Eventbrite is a tremendous advantage. Yeah, it's really exciting. All this to say, really excited and really passionate about the opportunity ahead of us.

Dae Lee (Equity Research and VP)

Great. Thank you for the detailed response.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Your next question is coming from Hamed Khorsand from BWS Financial. Your line is live.

Hamed Khorsand (Research Analyst)

Hi. My first question was just, given your change in business model and all the restructurings you have taken in the past with the headcount reductions, do you need to grow headcount here? Are you efficient? Is there anywhere you need to spend more, or do you have the business intact to just lever up from here?

Anand Gandhi (CFO)

Hey, Hamad. Thanks for the question. It's actually a great question because we spent a lot of time thinking about our cost structure and really how to execute well financial discipline. What we've done and what we've seen as we've dug into the numbers is we feel really good about where our staffing is today. What we've done is really tapped into how to reallocate resources and focus on having the strongest talents and keeping them here and allocating them to the areas that are most important to us. For us, growth is not dependent on growing the teams. Growth is undependent on having the right talent and allocating those resources appropriately. That's what we're spending a lot of time on. That also is another belief why we have the opportunity to benefit tremendously from operating leverage.

Again, as we scale, the real building blocks to build a high-margin business.

Hamed Khorsand (Research Analyst)

My other question was going to be just from the standpoint of what are you putting behind as far as getting those high-volume creators back, especially with your competitors trying to lock them down? Do you have to spend more? Do you have to offer a lot more money? What do you have to do to get those creators back?

Julia Hartz (Co-founder and CEO)

Thanks, Hamad. I'll take that one. Since reintroducing the free tier in September, we've seen stronger reengagement with creators, definitely confirming that our pricing reset is working. We're not just seeing creators return. We're seeing them actively reengage and sell more tickets because since they've been gone, we've created even better and more effective marketing tools such as premium email marketing, paid social advertising, and of course, Eventbrite Ads or promoted listings. On the sales-driven front, we're seeing success across the music category, which is a key driver of repeat ticketing and consumer engagement. It is also the most competitive space. Many creators in this space have reactivated their event ticketing on Eventbrite while using, again, coming because we start the conversation, we reengage them.

We're taking a very targeted and aggressive approach to make sure that they understand where we have improved not only our platform and tooling, but also our service. I think we've really honed a much more efficient, but focused and successful account management strategy for our high-value customers. Take Elsewhere, for example. It's one of New York's most prominent independent music venues. We partnered with them when they opened their doors, and they left Eventbrite's platform during COVID about three years ago. After being with a competitor, they returned to Eventbrite, and they cited our audience reach.

Undeniably, the fact that being on Eventbrite in the marketplace drives more tickets for them on any given night, our discovery capabilities, how they can use Eventbrite to amplify their show schedule, and the marketplace strength, again, connecting the right consumer with their right show at the right time, and how stable and consistently reliant our platform is. They draw nearly 300,000 attendees per year, and they're a lighthouse for nightlife on the East Coast. I think we've seen some really positive things through sales. Year-over-year bookings are up strong again in music and nightlife and food and drink. We're seeing the team really start to reengage again, very specific customers that have left the platform that we want back on the platform.

What I would say is that it's about knowing the right customers that are going to drive consumer engagement and activity in the marketplace, and then really convincing them by showing them that we can drive more demand for them now than we could ever before, and really showing them the value of Eventbrite's product as it continues to get better and better. I would say it's going to be an uphill climb, as is with any competitive environment, but I'd bet on Eventbrite all day long. We have the momentum. We have the reliability in the brand. We have the breadth, and we have the power to really help people expand their businesses.

Hamed Khorsand (Research Analyst)

Great. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. That completes our Q&A session. Everyone, this concludes today's event. You may disconnect at this time and have a wonderful day. Thank you for your participation.