Vimeo - Earnings Call - Q2 2025

Executive Summary

• Q2 2025 revenue was $104.65M, flat year over year (+0.3%), with diluted EPS of $0.04; gross margin held at 78% and Adjusted EBITDA reached $10.9M, up sequentially from $4.8M in Q1.
• Vimeo raised FY25 Adjusted EBITDA guidance to approximately $35M from $25–$30M, maintained low-single-digit full-year revenue growth and ~$6M operating income; Q3 guidance calls for revenue ~$106M, operating income ~$2M, and Adjusted EBITDA ~$9M.
• Segment dynamics: Vimeo Enterprise revenue grew 25% YoY to $25.0M, while Self-Serve revenue declined 1% YoY but delivered 11% YoY bookings growth; Add-Ons were -20% YoY and OTT -3% YoY.
• Key catalyst: Raised FY25 EBITDA guidance alongside accelerating Self-Serve bookings and continued Enterprise strength; management reiterated line of sight to double-digit growth aspirations, supported by AI-driven product velocity.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• Enterprise revenue rose 25% YoY, with bookings +9%, subscribers +10%, ARPU +12%; notable new wins included Jaguar Land Rover, Spotify, and FanDuel.
• Self-Serve bookings increased 11% YoY—the highest rate in 14 quarters—driven by price increases, stable renewals, and ARPU +11%; management: “retention rates…continue to be strong” under new pricing/packaging.
• Sequential profit improvement: net income $6.3M, Adjusted EBITDA $10.9M, cash from operations $19.4M, free cash flow $17.8M; stock-based compensation fell 39% YoY to $5.1M.

What Went Wrong

• Revenue slightly missed consensus ($104.65M vs $105.76M); EPS of $0.04 materially beat a -$0.01 consensus, but year-over-year net earnings declined from $10.1M to $6.3M as growth investments weighed on profitability.
• Enterprise bookings growth (9%) was impacted by churn of a large bandwidth-heavy customer that had under-adopted broader Enterprise features; management outlined retention and expansion process improvements.
• Add-Ons revenue dropped 20% YoY amid commoditization of bandwidth; management expects future “consumables” (e.g., AI credits) to offset over time.

Transcript

Speaker 3

Hello, and thank you for joining Vimeo's Q2 2025 earnings live Q&A. Before we begin, a few comments: First, this session will be recorded and available on the Vimeo Investor Relations site later today. Second, we will discuss Vimeo's outlook and future performance. These forward-looking statements typically may be preceded by words such as "We expect," "We believe," "We anticipate," or other such statements. These forward-looking views are subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results could differ materially from the views expressed today. Please refer to the earnings release we furnished to the SEC on Form 8-K earlier today, which is posted on our website, for additional information regarding those risks and uncertainties. We've also provided information regarding certain key metrics and our non-GAAP financial measures, including certain forward-looking measures.

These should be considered in addition to, and not as a substitute for, or in isolation from, GAAP measures. Additional information regarding Vimeo's financial performance, including reconciliations with comparable GAAP measures, can be found in our shareholder letter and Vimeo's filings with the SEC, as well as in supplemental information posted on the Investor Relations section of our website. With that, I'll hand it over to our CEO, Philip Moyer. Philip?

Speaker 2

Good afternoon. Thank you for joining Vimeo's Q2 2025 live earnings call. Vimeo had a strong Q2 2025, with bookings growing 6% year-over-year, the strongest growth since 2022. Self-serve grew bookings by an impressive 11%, reaching levels last seen in 2021. This success is attributed to the recent changes in packaging and pricing, but also early positive signals from all the new product improvements that we've been making. Vimeo Enterprise grew revenue by 25% and saw its second highest booking level on a dollar basis. Despite falling slightly short of our bookings growth goals, the fundamentals are strong, and we are winning competitive deals by helping major brands consolidate their video technology and seeing traction across all of our AI offerings. We believe we will re-accelerate growth in this product's bookings in the second half. Our business is doing well.

We continue to hope to end the year with a line of sight to double-digit growth. Moreover, our improved efficiency has enabled us to raise our 2025 adjusted EBITDA guidance to approximately $35 million, up from our previous range of $25 million to $30 million. Thank you again, and with that, we will take your questions.

Speaker 3

Alright, first we're going to go ahead and remind all of our analysts to please turn on your cameras and your audio. First, we'll talk to Youssef Squali.

Speaker 1

Excellent. Hi, guys. Nice to see you. Maybe, Philip, can you talk a little bit about the self-serve piece of the business? It seems like the upside came mostly through the pricing change that you discussed. Maybe talk about the underlying elements of what's driving subscriber decline still. When you talk about having line of sight to double-digit growth by the end of the year, what's kind of baked in in terms of subscriber growth for the self-serve business in particular? Do we get to a point where maybe we flatten the growth, or is that something most likely for 2026?

Speaker 2

Look, I am super thrilled with the self-serve leadership that we have. I think earlier this year I talked about the fact that we put in place a single-threaded leader, and that single-threaded leader and that team are really doing some tremendous work. The pricing and packaging work was important, not just from an increase in price perspective, but also from customer retention. The retention rates in that business continue to be strong even as we roll out new pricing and packaging across the entire customer base. First and foremost, retention is absolutely essential to establishing a floor in that business to be able to grow from. The second thing is that we've been releasing a lot of really important features, capabilities that some of our customers have been asking for for years.

Some of the things that you saw in the lead-in video, the way that we actually, the watch page for videos, people come to Vimeo for inspiration. A lot of marketers do, a lot of creators do. Reinvigorating our brand as it relates to watch and it relates to that entire creator community is absolutely essential in the business. Simple things like re-releasing the Apple application that we did this past quarter are again starting to delight our customers even more. We just started rolling out AI features. I think I mentioned this on the last call. We had just started that with our self-serve customer base, and we're seeing really strong activity in the use of our AI features.

When I combine together all the innovations that we're doing, the solid retention, satisfying customers more with the right pricing and the right packaging, I actually do continue to believe that that business can be a growth business over a longer period of time than just from the enhancements that we're seeing in the pricing and packaging.

Speaker 4

Youssef, I want to add to that a little bit. You asked a little bit about the subscriber growth. I think likely mathematically that is into 2026. As we've talked about before, pricing gives us a lot of room in that business if we look at the next several quarters. In fact, actually in Q3, we are already seeing really nice trends in the self-serve business. One of the things we've talked to a lot of you about is as we try to get back to growth and move the company back solidly into revenue growth, one of the fastest paths back to that is through self-serve. Right now, as we look at it, we've always just thought, let's get self-serve back to growth, right? Let's start there. Actually, given what we're seeing, we believe that with good execution, this could be a double-digit grower.

When you think about the math to get Vimeo itself back, that is really exciting to us. Of course, lots of execution to do, but the self-serve business is really, really, we're really very enthusiastic there in terms of the business.

Speaker 1

Thank you. Just very quickly on the enterprise and the slowdown in bookings, I think it was related, you said, in the release to a particular customer. Can you maybe just drill a little deeper into that and what gives you confidence for the re-acceleration in the second half?

Speaker 4

Yeah, let me start and then Philip can fill in some more about where we're going with the product roadmap. The customer we mentioned is kind of an interesting example for us and very much speaks to the strategy at Vimeo right now. That customer happens to be an international customer that was very central bandwidth, a bandwidth user in a lot of ways. They had a Vimeo Enterprise account, but a lot of what they were buying us for was bandwidth. As you can see in our add-ons business, that bandwidth business has gotten a little bit more commoditized. You've seen that business come down in the last while for us. This customer really never adopted our other features as well as we would have hoped. When that happens, we have retention challenges. We know that and we are working on that.

That is why we're so focused on a product roadmap that includes more than that. For us internally, I think it's a good lesson to remind us that we have to continually work to get our customers up and running on our other features. This one obviously is unfortunate, but I think for us, it's a really good reminder of where we're going. It also, in our mind, makes us very excited about the product roadmap ahead. I think I'll have Philip focus in on some of the things we're bringing for enterprises that we just think are going to help avoid that kind of a situation going forward.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I would say a couple of things. When you're growing a $100 million enterprise business, as you push through that $100 million, it is always a little bit of, it can be a bit rocky in making sure that you have all engines firing on all cylinders. There are three things that I think about when you really want to scale a $100 million enterprise business. You've got to do a fantastic job with new and winning against your competitors. You do that by innovating, first and foremost, and really providing better service and a better product than your competitors. This quarter, I talked about the fact that we're very happy with the number of competitive wins that we have. We're seeing even more customers start to consolidate their video platforms into us. We are being very aggressive in the market, very, very aggressive in going after competitive deals.

We're excited about how we're winning those deals, and we believe that we're making a lot of customers that will be with us a long time. The second thing we've got to do is retain customers. We're spending a lot of time in retooling some of our customer service department and how we support customers and doing a better job to be able to identify customers like this larger one that might have a retention risk and proactively go and approach them with different offerings. The third thing that we've got to do a really good job of is expanding those customer relationships. We made a lot of changes to start to invest in customer relationships this past year and in the past six months. We've brought in a lot of new leadership that focuses on expansion.

The things that I see inside of this business, and I spend a lot of time talking to customers, is we've got customers that are excited about our products. We're winning with the innovations that we're bringing to markets, and we see a path to expand customers. We're about to start rolling out some of the most important releases that we ever have in the enterprise business. We have some new technology that's hitting the marketplace here in Q3 and into Q4 called Workspaces. It's the number one thing that's been requested by customers. It's higher-grade security down at the departmental level and at the organizational unit level.

The AI work that we're doing in translations, we're seeing now we're finally starting to generate revenue from the AI innovations that we did in the translations work, where we're seeing customers come in and translate literally their entire libraries using our AI features. I'm excited about the business. I'm excited about some of the customers that we've won. These are some of the most technologically advanced companies in the world: Spotify, for example, and Jaguar Land Rover, FanDuel. Some of the biggest names that have really extraordinary software development organizations and enterprise-class technology, and they continue to choose Vimeo. I continue to be very, very excited about the enterprise business. I believe it can continue to be a solid growth engine for us, regardless of just a few minor ups or downs inside of a quarter.

Speaker 1

Okay. All right. Great. Thank you both.

Speaker 3

Thank you, Youssef. Now we'll go to Tom Champion from Piper Sandler.

Speaker 0

Great. Philip, Gillian, good afternoon. Philip, I guess maybe on enterprise with the leadership changes you made at the start of the year and everything you see on the product side, maybe not to put too pointed a question out there, but we did see an enterprise customer decline sequentially. Just curious your thought on the ability to get that back to growth in the second half of the year. I'm curious, as you think about enterprise over the last quarter, was there any impact from macro-economic turmoil that maybe was in place at the start of Q2? Any thoughts on if changes to the search landscape are impacting the enterprise side of the business? I don't know if it does or it doesn't, but search is clearly in a period of change. Any comments around those issues would be really helpful.

Speaker 2

Sure. First of all, what I would say is that we continue to win new customers. We're excited about the fact that we're bringing more customers into Vimeo every single day. We do have a number of customers that churn. This is a business that I would tell you that when I got here, the AOV in that business was much lower than where it is today. How we classify customers, whether or not they're a Vimeo Enterprise customer, self-serve customer, a custom customer, an add-on customer, we're still getting some packaging and pricing right in that space. We're launching some new SKUs in the mid-market. Increasingly, what we're doing is we're trying to provide a perfect stair step up from self-service all the way up to enterprise.

I think I've said in the past that roughly about 70% of our customers in the enterprise business come out of that self-serve business. In any given quarter, it's been interesting to me to see that we sometimes change customers back and forth between those businesses. Overall, I'm pretty pleased with our ability to bring new customers into the business. Still excited about it. I would say on the macro-economic trends, we've seen a few challenges in some geographies from tariffs and some uncertainty. We've seen a little bit of uncertainty in some areas, healthcare as an example, and education that maybe are not as strong as what we'd like to see. I would also tell you that we've got a stronger value proposition than ever in some of those places.

Our ability to be able to do interactive video we think is going to be important, our ability to be able to do HIPAA and compliant video. With the healthcare organizations, we continue to have a strong value proposition. Your last question as it relates to search. Look, we've seen a lot of organizations fall off a cliff in terms of SEO. I've seen some numbers as high as 30% to 40% drop-off. Our team is doing a better job than they ever have in doing return on ad spend. We focus really, really, really tight on that. I think that we're probably more efficient than we've ever been in that space.

What I'm excited about is with some of the work we're doing with AI agents, we actually have the ability to be able to help customers with SEO and search and really make video part of that longer-term SEO strategy. While there are some challenges in the environment in that space, we also view what we're releasing in the marketplace as something that might be a solution.

Speaker 0

Okay, maybe if I could just ask one more, Gillian, I'd love to have you talk a little bit about the investment plans for the year. I think last quarter it was up to $30 million in R&D, and it seems like, you know, maybe there's been a change there or some learnings, and just maybe talk to us about the investment plans for the year.

Speaker 4

Absolutely. I think what we're finding is that we're able to invest more efficiently than we expected. When you look at our guidance overall, the top line guidance is roughly the same as where we were before, but we've been able to bring up the adjusted EBITDA guidance, and that really is because we're able to get more done with less. I think it is not at all an indication of any less enthusiastic approach to investing. As we go and deploy the money, I think we're being very, very careful about is every dollar something we want to spend, and we've been adjusting along the way. We're delighted that we can have that kind of an EBITDA result even while we invest. What I think it really speaks to is something that we've talked about for a long time, which is the Vimeo business model is great.

This business really can generate very attractive margins even when we're in a lower growth environment. As we build this business, we have always had the approach of let's invest very, very carefully with our shareholders' money, and you're seeing us be able to put up better EBITDA margins, which has actually been a trend we've seen over the last two years as well.

Speaker 2

I want to add one thing in addition. I think we're super proud of how efficient we've been in this space. The other thing is that we are taking a business that has had close to a dozen different products, and we're bringing that entire business down and that code base down to a single code base over a period of time. As we deprecate older products, as we converge these products together, we get more efficient and we get faster. Our pace of innovation, I talk a lot about this in our shareholder letters, about pace of innovation. It is so, so important to customers right now in a world where AI is changing the interface to information, that we're able to keep pace and actually outpace our competitors in taking customers and the entire video platform we have into this next era of AI.

I'm excited both about our efficiency, but also our speed at which we're innovating.

Speaker 3

Thank you. Our last question, Bill Kerr from TD Cowen.

Speaker 0

Hi, thank you for the question. You mentioned on the shareholder video that you're testing GenTech AI features with customers now. I was hoping you might be able to describe what some of those features look like and what the potential timeline might look like for a broader rollout of those features that you're testing now.

Speaker 2

I've recently seen some statistics that state that over 64% of companies in the world are rolling out AI agents, and we intend to make Vimeo a part of that AI agent ecosystem. The ability to be able to use any AI agent that you want and be able to query the Vimeo library to be able to ask questions. Can you find a video that has my old logo? What is the most frequently watched video inside of my video library? How long do people watch it? Is there a particular color palette that's being used inside of this video? Being able to allow the customer support department to be able to integrate video directly into that customer support experience.

For example, you have a complex product, and instead of you having to just put out text to be able to guide the user, you can go right to a section of a video. The idea of a GenTech video is literally making Vimeo almost like ChatGPT for Vimeo, being able to provide access to the entire library through a simple agent, a simple natural language interface. We're really excited. We see huge uses for this in things like healthcare to be able to augment the patient experience. We see the opportunity to bring down customer support costs by being able, if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million words, and the ability to be able to deliver that video right at the right moment in a customer support situation is exciting.

The ability to be able to onboard employees, one of the biggest contributors to our video library is Zoom. We have an integration with Zoom, and you can imagine Zoom meetings and team meetings and meets suddenly being able to be summarized, the content, and being able to give clips to be able to onboard a brand new employee of these are the most important clips that you need to watch about the project that you're coming into. We're really excited about this ability to be able to extract details, to be able to interact with video, and to be able to summarize a vast amount of content that you simply couldn't do without having to watch all the videos in your library. We can do it in a fraction of a second with some of the new GenTech technologies that we're releasing.

Speaker 0

Okay, great. Thank you. I just had one more on capital allocation. You guys continue to generate a significant amount of free cash flow, and you maintain a strong cash balance. Can you talk about how you're thinking about deploying that capital, especially since it seems like you guys have gotten more efficient with your investments for this year? Just looking to get some more color on that, where you're deploying that capital.

Speaker 4

I'm always looking at the three legs of the capital allocation stool: invest in the business, buy back shares, and M&A. As we really came into this year very focused on the invest in the business angle on that, that's what we've been really focused on at least near term. We believe that we are a very attractive acquirer. We are stable. We have a great business model. We're in a really exciting space. We do look at a lot out there. I think our bar to have something be something that we want to devote the team's energy to and distract from other things we're doing is pretty high. So far, nothing's passed that test, if you will. You've seen us buy back shares over time, and we clearly have an appetite for our shares out there as we work through the years.

Speaker 0

Okay, very helpful. Thank you for the questions.

Speaker 3

That is all for our questions. With that, I'll turn it back over to our CEO, Philip Moyer.

Speaker 2

I want to thank all of you for being shareholders, and thank you for joining our Q2 2025 earnings call. We look forward to speaking with you for our Q3 update in November.