Shutterstock has reported a record 22.3 million downloads and $51.5 million in revenue in Q1 2013. Revenue per download grew 8% year-over-year to $2.29. The Shutterstock collection has grown to more than 25 million images and over 1 million video clips.
Revenue is expected to grow in Q2 to between $53 million and $55 million. For all of 2013 revenue is now projected to be between $221 million and $226 million. EBITDA is projected to be between $46 million and $48 million.
In October of last year Shutterstock was trading at $22 a share. Today it is trading above $46.
Revenue And Download Trends
The chart below shows some of the trends in downloads, images in the collection and revenue growth since the last quarter of 2010. The bottom row is "revenue per image in the collection." For this figure we divide total revenue by the sum of still images and video clips since the video makes up a portion of the revenue.
| |
Dec |
Mar |
June |
Sept |
Dec |
Mar |
June |
Sept |
Dec |
Mar |
| |
2010 |
2011 |
2011 |
2011 |
2011 |
2012 |
2012 |
2012 |
2012 |
2013 |
| Download |
12.5 |
13.3 |
14.4 |
14.8 |
16.2 |
17.6 |
18.3 |
18.7 |
21.4 |
22.3 |
| Rev per DL |
$1.91 |
$1.92 |
$2.01 |
$2.10 |
$2.14 |
$2.13 |
$2.22 |
$2.26 |
$2.30 |
$2.29 |
| Images |
13.3 |
14.4 |
15.3 |
16.2 |
17.4 |
18.8 |
20.2 |
21.7 |
23.3 |
25 |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Total Rev |
$23.88 |
$25.54 |
$28.94 |
$31.08 |
$34.67 |
$37.49 |
$40.63 |
$42.26 |
$49.22 |
$51.5 |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Rev/ImCol |
$1.80 |
$1.77 |
$1.89 |
$1.92 |
$1.99 |
$1.99 |
$2.01 |
$1.95 |
$2.11 |
$1.98 |
On the conference call Jon Oringer, Shutterstock’s Founder, CEO and Chairman said, “Our financial results reflect the progress that we’re making across our three primary growth strategies, which are increasing penetration in all markets, developing emerging content types – particularly video footage – and expanding direct sales to large enterprises.
“We continue to focus on aggressive customer acquisition across all territories. One of the important ways that we support our customer acquisition activities is through continued international localization. This includes improving our search capabilities around the globe, sourcing local content, and expanding the number of languages and currencies that our marketplace supports.
“We recently introduced four new languages to our website, focusing on Scandinavia, a region which is home to some of the most influential design, technology, and media centers in the world. We now support customers in Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish and Danish, bringing the total number of languages on our site to 18.
“We license images in more than 150 countries and generate roughly two thirds of our revenue outside the United States," Oringer continued.
Thilo Semmelbauer, President and COO pointed out that in Q1 2012 they enaged a number of marketing agencies around the world to help penetrate the international markets. They found that some of this agency spend was not productive. In later quarters last year they scaled back and brought a good portion of management of advertising spend back in-house. This improved their marketing efficiency and decreased sales and marketing as a percent of revenue from 32% in Q1 2012 to 23% in Q1 2013.
“Put another way, we spent roughly the same amount of marketing dollars as last year but we drove 36% more revenue. We did this through a combination of spend optimization and increased investment in more efficient channels. We manage our marketing spend by balancing, testing, and optimization so we will continue to see quarter-to-quarter fluctuations as we invest in growth,” Semmelbaure explained.
In discussing growth Tim Bixby, CFO said all aspects of the business are growing. Geographically the lowest-growth territories are growing at least 15% and the high-growth territories grow at 40%, 50% and 60%. He indicated that there are no territories where they are seeing flat or negative growth.
“Across product lines and price points – we’re seeing consistent uptake of both on-demand and subscription. There was no mix shift in the quarter which suggests that subscription did very well in the quarter. We’ve seen more of a skew towards on-demand in prior quarters but that was pretty balanced in the quarter.
“Direct sales continues to perform really nicely, even with a pretty aggressive plan. It’s still really new for us so we don’t have quite as much data with our core business…. we’re seeing a really nice response from large companies, both in meetings and interactions and also in the dollars they’re willing to commit,” Bixby added.