Vimeo Q2 2025 Earnings Call Summary and Q&A Highlights: AI Innovations and Enterprise Growth
Earnings Call
08/07
[Management View] Total bookings growth: 6% YoY, highest since 2022. Self-serve bookings: 11% growth, driven by new pricing and packaging. Enterprise revenue: 25% increase, second-highest booking level on a dollar basis. Adjusted EBITDA guidance: Raised to approximately $35 million from $25 million-$30 million. AI product monetization: Early adoption generating new revenue streams. Product roadmap: Launching "Workspaces" for enhanced security. Enterprise client wins: New customers include Spotify, Jaguar Land Rover, and FanDuel. Cost efficiency: Streamlining product code bases and selective investment.
[Outlook] Performance guidance: Management raised 2025 adjusted EBITDA guidance to approximately $35 million. Future plans: Focus on rolling out "Workspaces" and advanced AI capabilities in the second half of the year.
[Financial Performance] YoY trends: Bookings increased 6%, self-serve bookings grew 11%, enterprise revenue rose 25%. QoQ trends: Adjusted EBITDA guidance raised due to improved operational efficiency.
[Q&A Highlights] Question 1: 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 declines still. And when you talk about having line of sight to double-digit growth, by the end of the year, what's kind of baked 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? Answer: I am super thrilled with the self-serve leadership that we have. 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, and not just from an increasing of price perspective, but also from customer retention. And so the retention rates in that business continue to be strong, even as we roll out new pricing and packaging across the entire customer base. So 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 years. Of the things that you saw on 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. And so 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 had mentioned this on the call. We had just started that with our self-service customer base. And so we're seeing really strong activity in the use of our AI features, and so 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 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.
Question 2: And then 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 community just drill a little deeper into that and what gives you confidence for the reacceleration in the second half. Answer: So let me start and then, Philip can fill in some more about kinda where we're going with the product roadmap. So the customer we mentioned is, kind of an interesting example for us. And very much speaks to the strategy of Vimeo right now. So that customer happens to be an international customer that was very central bandwidth a bandwidth user in a lot of ways. They were head of Vimeo enterprise account, but a lot of what they were buying us for was bandwidth. And as you can see in our add-ons business, that bandwidth business has been gotten a little bit more commoditized. You've seen that business come down in the last while for us. So this customer really never adopted our other features as well as we would have hoped. And when that happens, we have retention challenges. And we know that. And we are working on that. And that is why we are so focused on a product roadmap that includes more than that. So 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, you know, in our mind makes us very excited about the product roadmap ahead. I think I'll have focus in on some of the things we're bringing for enterprises that we just think are gonna help avoid that kind of a situation going forward.
Question 3: Philip, Gillian, good afternoon. Philip, I guess maybe on enterprise with the leadership changes you made at the start of the year and or you see on the product side. Not to put two 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. And I'm curious as you think about enterprise over the last quarter, was there any impact from macroeconomic turmoil that maybe was in place at the start of 2Q? And or just 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. So any comments around those issues would be really helpful. Answer: Sure. So, you know, first of all, what I would say is that we continue to win new customers. And we're excited about the fact that we're bringing more customers into Vimeo, you know, 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. And so 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.
And 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. And so in any given quarter, it's been interesting to me to see that we sometimes change customers back and forth between those businesses. But overall, I've been pretty with our ability to bring new customers, into the business. So still excited about it. I would say on the macroeconomic trends, you know, we've seen a few challenges in some geographies, you know, from tariffs and some uncertainty. We've seen a little bit of in some areas, health care as an example and education that maybe are not as strong as what we'd like to see. But I would also tell you that we've got stronger value proposition than ever in some of those places. Our ability to be able to do interactive video, we think, is gonna be important. Our ability to be able to do HIPAA and compliant video. The healthcare organizations, we continue to have a strong value proposition. And then your last question as it relates to search, Look, we've seen a lot of organizations fall off a cliff you know, in terms of SEO. I've seen some numbers as high as like 30 to 40% drop off. Our team is doing a better job than they ever have in doing return on ads. Spend. We've focused really, really, really tight on that. I think that we're probably more efficient than we've ever been in that space. We also think what I'm excited about is with some of the work we're doing with Agenetic AI, actually have the ability to be able to help customers with SEO and search and really make video a part of that longer-term SEO strategy. So 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.
Question 4: 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. Answer: Absolutely. I think what we're finding is that we're able to invest more efficiently than we expected. So 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. But as we go and deploy the money, I think we're being very, very careful about is every dollar something we wanna spend, and we've been adjusting along the way. So 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 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. So 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.
Question 5: Hi. Thanks for the question. So you mentioned on the shareholder video that you're testing Genetic AI features with customers now. I was hoping that you might be able to describe you know, what some of those features look like. And what the potential timeline might look like for a broader rollout of the features that you're testing now. Answer: You know, 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. You know, can you find a video that has my old logo? What is the most frequently watched video inside of my video library, and how long do people watch it? Is there a particular color palette that's being used inside of this video?
Or being able to allow the customer to be able to integrate video directly into that customer support experience. Say 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 agentic video is literally making Vimeo like almost like ChatGPT for Vimeo. Being able to provide access to the entire library through a simple agent, a simple natural language interface. And 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 a picture is worth a thousand words, you know, a video is worth a million words, and to be able to deliver that video right at the right moment, to in a customer support situation is exciting. The ability to be able to onboard employees. You know, one of the biggest contributors to our video library is Zoom. We have an integration with Zoom, so you can imagine Zoom meetings and team meetings and Meets suddenly being able to be summarized the content, being able to give clips to be able to onboard a brand employee of these are the most important clips that you need to watch about the project that you're coming into. And so 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 vast amounts 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 AgenTic technologies that we're releasing.
Question 6: Okay. Great. Thank you. And then I just had one more on, 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. So just looking you know, to get some more color on that where you're applying that We're always looking at Answer: sort of the three legs of the capital allocation stool, invest in the business, buy back shares, and M&A. And you know, as you're we really were came into this year very focused on the invest in the business angle on that. And so that's what we've been really focused on at least near term. But 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. And we do look at a lot out there. I think our bar to have something be something that we wanna devote the team's energy to and distract from other things we're doing is pretty high. So far, nothing's past that test, if you will. And then 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.
[Sentiment Analysis] Tone of analysts: Generally positive, with a focus on understanding growth drivers and investment efficiency. Tone of management: Optimistic about future growth, confident in strategic initiatives and product innovations.
[Risks and Concerns] - Subscriber declines in the self-serve segment. - Commoditization of the bandwidth business affecting enterprise customers. - Macroeconomic challenges in certain geographies and sectors. - Potential impact of changes in the search landscape on enterprise business.
[Final Takeaway] Vimeo's Q2 2025 earnings call highlighted strong growth in bookings and enterprise revenue, driven by new pricing, packaging, and AI product monetization. Management raised the adjusted EBITDA guidance, reflecting improved operational efficiency. The company is optimistic about future growth, with plans to roll out significant product innovations like "Workspaces" and advanced AI capabilities. While there are some concerns about subscriber declines and macroeconomic challenges, the overall sentiment remains positive, with a focus on strategic execution and investment efficiency.