And the call with analysts to explain themselves...

https://www.streetinsider.com/Corporate+News/Shutterstock+%28SSTK%29+Misses+Q1+EPS+by+7c%2C+Revenues+Miss%3B+FY19+Revenue+Mid-Point+Guidance+Above+Consensus/15405121.html

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/shutterstock-inc-sstk-q1-2019-162538554.html

The SS PDF of their slides

http://investor.shutterstock.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=251362&p=irol-presentations

Only three analysts joined the call and Q&A was brief - as usual they seemed to accept the corporate-speak non-answers they were given. Perhaps I'm just crabby today but I thought sentences like this were a new high/low for stringing together buzzwords to try and sound as if you're actually saying something:

"On the enterprise side, I would say that what we're doing is we're working on our go-to-market strategy. We're improving our product, which is the premier product and also includes the SMB team subscription. We continue to optimize certain marketing efforts, like lead flow optimization, scrutinizing the pipeline, understanding exactly which leads go to the right reps et cetera. "

This was in reply to a question about why they were confident in their full year predictions even though they missed on Q1

There was mention of a new platform - something I haven't heard about, and apparently the analysts hadn't either. One of the questions asked: "Maybe just digging in on -- starting with maybe just e-commerce, new studio platform, I don't -- maybe some more color there. I don't know if we've heard about that before"

The answer didn't tell me much: "...what the platform allows us to do is really move toward that single service for all of our product platforms. So when you look at kind of how our media service, for instance, as one of the big key services in our underlying infrastructure and product environment has evolved, we're going to place where we can really optimize and store certain advanced types of metadata for search optimization and also really understanding what our customers need. So as we start to index that metadata in more creative ways, we can start to show the way that our similar images or our asset details page are displayed in different ways based on different customers and different regions. That kind of leads to the way our search algorithm is going to continue to evolve using that metadata. And when we're on this platform, which we continue to make progress on all of our different products and services and asset types, we will be able to be cross-sell and discover in more interesting way"

The growth of enterprise side of the business has slowed a bit but they have plans to fix that; they said the e-commerce side had done well - wherever that is, I'm not seeing it, so possibly it's just the massive size of the collection that means individual contributors don't necessarily see growth when the company does.. The collection grew almost 40%

They were asked a question about the custom content business and Jon gave a somewhat vague answer about productizing that, saying he wanted to see a: "...kind of B2B to C kind of flow, and get the kind of intelligence into that brief in an automated, mechanized type of way, so that we can match the right photographer with that and client will all be happier at the end of the day"

I don't think technology can help with the problem of trying to get a quality custom shoot on the cheap.

Their stock was down 8% today

Thanks for that. The quotes seem to me like the kind of gobbledygook that spills out when someone has been sold something they don't understand. I remember a time I could understand these releases now I dont really care if I can't.

Sounds about like what you'd expect. We are so far removed from what they are working on that they probably forget we are still around.

Quote from: cthoman on April 26, 2019, 09:54

Sounds about like what you'd expect. We are so far removed from what they are working on that they probably forget we are still around.

At heart this is really a very simple industry. They are making it sound like nuclear physics.

Yeah, and it's mainly just fluff. They need to come up with new things every year to justify the existence of their superfluous managerial positions.

Quote from: Pauws99 on April 26, 2019, 12:09

Quote from: cthoman on April 26, 2019, 09:54

Sounds about like what you'd expect. We are so far removed from what they are working on that they probably forget we are still around.

At heart this is really a very simple industry. They are making it sound like nuclear physics.

At some point, it becomes a bit of a magic show. They need to try to create growing revenue year over year from a market that is essentially only so large. They might be hitting that point where the only way to possibly do that is to make it magically appear or somehow convince contributors to do freelance work through Shutterstock (which might be a better magic trick).

Does anyone still get "offers" from Shutterstock Custom? I've not heard from them for a while...probably because their "assignments" were not worth considering for a nano-second so I ignored them.