Spotify says AI will allow for «much more interactive» consumer experiences in its app.
Spotify hints at a more chatty voice AI interface in the future
Архив рубрики: earnings
Roku gains 1.6 million active streaming accounts in Q1, warns of continued ad uncertainty
Roku delivered its first-quarter results on Wednesday with better-than-expected revenue and the addition of 1.6 million active streaming accounts in the period. Although the company’s results came in above analyst estimates, Roku told investors that it sees its advertising business remaining challenged.
The company’s revenue for the quarter reached $741 million, up just 1% from the year-ago quarter, and a net loss of $193.6 million.
Notably, the company revealed that it reached 71.6 million active accounts, a 17% year-over-year increase. Streaming hours reached 25.1 billion, up 4.2 billion hours or 20% year-over-year. Average revenue per user fell 5% year-over-year to $40.67.
“Similar to our viewpoint during our last earnings call, we expect macro uncertainties to persist throughout 2023,” the company wrote in a letter to shareholders. “Consumers remain pressured by inflation and recessionary fears, and thus discretionary spend is likely to remain muted. Accordingly, we expect the advertising market in Q2 to look much the same as it did in Q1, with ad spend from certain verticals improving (travel and health and wellness), while others remain pressured (M&E and financial services).”
In its letter, Roku wrote that it was the most popular streaming platform for this year’s Super Bowl with approximately half of all streams. The company notes that of those viewers, 12% started the game through either its Sports experience or a game-related ad.
Roku expects Q2 total net revenue of about $770 million, total gross profit of roughly $335 million and adjusted EBITDA of negative $75 million.
The company’s earning results come a month after Roku conducted a second round of layoffs and let go of 6% of its workforce, or around 200 employees. Roku disclosed the cuts in an SEC filing, explaining that the decision was part of a larger plan to lower its year-over-year operating expense growth and prioritize projects that it believes will have a higher return on investment. The company had laid off 200 U.S. employees back in November, citing economic conditions in the industry.
Roku announces a second set of layoffs impacting 200 employees, or 6% of its workforce
Roku soars past revenue expectations as it bets on streaming devices to boost growth
Roku gains 1.6 million active streaming accounts in Q1, warns of continued ad uncertainty by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
Roku gains 1.6 million active streaming accounts in Q1, warns of continued ad uncertainty
YouTube continues to see ad revenue decline, 2.6% drop YOY
Alphabet reported Tuesday its latest earnings, citing that YouTube saw ad revenue fall 2.6% year over year as advertisers pulled back from the platform due to economic uncertainty. YouTube only raked in $6.69 billion in advertising revenue for the first fiscal quarter of 2023 compared to the $6.87 billion during the same period last year.
Despite the disappointing number, YouTube managed to slightly beat analysts’ expectations of $6.6 billion.
This is the third quarter in a row that YouTube’s ad revenue decreased. The downward sliding figures are a cause of concern for content creators, who look to ad revenue to earn income.
The company attempted to offer reassurance during Tuesday’s earnings call, choosing to focus on its success with the short-form video feature Shorts.
“Last year the number of channels that uploaded to Shorts daily grew over 80%. Those posting weekly on Shorts saw the majority of new channel subscribers coming from their Shorts posts,” Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet said.
As the platform experiences intense competition from rivals like TikTok, the company continues to focus on the Shorts to boost its growth. In November 2022, YouTube rolled out Shorts to smart TVs. Google announced in February that Shorts has reached 50 billion daily views.
“We’re seeing strong watch time, growth… monetization is also progressing nicely. People are engaging and converting on ads across Shorts at increasing rates,” added Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer.
YouTube also reiterated plans to ramp up its efforts to make YouTube more shoppable. The company partnered with Shopify last year to enable YouTubers and merchants to feature products on their channels.
“Shopping on YouTube… It’s still super early days. One highlight last year, we brought shopping to more creators and brands by partnering with commerce platforms like Shopify. Now more than 100,000 creators, artists and brands have connected their own stores to their YouTube channels to sell their products. We’re excited about the potential ahead,” Schindler said.
The company confirmed to TechCrunch in November that it plans to add shopping features to Shorts.
Overall, parent company Alphabet reported $69.8 billion in revenue for the first quarter of 2023, a 3% increase from the same year-ago period.
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki stepped down from her role in February, taking on an advisory role across Google and Alphabet. Neal Mohan, chief product officer, is the new CEO.
In January, Alphabet cut 6% of its workforce, which affected 12,000 employees.
YouTube Shorts begins testing shopping features and affiliate marketing
YouTube continues to see ad revenue decline, 2.6% drop YOY by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch
YouTube continues to see ad revenue decline, 2.6% drop YOY
Roku soars past revenue expectations as it bets on streaming devices to boost growth
Over a month after Roku announced its first Roku-branded TVs, which will launch in the U.S. in spring 2023, the hardware company reported its quarterly earnings this afternoon, which showed Roku beat its own revenue expectations, reporting a total net revenue of $867.1 million for Q4.
The company previously cautioned investors of a shaky fourth quarter, predicting total revenue at around $800 million, a 7.5% decrease year over year. In Q3, Roku had total revenue of $761 million. Analysts predicted a year-over-year decline of 7% to $804.19 million.
However, the company’s Q1 2023 guidance is still cautious of the current macroenvironment. Roku predicts a total net revenue of $700 million.
Also, Roku recently announced that it surpassed 70 million active accounts globally in 2022, an impressive milestone for the company. It had 65.4 million active accounts in Q3. For comparison, rival Tubi, Fox’s free ad-supported streaming TV service, revealed yesterday that it reached 64 million monthly active users.
Plus, Roku had a 19% year-over-year increase in global streaming hours, with a total of 87.4 billion streaming hours in 2022 and 23.9 billion for the fourth quarter.
Despite the growth in accounts, Roku continued to see operating losses widen to $249.9 million, compared to a loss of $147 million in the prior quarter. Due to the economic challenges, Roku wrote in an SEC filing in November that it planned to cut 200 jobs in the U.S. between Q4 2022 and Q1 2023.
“We plan to continue to improve our operating expense profile to better manage through the challenging macro environment while building on our platform’s monetization and engagement tools and partnerships,” the company wrote in its letter to shareholders. “Through a combination of operating expense control and revenue growth, we are committed to a path that delivers positive adjusted EBITDA for full year 2024. Our platform and industry leadership positions us well for reaccelerated revenue growth as the ad market recovers and the shift to TV streaming continues.”
The company added that Roku’s operating system (OS), which will power the forthcoming Roku-branded TVs, grew to 38% of units sold in the U.S. Q4 2022, per NPD. This means Roku OS continues to be among the top-selling smart TV OS in the U.S. The new Roku-branded TVs, announced last month, were another significant move for the company.
Roku recently closed a few deals with major companies to boost its streaming business. For instance, the company closed a deal with Warner Bros. Discovery, getting 2,000 hours of movies and TV shows, including HBO’s “Westworld,” “The Bachelor,” “Cake Boss” and “Say Yes to the Dress,” among others.
Earlier this week, the company struck an exclusive programming deal with Pocket.watch, a kids and family entertainment studio, to bring more children’s content to the Roku Channel.
Also, Roku partnered with DoorDash earlier this month to give customers a free six-month subscription to DashPass and launched interactive shoppable ads for DoorDash businesses on Roku devices.
Roku ends 2022 with new milestone, tops 70M active accounts
Roku unveils its first-ever TVs designed and built by the company
Roku soars past revenue expectations as it bets on streaming devices to boost growth by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch
Roku soars past revenue expectations as it bets on streaming devices to boost growth
Starbucks to unveil its web3-based rewards program next month
Starbucks will unveil its web3 initiative, which includes coffee-themed NFTs, at next month’s Investor Day event. The company earlier this year announced its plans to enter the web3 space, noting its NFTs wouldn’t just serve as digital collectibles, but would provide their owners with access to exclusive content and other perks.
At the time, Starbucks was light on details as to what its debut set of NFTs would look like, specific features they’d provide or even what blockchain it was building on. It said the plan was likely to be multichain or chain-agnostic, hinting at plans that weren’t yet finalized.
Overall, the coffee retailer kept its web3 news fairly high level, explaining simply that it believed digital collectibles could create an accretive business adjust to its stores and that more would be revealed later in 2022.
Starbucks to launch NFTs this year, offering access to ‘unique experiences and benefits’
While some companies jumped on the NFT bandwagon without much thought as to how their investments would fit in with their larger business goals, Starbucks seems to be attempting a different approach. It sees the collectibles as an extension of customer loyalty. The company brought in Adam Brotman, the architect of its Mobile Order & Pay system and the Starbucks app, to help serve as a special advisor on the project.
Mobile Order & Pay has been one of Starbucks’ biggest successes, in terms of tech innovations. The company was one of the first to introduce the concept of a digital wallet, even before Apple Pay became ubiquitous. And as broader mobile payment adoption has grown, Starbucks mobile ordering has, too. In the past quarter — Starbucks’ fiscal Q3 — mobile orders, delivery and drive-through combined drove 72% of Starbucks’ U.S. revenue. In addition, the mobile ordering sales mix grew to a record high of 47%, up 13% year-over-year, following COVID-driven changes in consumer behavior, the company said.
Starbucks founder and interim CEO Howard Schultz, who returned to the company in April, teased its forthcoming web3 initiative during this week’s earnings call with investors.
“We have been working on a very exciting new digital initiative that builds on our existing industry-leading digital platform in innovative new ways all centered around coffee and most importantly, loyalty, that we will reveal at Investor Day,” Schultz said.
The company had previously announced its plans to host its 2022 Investor Day in Seattle on September 13, 2022.
Schultz continued, “we believe this new digital web3-enabled initiative will allow us to build on the current Starbucks Rewards engagement model with its powerful spend to earn stars approach while also introducing new methods of emotionally engaging customers, expanding our digital third place community, and offering a broader set of rewards, including one-of-a-kind experiences that you can’t get anywhere else, integrating our digital Starbucks Rewards ecosystem with Starbucks-branded digital collectibles as both a reward and a community building element.
“This will create an entirely new set of digital network effects that will attract new customers and be accretive to existing customers in our core retail stores,” he added.
Though the details aren’t yet fleshed out, the approach here sounds potentially interesting — at least compared with some other corporate NFT projects (an admittedly low bar). The company hadn’t before clarified that the NFTs would be tied directly to Starbucks Rewards.
Currently, customers earn Stars with purchases in the app or at Starbucks stores, which can then translate into tangible rewards — like free drinks. It appears that the new NFTs will now be incorporated into part of this loyalty program, somehow. If customers were to “earn” the collectibles through everyday purchases, perhaps, that could potentially onboard more people to the web3 ecosystem. This is one of the challenges the space faces today, where purchases of digital art and collectibles often come at high costs and with sizable fees. What’s more, the digital program could give customers a reason to care about NFTs, if the rewards and so-called “one-of-a-kind” experiences ended up being something actually worth earning. (Of course, that remains to be seen.)
There is some indication that consumers are interested in easier ways to enter the web3 space, however. For example, the crypto rewards app Sweatcoin has become a breakout hit thanks to how it rewards users with “Sweatcoins” for every 1,000 steps they walk. The app this past quarter was No. 4 by global downloads and No. 6 by monthly active users on data.ai’s list of “Top Breakout Apps” — meaning, those that saw the largest absolute growth in downloads in the quarter. There’s also now a good handful of games offering play-to-earn models, which aim to tie a fun activity like gaming to cryptocurrencies or NFTs. These have seen more mixed success as some gamers are opposed to the idea.
During the call, Schultz also stressed the value of catering to the younger consumer. Though his comments were more of a reflection of Gen Z’s demand for Starbucks’ cold drinks and iced shaken espresso — which drove sales in the quarter — a web3-based loyalty program could serve as another way to attract younger consumers to the brand.
“We don’t want to be in a business where our customer base is aging and we have a less relevant situation with younger people,” Schultz said, before touting that the company has “never been, in our history, more relevant than we are today to Gen Z.”
“To me, that cohort is so powerful, and the attachment rate that we have with them and the loyalty is just building,” he added.
Starbucks posted strong earnings in the quarter, beating Wall Street’s expectations despite the economic challenges. The company reported revenue of $8.15 billion versus $8.11 expected, and earnings per share of 84 cents adjusted versus 75 cents expected.
Starbucks to unveil its web3-based rewards program next month