Operator: The next question comes from Matt Farrell of Piper Sandler.
Matt Farrell: Congrats on the strong results and the really impressive execution. You raised the midpoint of the guidance for the full year, which really speaks to the confidence you have as you enter the second half. From your perspective, has anything changed from a consumer behavior or a creator behavior perspective over the last few months?
Julia Hartz: I think I’ll start with the demand for experiences and then Lenny can talk about our — a bit more about the guide. So we have our finger on the polls of consumer trends and we’re seeing strong demand signals across the board, particularly for categories like music, film and media, food and drink, night life, performing in visual arts. And as an anecdote in the marketplace, we’re seeing people really want to get out and connect with one another, singles and dating events are 50% up year-over-year. Independent singer-songwriter hosted events are up 60% and I’m sure you’re not surprised by this, but AI-related events have tripled. So we’re just seeing the strong growth across categories and geographies, it’s really about the demand side of that marketplace.
And I think with our business, the flywheel of growth is really when you see surging demand, you see strengthening confidence on the event creator side. So we’re seeing more and more creators be able to host more events in their category because they have that confidence that they’ll be able to sell more tickets. And so we’re meeting them right at that point and with our changes that we talked about today, we’re putting marketing tools, boost paid social advertising, e-mail marketing right in front of them at the right time, so that they can continue to strengthen that flywheel. And I think all signs both externally and internally point to a really strong second half of the year in terms of take a buyer demand for doing interesting things together through live experiences.
Lanny, is there anything you would add?
Lanny Baker: As we look at the outlook for the full year, our assumptions are that we could all see continued healthy demand for live events. Fairly normal seasonality, which always points toward a stronger fourth quarter by a little bit, I think the nature of our business today, the nature of seasonal holiday fall events, they’re becoming a little bit more popular and that probably leads to perhaps a little bit stronger second half seasonality than we’ve seen historically. And that plays out as we expect it may — those are the kind of things that tend to correlate with the higher end of our range. We also see — we expect continued growth for Eventbrite Ads. And over the course of the year, a little bit more noticeable revenue benefit from the organizer fees and the packaging of our marketing tools Julia talked about.
Matt Farrell: And maybe as a follow-up, I’d love to just hear a little bit more about the decision-making process and the logic behind including the demand generation tools into the core product. And is there any way that we should be thinking about the potential financial model impact of these changes?
Julia Hartz: I’ll start with the line and then I’ll let Lanny talk about the model. Our mission is really to push marketing tools to all of our creators to make demand generation central to the value proposition and this has been something we’ve worked on over the past nine months and our live events platform is clearly, highly valued by creators who are seeking larger audiences and our marketing tools are performing exceptionally well. For instance, our AI-assisted social media ad copy creation flow is launching campaigns 30% faster and creating 3x as many campaigns. And those subscribers are seeing a 63% improvement in results and re-achieving a return on Ad spend of 5x to 6x. So it was at this point that we knew we saw this strong signal of efficacy and success in the customers who are using Boost and who are advertising in the marketplace through Eventbrite Ads.
We think by bringing all of this value and growth enablement to the front door of Eventbrite, it will benefit greater and faster growth by creators and better value for the platform. So the timing was right from that perspective, the product experience is ready and we think that this gives all creators the opportunity to benefit from the demand generation tools now fully embedded in the core product.
