TripAdvisor (TRIP) Q2 2012 Earnings Call July 24, 2012 5:00 pm ET Executives Will Lyons Stephen Kaufer - Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, President, Director and Member of Executive Committee Julie M. B. Bradley - Chief Financial Officer, Chief Accounting Officer, Senior Vice President and Treasurer Analysts Nathaniel Schindler - BofA Merrill Lynch, Research Division Heath P. Terry - Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Research Division Tom White - Macquarie Research Herman Leung - Susquehanna Financial Group, LLLP, Research Division Michael J. Olson - Piper Jaffray Companies, Research Division Anthony J. DiClemente - Barclays Capital, Research Division Scott W. Devitt - Morgan Stanley, Research Division Chad Bartley - Pacific Crest Securities, Inc., Research Division Douglas Anmuth - JP Morgan Chase & Co, Research Division Mark S. Mahaney - Citigroup Inc, Research Division Peter Stabler - Wells Fargo Securities, LLC, Research Division Brian Nowak - Nomura Securities Co. Ltd., Research Division Presentation Operator Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to TripAdvisor's Second Quarter 2012 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. Now I'll turn the conference over to Will Lyons, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please begin. Will Lyons Thanks, Tyrone. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to TripAdvisor's Second Quarter 2012 Earnings Conference Call. We appreciate your joining us today. I'm Will Lyons, Senior Director of Investor Relations for TripAdvisor, and joining me on the call today are CEO Steve Kaufer; and our CFO Julie Bradley. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that today's presentation contains estimates and other statements that are forward-looking under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties and involve a number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements. Additional information concerning these factors is contained in TripAdvisor's filings with the SEC, including our annual report filed on Form 10-K, which is available on www.sec.gov. The forward-looking statements included in this call represent the company's views on July 24, 2012. TripAdvisor disclaims any obligation to update these statements to reflect future events or circumstances.
During this call, we'll refer to non-GAAP financial measures that are not prepared in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, including adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, non-GAAP operating expenses, non-GAAP net income, non-GAAP net income per diluted share and free cash flow. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure is available in the press release announcing our second quarter 2012 financial results. This press release, as well as other important content, is available in the Investor Relations section of our website, www.tripadvisor.com.
And with that, I'll now turn the call over to Steve. Stephen Kaufer Thank you, Will, and welcome, everyone to today's conference call. The second quarter completed a great first half of 2012 for TripAdvisor. We generated record quarterly revenue of $197 million and adjusted EBITDA of $97 million, continued to grow traffic and hotel shoppers while taking important steps to optimize traffic quality and continued growing and leveraging our social and mobile initiatives to drive user adoption. We're making tremendous headway on content collection, membership and traffic. At the end of Q2, we passed the 75 million reviews and opinions milestone and our travel community continues to add content at 50 contributions per minute, which translated to an accelerated pace of more than 25 million contributions for 2012. Marketable member growth, travelers whom we have permission to e-mail on a regular basis, also accelerated during the quarter, growing over 25% to more than 32 million, up over 60% year-over-year. The top of our funnel, total traffic growth, also remained strong, as Q2 comScore data reflects an average of more than 54 million worldwide unique visitors to TripAdvisor sites, up more than 31% year-over-year. Further down the funnel, hotel shoppers, the key metric for our click-based revenue line, was up approximately 30% year-over-year and would've been higher were it not for a strategy change that I'll discuss in a minute. User engagement on the site was up as well, as we saw growth in time spent per session and page views per session, according to our internal log files. We attribute this growth in user engagement to our robust email campaigns and continued efforts to personalize the site experience.In Social, we are finding great ways to leverage the building blocks we put in place on the Facebook platform. In April, we merged our TripAdvisor and Cities I've Visited apps into one app, better integrating Facebook's users' activity within TripAdvisor and allowing friends to find TripAdvisor more easily on Facebook. In the first half of the year, TripAdvisor published more than 300 million actions generated from member activity on our website or using our App into Facebook's Open Graph. In June alone, we had over 32 million logged-in Facebook users use the TripAdvisor app or be instantly personalized on the site. This traffic level makes TripAdvisor the second most popular Facebook app, according to AppData. These efforts have been very successful in terms of brand awareness, content and community building, and growing our friend-connected member base.
In addition to Social, our mobile initiatives continue to thrive as we continue to invest in and innovate on this fast-growing platform. During the quarter, we rolled out our new iPad app and introduced Facebook log-in functionality. We also launched 30 new free City Guides across iOS and Android, bringing our coverage to 50 cities. As of June 30, we reached over 22 million cumulative mobile app downloads of our TripAdvisor, City Guides and SeatGuru apps on smartphones and tablets, up more than 200% year-over-year. We also grew to more than 27 million monthly unique visitors of TripAdvisor on mobile devices in May. Further, tablet continues to be our fastest grower in terms of mobile page views, sessions and unique users and accounts for more than 3/4 of our mobile revenue. We're obviously pleased with our mobile growth and we are focused on creating a more complete user experience on mobile, which will lead to an even more loyal and engaged user community. Read the rest of this transcript for free on seekingalpha.com
