Getty Images Holdings, Inc. 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

Please go ahead, sir. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining our second quarter earnings call.

Joining me on today's call are Craig Peters, Chief Executive Officer, and Jen Leyden, Chief Financial Officer. This call will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements, including the determination by the company not to provide earnings guidance at this time, are subject to various risks, uncertainties, and assumptions which could cause our actual results to differ materially from these statements. These risks, uncertainties, and assumptions are highlighted in the forward-looking statements section of today's press release and in our filings with the SEC. Links to these filings and today's press release can be found on our investor relations website at investors.gettyimages.com. During our call today, we will also reference certain non-GAAP financial information, including adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, Adjusted EBITDA less CapEx, and Free Cash Flow.

We use non-GAAP measures in some of our financial discussions as we believe they represent our operational performance and underlying results of our business. Reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP measures, as well as the description, limitations, and rationale for using each measure, can be found in today's press release and our filings with the SEC. With that, I will hand the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Craig Peters.

Thanks, Steven, and thank you to everyone making time for this call. Q2 results are not where we wanted them to be, but I'm excited to have regained our focus as a standalone company to begin the work on improving liquidity and reducing debt, and to be the source for authentic, authoritative, high-quality visual content and coverage for quality-conscious customers around the globe. We believe that Getty Images is a great business with significant opportunities and a challenged balance sheet. Addressing the balance sheet and our liquidity is our immediate priority. Let me start with the factors that impacted the quarter. The cumulative real and opportunity costs of pursuing and planning for the Shutterstock merger, combined with the continued market challenges across our agency and iStock e-commerce business, weighed on our Q2 results. Second quarter revenue for 2026 was $229.1 million.

That is down 2.5% reported and down 4.1% on a currency neutral basis. On the agency front, we continue to see declining revenue driven by secular headwinds, industry consolidation, and the agency's business model, which incentivizes towards internal production, and that is inclusive of AI. On the iStock front, we continue to see search engine referral traffic declines and the knock-on impact to our affiliate traffic sources as the search engines implement AI-generated answers. This is impacting new customer acquisition. The microstock category more generally also continues to be impacted by generative AI. This impact concentrates on price-sensitive, quality-indifferent customers. Unlike other participants in the category, iStock is more insulated from this impact given our exclusive high-quality content and the historic makeup of our customer cohorts, where 70% of our revenue is generated by our exclusive premium offerings.

Outside these areas, within the quarter, we delivered continued growth across the largest parts of our business, corporate and media, serviced through the Getty Images brand and offerings, representing three-quarters of our revenue. We continue to see strength in both media and corporate with respect to customer adoption, customer consumption, and customer retention, given the importance of our offerings to their needs. Jen Leyden will walk through the quarterly results in more detail. But before I hand it over, I want to speak to our recent decision to terminate the proposed Shutterstock merger. We spent more than 18 months and significant capital, that is more than $100 million across professional fees and financing costs, in pursuit of what we believed would be a strategic transaction.

Unfortunately, the regulatory requirements and the corresponding uncertainty and cost of execution, both direct and indirect, presented burdens we determined were no longer in the best interest of the company to bear. As a result, we made the decision to terminate the merger agreement. We are now on a standalone path, and our standalone operating plan starts with addressing our balance sheet. While we firmly disagree with the regulatory outcome and recent court rulings with respect to warrant litigation, it is clear we now need to optimize our capital structure to align with our standalone path. In July, we hired Guggenheim Securities to explore strategic financing alternatives and balance sheet management initiatives. We have not yet established a timeline, but I expect this process to run through Q3 and into Q4. In parallel, we will counter the challenges represented in our agency and iStock businesses.

On the agency front, we will continue to rationalize our resources in support of this part of our business given the secular challenges. But we are also encouraged to see AI transparency laws going into effect around the globe and consumer sentiment slowing AI use in ad creative. With respect to iStock, we will reorient the site to our premium offerings where we see improved customer lifetime value, and we will rationalize our marketing spend where returns are no longer inside our required payback period. This will adversely impact some business KPIs over 2026 and into 2027, but it builds on our support and goal of improved liquidity. We are committed to working through the balance sheet optimization process and these changes in the coming months. With the process to address that balance sheet underway, I look forward to fully focusing on the opportunity of this company, given its unique assets.

That opportunity is to be the source for authentic, authoritative, high-quality visual content and coverage. Getty Images is blessed with the foundational pillars of a recognized and respected brand, deep expertise across our staff and our exclusive partners and contributors, and an amazing archive. That combined potential of these pillars can be seen through the FIFA World Cup and how Getty Images comprehensively captured the venues, the competition, and the pageantry of the event in support of the global media and corporate sponsors. They can be seen as organizations and individuals celebrate the 250th anniversary of the U.S. They can be seen as we work with Land O'Lakes to authentically depict and engage rural audiences. They can be seen as Google, OpenAI, Perplexity AI, and others build our content and coverage into their products and services.

They can be seen in our recently announced partnership with Goalhanger to incorporate our visuals into their top-ranked podcast. That is including "The Rest Is Football" and "The Rest Is History." We will continue to focus on serving our corporate and media customers with content and services that help them effectively and efficiently engage their end audiences absent IP risk. With the rollout of C2PA source verification protocol across our offerings, we will amplify trust and transparency. We will partner with the technology industry, inclusive of AI, to embed our content into their services to better meet their customer needs. With the launch of our Model Content Protocol, MCP, server, and the July expansion of natural language search across both creative and editorial searches, we will make it even easier for companies to build AI experiences leveraging our content and metadata.

We will expand Getty Images beyond its traditional customer bases to better service creators of all sizes across all media. To this end, in July, we launched new editorial and creative single-seat subscriptions to bring the power of Getty Images Premium Access subscriptions to individuals. We will continue to expand and optimize our offerings here, as well as partner more broadly with companies like Goalhanger to tell new stories for new audiences. We will continue to embrace AI as an enabler. With the recent launch of our new prompt-based editing AI modification tool, we are making it easier for customers to more quickly and cost-effectively modify their selected pre-shot creative visuals to meet their specific project needs with authenticity still at the core. As agentic AI offerings continue to develop, we will embrace them to improve our efficiency.

The first half rollout of coding assistance across our entire software engineering team and the July launch of AI customer service chatbots on iStock are two clear examples. Let me say it again. We believe Getty Images is a great business with opportunity and a challenge balance sheet. We are committed to working through our capital structure and operational initiatives in the coming months. At the same time, we are focusing on the opportunity ahead of us as a standalone company, given the unique assets of this company. With that, I will hand it back to Jen to speak to Q2.

Q2 revenue was $229.1 million, down 2.5% or down 4.1% on a currency neutral basis. Included in these results are certain impacts of the timing of revenue recognition, which contributed approximately 50 basis points of Q2 growth. Turning to the underlying drivers of performance in the quarter, the decline was largely due to ongoing challenges of iStock, where softer traffic trends continued to pressure performance, leading to a decline, as well as continued weakness in agency, which remained consistent with recent trends. Despite the agency headwinds, Getty Images delivered growth, reflecting the resilience of our enterprise-focused business and ongoing demand for our differentiated and exclusive content offerings. Unsplash was also in growth, reflecting its continued strong engagement with the long-tail creative customer.