We are ready. Let's kick it off. All right. Welcome, everybody. Thank you for joining us. I'm Ron Josey. I lead coverage here of internet across at Citi. And look, we're in for what should be a fun conversation. We have Nextdoor's founder, now CEO again, Nirav Tolia, here with us, and CFO Matt Anderson. So, look, I think most people know what Nextdoor does, and so we'll let Nirav sort of talk about it. But the bottom line is we're in the middle of a turnaround here, new management, new style. There's a lot of news this weekend around the founder mode. So I'm sure that'll come up.
But Nirav, just tell us a little bit more about your decision to come back, and then ultimately, and then bigger picture, the broader vision.
Thank you, Ron, and it's a pleasure to be here. I know I speak for Matt when I say that we're big fans of the work you and your team do, and
Thank you.
We're excited about continuing to help people understand that this is really a special time for Nextdoor, because we have some scale. We don't have nearly the scale that we think we should have, and getting to that scale that we think we should have, we believe is a matter of execution. And so to your point, I never really left Nextdoor.
Right.
I just left in an operating capacity. I founded the company in the summer of 2010, ran it as CEO for nine years. Ultimately, I was lucky enough to find Sarah Friar, who was at the time the CFO of Square, now Block, and thought that she would do an exceptional job taking a company that had been in build mode
Yeah
for the first nine years, and scaling it, and she did exactly that over the last five years. She scaled the company, professionalized it, took it public, experienced a lot of success, and then ultimately, as we know, the entire sector had a pretty dramatic pullback. And as we were looking at that as a board, it became clear to us that the way Nextdoor was going to respond and come back from that pullback was by dramatically improving the quality of its product. Because while Nextdoor has always had this amazing opportunity to become the definitive consumer internet service in local, and with 95 million verified neighbors, we have certainly experienced some traction, established a good position. We haven't been able to truly realize that potential of being the indispensable site
Right
That people turn to every single day for information about their local lives. How do we get there? We didn't believe the way to get there was scaling what we currently have. We felt like the way to get there was to dramatically improve the quality of the product, transform it, and so I was lucky enough to come back. I consider it a privilege. I mean, when you think about coming back to the company that you co-founded, that you were able to run with a mission that I believe very deeply in, and that is a mission around building community at a local level, it's a real privilege. Now, it's not easy.
I was an investor for most of the last five years and was in particular looking at AI ideas, as many investors have, and that was a fun thing, and I used to joke with my wife that I was working in air quotes compared to being a CEO, which is most of what I've done in my career. But a great privilege to come back, because the opportunity for Nextdoor is as ripe and vibrant as it's ever been, and the only thing that really stands between us and that great prize is execution.
And so I'm back to work with the team to execute, and we're trying to simultaneously do two things, which is not easy to do, and those two things are, in the very near term, continue to operate the business in a very rigorous and disciplined way and achieve performance like we had last quarter. Last quarter, we grew users 8%. We went back to double-digit growth in revenue, 11% growth, and we had 20 points of margin improvement. So that's the beginning of real steady progress. The step function progress, which we're all looking for, is the other big challenge and the other big opportunity, and that is to transform the Nextdoor product, and we call that effort Next, as you know.
Next should be in our hands by the end of this year. It should be in everyone's hands by the middle of next year.
Okay.
We're not talking about a long timeframe here. Simultaneously building an execution of culture and showing that in the near term, while also tuning our innovation machine so that Next can be something that transforms the user experience, that's the challenge in front of us. Matt, I don't know if I missed anything or if there's anything salient for you to add.
No, I think, I think on this point you captured the real essence.
I found it fascinating that productivity year-over-year. i think I have this right. It grew 50% year-over-year, so talks about the near term, operating the business. You saw improvements across the core metrics of users, engagement, revenue. You know, you and I spoke when we were you know, when you first joined, and then also during the summer and others, and it's been a lot of fun hearing the vision of how you do this. You talked about founder's mentality and bringing that back and having everyone sort of own it. Would love to understand how you combine do more with less, sort of maybe our words, or maybe the founder's mentality word, right, with execution, 'cause it's hard to do both.
I believe, as a founder of three companies and someone who has never been over-resourced, that the path to innovation is not made easier with infinite resources.
Yeah.
In fact, in many ways, it's made more difficult. I am a big fan of embracing constraints. I'm a big fan of thinking about scarcity more than surplus. And there's a great book in Silicon Valley. I'm sure if one is in founder mode, as they're talking about, they are talking about this book. It's called The Mythical Man-Month.
And it's about software development, and this idea that if you have a schedule of a piece of software that you're trying to build, you obviously want to either hit that schedule or to pull the schedule back and make it happen as quickly as possible, but you can't just throw more resources at the problem. Innovation, I don't believe, is gated by resources. You need to have a base level of resources, but we have more than enough resources. Innovation is gated by creativity. It's gated by work ethic. It's gated by caring deeply about what you're doing. And when you talk about the founder's mentality, those are the kinds of things that
Sure
We think about, and when we talk about founder mode, it's a lot more complex than just saying you're gonna be a founder when you come back into a public company that needs to deliver results on a quarterly basis. I have to give a lot of credit to the former CEO, Sarah, and really all the short-term credit for our performance goes to the existing team that I was lucky enough to inherit. They know how to execute, and we've just clarified some things. We've narrowed our focus. We have created a new vision for Next. But that founder mentality is about really believing in the vision, which we do. It's about being obsessed with the front line, and what that means is the details matter. That's where the magic is. Our users are telling us what they want.
We just need to listen, and we need to take immense pride in every single day showing up and having an owner's mindset, where every penny matters. And it's not a question about working late or working on the weekends. This is our company.
Right.
This is our passion and our purpose, and so going back with the founder's mentality is not just relevant when you start a company, it's relevant for any company at any phase, in particular, a company that needs to transform itself. And so that productivity number that you talked about, we're very proud of that internally, because what it says is we can create value through execution, but execution alone is not gonna get us where we need to get. We need to also innovate.
Right.
And so building execution muscle around not just the day-to-day, but around innovating, that's part of the challenge, and that's what founders have to do when they create companies. They need to simultaneously execute and innovate.
I want to
That's what we're trying to do.
Yeah, and if I may, I just want to pick up one thing on the productivity point, too, as well, because, you know, as the CFO, it's actually a very deliberate word, and there's an equation. It's. We are a growth business, so we want to make sure people are not just looking at the absolute cost. That's one component of the productivity equation. There's the absolute cost, and there's the allocation of cost. And so that starts to get into what Nirav was talking about, and to give you a few tangible examples. I mean, we know over the long, long run, user growth engagement is the ultimate lever in the business.
Yep.
So that guides us. But then when we get into things like improving gross margins two points year-over-year, what's really happening? We are optimizing the level of rigor, our hosting costs. Where will that be recycled back into? Probably more sophisticated models, probably investments in certain areas of the team, because we know it cycles back to that top, top, top product focus. And then I'll introduce one other kind of concept, as it gets into how we make decisions day to day now, which is going from is it ROI positive to is it the highest ROI? And so when we talk about things like adding millions of organic neighbors each quarter, that's actually very powerful because what it really allows us to do is take our neighbor acquisition spend effectively to zero. Why is that important?
Because that allows us to double down on the better product. When we think about international markets, you see actually more of that leverage happening in the U.S. because we are saying we know over time, bringing better product, bringing the ad serving and self-serve capabilities to international markets, will help us to grow the trajectory very different than if we kind of did incremental neighbor acquisition, incremental ad product availability, so it all comes back to highest ROI, not ROI positive, and so it's a nuance that doesn't always come through, but that's why productivity was actually a very deliberate word that we use, because there's actually more in that equation than meets the eye and just cost.
That's super helpful and insightful because I think the nuance, highest ROI versus is it ROI positive, just changes how you think about things. I want to get into Next and the platform before we get into the nitty-gritty of, like, the quarterlies and everything. But before we do, I found this story really fascinating, Nirav, that I'd like for you to talk about. Day one or week one, what did you do? Was it your same office? Well, you know
same HQ, same. And I know you dug into, like, the data, and that's what I want to hear. I want the story to be told, but I want to hear day one, you walked in, "I'm back.
Again, I mean, a real privilege to come back.
Yeah but also a little bit unique and jarring for me because I've been CEO and founder of three companies. But as a founder of those companies, I've been employee zero, and so I have hired every one of those people, or at least been CEO when those people were hired. When I left Nextdoor, I think there were about 200 people, and ultimately we got up to 800 or so. And so there were 600 people hired when I wasn't CEO, when I wasn't in the office, when I wasn't day to day. And so when I came back, there were many more people in the company that I didn't know and that didn't know me, and that was a very unique experience that I had never really experienced as a CEO. And so for me, it was about going back and listening and learning.
I wasn't gonna go in and have any grand gestures. I mean, the truth is, if I had some magic solution for the company, I was on the board.
and I'm the largest individual shareholder, I would've been pounding the table saying, "We need to do this. We need to do this." I had incredible confidence in Sarah and the rest of the management team, and so when I walked in, I wanted to understand, given that we have a lot of cash, we have extremely talented people, and we have an unbelievable market opportunity, why isn't this clicking the way that we all want it to? And that was really all about listening and learning. The other thing that's been a real blessing is to come in with fresh eyes, because I was away for five years as an operator. I was on the board, yes, but being on the board is very different than being in on the day-to-day.
And in addition to not being in the day-to-day, and as a result, being pretty myopic, because when you're an operator, you get leverage from being myopic about the details. But as an investor, which is what I had been over the last five years, you need to be more broad than deep. So you're looking across the industry. That's why I had to learn about AI. That's why I had to think about, what are the different ways that CEOs manage companies? I had my way of doing it, but then when I became an investor over the last five years and I sat on a dozen boards, I got to experience different ways of doing it, and it really made me think.
So when I came back, I was listening and learning, I was getting to know people, and I was thinking to myself: How can I benefit from fresh eyes? I obviously founded the company and created the product, so it's not as if I don't know where the bodies are buried.
Right.
I'm very familiar with the concept, what's worked, what hasn't worked, what we've tried, what the basics are of everything we've done, but how can I bring some freshness in? And so I paired those fresh eyes with a lot of investigation around the data, and I tried to marry a fresh perspective from being outside the building with a very quantitative perspective in looking at the data. And in particular, I was asking myself questions like: How has the world changed between when we started Nextdoor, and we had some of the foundational principles around the product, and where we are today? I asked myself the question: How can I cohort some of these 300,000 neighborhoods that are using Nextdoor to try to understand where Nextdoor is working more effectively than it's not working effectively?
I asked myself the question: What are the things that users are telling us we're not doing that they want us to do? And so synthesizing where the world is, what the data is saying quantitatively, and then qualitatively what users are saying, that ultimately culminated in 6 pages of single-spaced vision
which we called the next Nextdoor.
Good segue for this, for the next part. Okay.
And the next Nextdoor was as much about painting a vision of what needed to be new, as it was an examination of what we felt was wrong with the current product. And wrong is probably too extreme a word, but I'll give you a very specific example, because let's get into specifics now. Nextdoor has performed exceptionally well at a number of use cases that are indispensable to our users in a way that no other internet entity can provide value, and I'll give you examples. When you lose a pet, Nextdoor is one of the only places you can go, and has been successful thousands of times in returning lost pets to pet owners.
When your neighborhood is in the middle of any kind of inclement weather, particularly extreme weather, like a hurricane or a tornado, you rely on your neighbors, and Nextdoor is the way that you connect with those neighbors. We've seen that happen over and over again. When you need something related to your home from a service provider standpoint, whether it's a babysitter for your kids or whether it's a painter to paint your fence, there's no one better to ask than your neighbors
for recommendations, so that local word of mouth is proxied on Nextdoor in a way that you can't get through a Google search, you can't get through one of your friends on Facebook, so there are a number of use cases where Nextdoor is not just working, it's indispensable. However, the challenge of those use cases is they don't happen every day, so as we think about building a resource that people rely on every single day to make their local lives better, hopefully they're not losing their pets every day. Hopefully, there isn't inclement weather every single day in the neighborhood, right? and once you find the person who's great at power washing your deck, hopefully you don't need to ask for another person, so that led us to ask the question: Okay, what do people need on a daily basis, and why aren't we delivering that?
To give you one specific example, people are looking, particularly with the erosion of local newspapers, and we no longer watch the 5:00 P.M. news. So where are we getting local information? How do we know what's going on this weekend where we live? How do we know what local issues need to be discussed and need to be debated? How do we know there's a new restaurant in the area? How do we know that an existing restaurant is closing down, right? That information is in a vacuum right now that's not really accessible. It's not accessible through AI tools even, right? But our users are telling us they want to rely on Nextdoor to be informed every single day on what's happening in their neighborhood.
And that, as we start to get a little bit more fine-grained and subtle about how we build a product around it, those set of use cases, what's going on in my neighborhood, broadly speaking, those set of use cases are much more discovery-centric than they are intent-centric. Intent is why we use Google. I'm searching for something specific. Intent is when you lose your pet... or when you need a plumber, or when you need to know what you should do because there's gonna be a tornado that's sweeping through, right? Those are intent-centric use cases. Discovery is why you wake up in the morning and go to Instagram, or you go to Twitter, or you go to The New York Times. It's because you don't really know what's going on in the world, but you wanna know, and you rely on some of those sources to find out.
And so as we start to think about Next, we're not getting rid of all of the intent-centric use cases. Those are really valuable. We're just going to build around them a set of discovery-centric use cases that we know are really valuable because our users are asking for those things. There's a new house for sale in the neighborhood. What's it worth? What's it gonna sell for? This weekend, there is a concert that maybe you didn't hear about, right? Your kids go to a high school. What happened in the football game on Friday night for that high school?
These are all things that typically we find out about either through local media or through conversations with our neighbors, and we know that the world has moved into a place where we no longer rely on local media, and we don't talk to our neighbors as much, and so it's a great opportunity for Nextdoor.
That, that's a great way to paint how we can think about Next. That's the platform mid 2025. I guess we'll be hearing about this discovery of use cases from here to there, but internally, you said by 4Q, you might be seeing something and testing it out?
We're already testing internally ourselves.
Yeah
and I think it is the first chapter of Next. And so let me be clear that we think that there are more opportunities around monetization, for example, than what we have seen today, which is we've done really well with ads in the news feed. But what is most people's most important financial asset?
Right.
It's their home.
Yeah.
It's their home. So what can Nextdoor do to help you ensure that that asset is well cared for, is maintained, is maximized in value? That should be a chapter of Next. It's just not gonna be the first chapter, so the first chapter is about those discovery-centric use cases, because back to Matt's point about engagement being one of the very first things that you look for from a successful social network, engagement is where we can start, and if that engagement starts to really become more vibrant, that creates a fertile ground to start to push on things like monetization, and so I think Next is not just something that in the middle of 2025, you're gonna have something, and that's it, right? It's like all other pieces of innovation.
It's a series of breakthroughs that you try to string together in a coherent way, and the first set of those breakthroughs for us are around local information and making Nextdoor a place that when you wake up in the morning, it's one of that very small set of tools that you feel like you have to check, the same way that you would go outside and on your front doorstep was the local newspaper, but that doesn't exist anymore, so where are you gonna get the information? It's hard to get it on Twitter. You can't get it on TikTok or Instagram, right? Nextdoor is a very natural place for that to exist, but that's only the first chapter.
Got it. Super helpful. Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about the here and now. This was a good quarter in that we saw accelerating growth. Matt, I wanted to ask you about WAU, specifically. I think growth accelerated to 8% in the quarter, 12% in the U.S. I'd love to hear about the drivers, because-
Yeah
I think we can better see the vision of discoverability, can better see the vision of monetization and how a home and different things you can anchor to. 2Q was good, and so what was it that drove that WAU growth, that greater engagement.
Yeah
anything we can point to?
Yeah, I'd break it down into three things, and these are probably good guides, at least as you think about the next couple of quarters as well. The first is something referenced briefly earlier, which is we are adding millions of new verified neighbors each quarter, and they're coming organically, and so that is a very powerful input into that WAU equation. So, occasionally, that gets lost in the mix of this, but it's a really important starting point. The next is: what are the things we can do today to remove friction? And, you know, we looked at, okay, well, as Nirav mentioned, looking at the details, looking through the flows, looking through the experiences. One of the things we uncovered is that there were plenty of people that wanted to go consume Nextdoor content who might have just been logged out.
Before, they would have hit a wall, and the natural human behavior is to, you know, abandon. But how can we give people a log-out experience when they click on a link or when they're kind of organically come back to the platform? And we can by doing that, we get them access to the content. We can actually then prompt them to log back in. And it sounds very, like a, I mean, obvious thing to say, but it's really important, because if we remove the friction, that really changes how our existing base of 95 million verified neighbors actually comes to us.
That was, and I'd say that was probably the most new engagement dynamic in the quarter. And there's the third, which is, in many ways, a perpetual one, which is: how do we continue to drive towards a more personalized experience with better content relevance? And the step function there is Next, but we can look at things and say: "You know what? What content do you see in your feed? What's the distance of that content?" And we can actually get much smarter about tailoring and optimizing just the content, how it's ranked, how it's presented, based on things as simple as how far away it is, how far away it is from you. And so those things, you know, when taken together and still driving meaningful improvement from our base today.
So I think those are the three I think about now, and then really around how those really start to get amplified as the type of content Nirav talked about starts to come to the fore.
Super helpful, especially that removing friction, that login-logged out experience. You don't hear too much about that, so that's really helpful. Bigger picture, U.S., international? International, we're focusing more on U.S. now. How do we think about those two?
Yeah. I, I think this is probably the best real-time case study of that focus that we're talking about, because it really is. And you can see that, and I think one of the things that's important to us is you can see that in the metrics today. Every one of those headline metrics you mentioned is even stronger in the U.S., and that's because we can see some of the- whether it's the user growth and engagement dynamics playing out, it's really, really important. And going back to my comment earlier, we know that by accelerating our efforts towards improving the product, that's how we are going to unlock international markets. Now, we are prioritizing a select set of those markets, particularly the U.K. and Canada, and so we are seeing steady growth there.
We are making very deliberate trade-offs around how we think about near-term neighbor acquisition in those markets so that we can keep pushing back into a better product experience, so.
You know, said a different way, we cannot do everything all at the same time.
Right.
So much of the way that we think about strategy is through a sequential kind of build, and so it's important for us to get all of the pieces on the table. They're all opportunities. International is a huge opportunity for Nextdoor. We're one of the few local companies, by the way, that has that opportunity, but we have launched in 11 countries, and we know that it will work globally. But when we put everything on the table, we said: "Okay, now, as we arrange the strategic roadmap, how many things can we do at the beginning?" And we wanted to pick as few as possible because we want to pick the most important ones and really drive a truck through those.
Yeah.
And so, to just reiterate what Matt said, we felt the best avenue to drive growth internationally was to develop a better product, and that is a product that, because some of those international markets would be considered subscale relative to the U.S., the U.K., and Canada, we'll hold off on in the very near term, while we're using the U.S., the U.K., and Canada as our test markets for Next. And then, as we get Next off the ground and we see it working, we'll bring those to the international markets. There's no reason for us to invest behind the existing product in those international markets today, when we know that isn't the product that they're
Yeah
gonna get long term. So it, again, it sounds very elementary and almost pedantic, but when you reach a certain scale as a company, you do need to have a little bit of that founder's mentality. You got to go to founder mode and say: "We can't do everything at the same time," and that's okay. There's tremendous strength in focus, and so we're gonna embrace that focus.
That's great. So we've gotten through, I don't know, two-thirds, three-quarters of the talk today. We haven't spoken about monetization yet. So let's sort of transition to monetization of the user base that's growing, and obviously, we have the longer-term vision. But let's kick it off with just from a macro perspective, what are you all seeing from a macro advertiser, local but also national, which is a big part of your
Yeah. So I'll make a kind of a global comment, which is that we look at all kinds of measures. We look at vertical trends, we look at campaign objectives, we look at the macro data that you all can see. We take it seriously. We build strategies around it. But we know today that our story is as much around how effectively we deliver value to advertisers, regardless of vertical, and we'll get to those in a minute. And so that's really, I think, important, going back to how we work and think about the opportunity today, and I also think that's present in our results in the quarter, and sometimes they're entwined. We talked about things like home services, which is our most important vertical today, growing very nicely.
Now, if we triangulate external data points, there are probably some things to suggest that there were some areas of strength there, but that vertical was also the vertical where a significant share of our mid-market demand was coming through. These are the folks coming in through self-serve for the first time. By definition, if they're coming through the self-serve platform, what we call Nextdoor Ad Manager, then they are necessarily, their demand is being served on our ad server. That's where the value of our first-party data comes to the fore. Then we layer on the fact that home services as a vertical is very endemic. And so that's why I, I, I think you will continue to hear us talk about there's macro, but at our, at our stage of our journey, it's gonna be deeply intertwined with, with the value to advertisers.
Now, going to other verticals, you know, really the way we think about it is things that are close to the home or proximity or foot traffic matter. So retail and QSR is actually, it's a meaningful vertical for us, and we've seen continued progress. This is where progress around performance objectives becomes increasingly important, so it kind of reinforces our priority in terms of the ad stack. You have things like tech and telecom. Again, think about the home as the center of your life. That's a big part of it, and then there's also areas like financial services, which we've discussed at points in time in the past, which used to be a much bigger share in absolute and relative terms of our business, some modest signs of rebound and potentially some on the horizon if rate-sensitive dynamics change.
But at the end of the day, it all ties into, you know, what we believe very strongly, which is diversification. We have a portfolio of emerging verticals. I won't list them all here. Collectively, they're meaningful. We think they all represent opportunities, but it's just one more form of diversity. We think about the advertiser size and objective, we think about verticals, so we'll continue to push on in growing those. But I'd say overall, certainly relative to this time a year ago, better trends, big picture. But really, those four core verticals I talked about are the ones that are most relevant if you're thinking about us in the macro context.
When you think about those four core verticals, and I think the comment was 50% self-serve accounted for 50% of revenue, growing 40%. Do I have that right?
That's right.
The self-serve function is growing significantly faster than the overall company.
Yep.
It's accounting for a bigger part of revenue. But this was sort of an unlock for us, I think, first time we're hearing these numbers, sort of an unlock. Talk to us, what, what was that unlock? Was it home services, financial services, these verticals got stronger in the quarter, or execution improved, which is a productivity we started-
Yeah
the conversation with.
I mean,
Does that make sense?
In many ways, they
Yeah
They probably are self-reinforcing.
Yeah.
I think the first thing I'd point you to is when you come to the self-serve, when we talk about things like introducing video formats or lead gen formats, what's just as important, aside from the format itself, which is important, but also available on other platforms, it's that it is also available self-serve.
That's the key distinction, and so that starts to unlock all kinds of different... You know, that allows us to more effectively go to agencies. That is, whether it's an enterprise, but there's plenty of mid-market agencies who now can go to their clients and say, "This platform looks endemic. They've got these capabilities. Your kind of key threshold requirements are starting to, starting to be met." And so it really is around making that available, making the capabilities, the measurement, the targeting. You know, one of the other metrics we talked about at our last earnings was a 26% improvement in cost, in cost per click. And the reason that's really important is because at its core, what that is doing, it's harnessing that first-party data I talked about before and bringing higher-propensity audiences to those advertisers.
Before, for us, you know, as we were working through GAM, which was our, you know, we worked with until we had started building our ad stack, an impression was an impression. You know, we were not optimizing our inventory, we were not bringing higher-propensity audiences to those advertisers, and so that's really the key, is those capabilities. Now, we like to believe that that starts to reinforce drive brand awareness, drive better retention, and I think that's really at the, at the core. And, and the reason, you know, I think home service is relevant in that instance is it is so endemic that that's kind of the first leg of awareness because they, they are naturally thinking about us. But as we start showing that performance across more and more verticals, then we see no reason it can't be relevant for, for every vertical.
The macro is not something that we're immune to, but we focus on what we can control for. To the execution point, what can we control? I think generally speaking, advertisers online are increasingly looking for three things. They want scale of audience because they don't wanna have to advertise in a hundred different places. They, of course, want performance. And the third thing is they want ease of use. What does that translate to for us?
We need to grow our user base and our usage. You've heard us talk about that, right? We need to ensure that we're using all the technologies, whether they're targeting technologies or ML technologies, to ensure that ROI is as good as the other platforms. The third thing is, and this is self-serve, we need to reduce friction as much as possible so that people can do as much as possible with as little effort as possible.
All three of those things are about execution, and so we can sit here and say, "Oh, the macro's uncertain, and this is happening, and that's happening," and it may even be true, but there's plenty that we can do to control our own destiny, and that is culturally the way that we wanna think about it.
So speaking, we get the question all the time on ad loads and impression growth. Where do you think we are on the ad load world? Super early days. Newer inventory could open up as we go after Next and newer platforms, but how do you think about ad loads?
We will always try to grow the number of impressions, and we will always ask ourselves the question: What's the efficient frontier of showing more ads? And the better the ads are, the How is that balance relative to the user experience? Now, one of the trends that I think is actually quite interesting, and I'll use one of the big juggernauts to illustrate this, Instagram increasingly feels like the ads are better content than the content I'm being served by the graph I've built, and that's really kind of remarkable.
Yeah.
It's like turning on the TV to watch the ads versus the programming, right? So I think that tells us that when you get really good, when you have the scale of advertisers, when you have incredible technologies to understand what your users are looking for, and when you can start to use ML and AI to personalize everyone's feed, words like ad load, they start to fade away because the ads become the content. Now, that's the Holy Grail. That's really kind of where everyone wants to go. For us, at this point, because Nextdoor is a utility-centric platform, in many cases, the ads we serve up are. They are valuable pieces of content to our users.
So we just need to get better and better at starting to blend the line between "That's content that I care about, and that's an ad that I have to scroll past to get to the content." And so I think it's a little bit, in my opinion, of the rear view mirror
Yeah .
to think about things like ad load. I think the way we wanna position it much more is: How do we get the quality of advertisers, the quality of targeting, and the quality of personalization to a point where the ads are adding value to the experience? And then users don't think about things like ad load, right? They just keep scrolling because they see valuable content.
Yeah, and I'll just add two things I really wanna reinforce there. One, the ad inventory growth to date has been 100% increase in the content use. We have not changed our ad load. When we talk about things like steady WAU growth, and we much more than steady, such in depth, you know, 20, 30%. If you actually kinda just add those two, multiply those two together, it gives you a sense for the impression growth and what's being driven by. Now, and we take very seriously the idea of ad load, but I think that's really important. Like, ad load is not a part of our impression growth story today, and has not been over the last several years.
And then the other thing, I'll just flip back to a comment I made earlier. When we talk about things like ads being great content, that's in many ways the flip side of the improved cost per click that I mentioned earlier, which is that ad was more relevant for that user. Now, it's obviously delivering better performance for advertisers as well, and so that's a really key piece. And there's even more fundamental things like, as we move through our ad server and we have better density because we have more mid-market customers, there's a lot less repeat ads. You know, that's something that is kind of a mission to eliminate, the idea of that even being possible.
I think there are other things, even just today, that we're making progress on, that get us closer to that idea of great ads being great content.
So we have about two minutes left. That gives us time for some Q&A. If there's a Q&A in the audience, I think.
Thanks, so I have a question, kind of as a user, but also tying into some of what you're saying. Where I am in Texas, like, everyone is on Nextdoor. For everything that you said, like, it's amazing and heartwarming to see five different groups like track a cat who's gone, you know, eight miles, fighting through coyotes, and then find them and reunite them, but one of the other things is because, so like in Texas, where you have these communities and they're, I don't want to say they're isolated, but everything's so spread out, so people maybe don't want to hear all the posts from this other community that an algorithm thinks is close, but people on the ground don't want to see it.
So what the perspective is, trying to get the ads to as many eyeballs as you can, but certain people, back to the user experience, don't wanna, you know, they might wanna have more isolated experiences. And then I see people saying, you know, "How do I change my settings?" And then it goes to an easy user interface, so people can figure that out. 'Cause, you know, a lot of your users aren't very tech savvy and everything, and sort of need hand holding. So, you know, I guess I'm just wondering, how do you sort of triangulate those things? Like trying to appease some users that want limited, say, geographical depth, which is to the detriment of your advertisers, as well as just, you know, making, I guess, the simplest, easiest user interface as possible.
And that's just something I see, and I'm just curious-
Are you in Dallas, by the way? Where are you in
Austin.
Okay, Austin. I'm in Dallas, so-
Oh! Oh, okay.
Good to meet a fellow Texan.
Yeah.
I grew up in Odessa, so I didn't just move to Texas, you know, like many people have. I went back home. So two things. One is, in regards to the user interface and being able to change settings and having users that maybe aren't as sophisticated, whatever the case is, right? The best products in the world are intuitive. So whether we have the most sophisticated audience or the least sophisticated audience, we need to drive really hard to create the most intuitive user experience that we possibly can have, and that's something that you're gonna see with Next. So that part is kind of, I think, table stakes of building a great consumer product.
The second thing you said is actually a little bit more complex, because way back when I started talking about coming back to the company, one of the things that we invented as a pioneering feature of Nextdoor was this thing called Nearby Neighborhoods. So in the early days of Nextdoor, it was only for your neighborhood, which on average was about three hundred households, and that's all the content you saw, just three hundred households around you, which was a little difficult, because if you're in Manhattan, three hundred households could be in the building you're in, whereas if you're in West Texas, that could be a hundred square miles, right? So this is a complex problem. Like getting local right is not trivial, and it's something we've thought about very deeply for fourteen years.
So then we created this concept called Nearby Neighborhoods, where we said, "You know what? If you live on the edge of a neighborhood boundary that we've created, you kind of want to hear from your neighborhood that you associate yourself with, but also the adjacent neighborhood." And so we created that technology. I think we've probably taken that too far, because then we went from Nearby Neighborhoods, which is kind of neighborhood squared, to something we call neighborhood cubed, and we extended the radius even more. And so we have heard the feedback that you mentioned. It's not feedback that we hear everywhere, so we have to tune it the right way. And the way to ultimately solve it is, when we started the company, personalization and AI and ML were not nearly as sophisticated as they are today.
So we had to create some global settings that would apply to all the experiences that people would see. This notion of every single feed being personalized, that was not something that was realistic fourteen years ago. Today, it's completely realistic. So as we think about certain users, there are users who say, "I just want to hear mostly from people whose houses I see every day when I'm driving through the neighborhood and when I'm walking around." Others say, "I'm commuting to work, and between here and wherever I'm working, I want all the information in that area." And so I think in addition to thinking about the system controls and thinking about how we can create intimacy, but at scale, this is not driven by trying to get advertisers more eyeballs. It's not driven by that at all.
It's driven by creating the best experience for our users, and we just have to continue to fine-tune it, and we need to think about it in a more evolved way than the way we did initially, and that's one of those things that we're piling into Next.
So with that, we are over time. Thanks so much. So thank you, Nirav. Thank you, Matt-
Thank you.
Thank you for joining us today. Thank you all for joining.
Great discussion.
Thanks, Ron.
Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
Thank you.