Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Matt Anderson, and I'm Head of Finance and Strategy and Investor Relations at Nextdoor. Welcome to Nextdoor's twenty twenty one Investor Day. We're so glad to have you joining us today. Before we get started, I want to share that during today's event, we will be making statements related to our business that are forward looking statements under federal securities laws.
So please do read the disclaimers on the screen. These statements are not guarantees of future performance. They are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainty. Our actual results could differ materially from the expectations reflected in any forward looking statements. For a discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to filings with the SEC as well as the risks and other important factors discussed in today's presentation.
Additionally, we will be sharing non GAAP financial measures today. A reconciliation of the non GAAP measures to GAAP measures is provided in the presentation. During today's event, we will share more about our product and platform, the neighbors and organizations we serve and our business model. You'll hear first from our CEO, Sarah Fryer. Then you'll hear from four more members of our management team as they each provide a deep dive into the key areas of our business as well as from a member of our Board of Directors.
After that, our CFO, Mike Doyle, will wrap up the presentation with our financials, and then finally, we'll end with Q and A. If you would like to ask a question during the Q and A, please submit your questions in the Ask a Question text box on the webcast console at any point during the course of the event. After today's event, we will be sharing a replay on our Investor Relations website, investors.nextdoor.com, along with the slide deck and transcript. And with that, I'll turn it over to our CEO, Sarah.
Welcome, welcome everyone. Welcome to the neighborhood. Welcome to Nextdoor. Thank you for joining our twenty twenty one Investor Day. We're delighted to share with you more about our story, what we've built, why it's important and ultimately why we think Nextdoor is a phenomenal business and a terrific investment opportunity.
Let me start with the why. When our co founders came together, they realized that despite technology's ability to connect people and communities virtually all across the globe, in actuality people have become more disconnected, especially in real life. And the research backed this up. In his seminal book Bowling Alone, Doctor. Robert Putnam details the many reasons why we've lost touch with our communities and what that impact is on individuals, neighborhoods, societies and the world at large.
He defined a measure, social capital. Social capital is a measure of the number of people you know in your community that you can rely on for help and favors. And Doctor. Putnam's research concludes that all communities when they have more social capital have better outcomes. Crime rates drop, property values increase, education and test scores improve.
It's good for our kids and people in fact live longer in communities where they have the support of their neighbors. Despite the proven benefits, we've been losing social capital. A Pew Research study showed that 29% of Americans claimed to know very few of their neighbors and 28% of Americans said they don't know a single neighbor by name. So Nextdoor was founded on the idea that technology could play a pivotal role in bringing community back, connecting neighborhoods one neighbor at a time. Today, relationships sparked on Nextdoor connect millions of people back to the original social network, their neighborhood.
I joined Nextdoor about two and a half years ago and while there were several reasons I joined, I can really distill it down to two key themes, our purpose and our opportunity. Let's talk purpose. NextEra's purpose is to cultivate a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood they can rely on. Very rarely, a company comes along that has the ability to literally change people's lives for the better, how they communicate, how they connect, how they care for their fellow neighbors. Nextdoor is one of those rare companies that transcends its utility as a business and is making its mark on communities around the world.
I grew up in Northern Ireland in the height of the troubles and I saw communities riven apart by distrust. I was also lucky enough to have a mom and dad who were both highly active in their communities as the HR manager of the local mill and the local nurse. When the first bomb attack shattered our home's windows, it was our neighbors of the opposite religion who helped us board them up until they could be replaced. So what I love about neighborhood is that it brings people back together with a collective purpose. Our neighborhoods aren't just where we live, they're an essential part of who we are, how we connect to those around us and we all have a strong incentive to make them work even when we have differing beliefs or backgrounds.
Our purpose means getting to wake up every day and do fulfilling work and it also attracts amazing people that you want to work with, all of whom come to work with us because of their passion and belief on what we do. I'm excited that today you will meet many more of them. The second big draw for me was our opportunity. Looking at Nextdoor, I saw a data rich environment, which when used appropriately could connect neighbors, businesses and public agencies in unique value added ways. You'll see this when Kieran talks about our product strategy and when Heidi discusses how we monetize and bring value to our customers.
So why do people come to Nextdoor every day? Neighbors turn to Nextdoor for three things: to receive trusted information, give and get help and build real world connections. Let me go just a bit deeper. First, on receiving trusted information. Nextdoor was built on trust.
When on Nextdoor, you know you're talking to real neighbors and you can clearly see which neighborhood they belong to. Second, you get to give and get help or just get things done. Nexstar enables you to access the social capital of your neighborhood. Let me give you an example. In Austin, Texas, 68 year old Emily tried to schedule a COVID vaccine prior to flying out of state for heart surgery, but none of her doctors could get her an appointment soon enough.
She posted on next door to ask for suggestions and a neighbor who she had never met before offered up her appointment for the next morning. Third, building real world connections with those nearby, your neighbors, local businesses and public agencies. Nextdoor is uniquely positioned to help neighbors connect online and take those connections into the real world. For example, in response to the rise in Asian hate crimes, 13 year old Ashlyn based here in the Bay Area posted on Nextdoor to organize a StandForAsians rally in her neighborhood. She received an outpouring of support from the community and over 300 people attended her rally in person.
That's the power of online to offline connections. In the review of our product strategy, Kieran, our Head of Product is going to amplify how Nextdoor rises to meet these core needs, highlighting the top five jobs that neighbors use Nextdoor for today and how our product innovation cycle is accelerating to ensure Nextdoor is the place neighbors turn to for everything local. And so with that, we've built an incredible competitive moat, real people at real addresses, hyper local proximity based conversations, trusted information, the local perspective and of course instant distribution. Businesses create one viral loop on Nextdoor. They often invite their customers to join the platform to give them recommendations because more recommendations equals more customers.
Neighbors come to Nextdoor to connect into their neighborhoods. There's nowhere else where you can find everything local from finding a business to nearby group, to asking a neighbor for a recommendation to finding trusted information from public agencies. Neighbors invite other neighbors especially when they want to activate their neighborhood around a common goal. And for public agencies, Nextdoor becomes essential because they can get their message out in a surgical way to a street, a neighborhood or broadly to a city, a state, even a country. The more density we have on the platform, the better the platform works for everyone in the neighborhood.
It's the network effect in action, not a scale effect, a network effect. The need for hyper local connection is real and lasting. To the first point, our need to connect, particularly to those nearby is what's driven Nextdoor's growth since launch and COVID like all disasters at a local level amplified that need. We also know that local is becoming increasingly more important. 73% of our users say that neighbors are the most important community, 80% expect to work more from home and 75% plan to shop more locally, making Nextdoor not just a great place for community, but also enabling a strong business model.
Today, we're ubiquitous in The United States and growing globally. As of Q2, Nextdoor is in almost one in three U. S. Households. Globally, we have over 63,000,000 verified neighbors on the platform that grew 17% year over year and over 29,000,000 weekly active neighbors.
We've already created an incredible product market fit. When neighbors come to Nextdoor, three months in, 75% of them are still on the platform. Six months in, that's 65% and by twenty four months in, that line begins to asymptote at well above 50%. And we're proud that our retention rate is estimated to be 20 points higher than leading peers. We know that when people come, they come with intent and they stay.
That stickiness is a really big piece of our ongoing growth. We also have strong network effects. In a young neighborhood with 5% to 10% of the households in that neighborhood on the platform, we see good engagement. But as we move up into our top quartile of neighborhood penetration, we start to see engagement levels that are over 2x what we see in the beginning. This is because more content on the platform drives more engagement, which drives more people to join, which drives more content.
That's our flywheel of growth. We see wide adoption across geographies and demographics. In The United States, we're in neighborhoods that span 99 of homes. You'll find us in suburbs, rural areas, urban areas. We work wherever there are neighborhoods to be had.
In fact, you can see our top 10 most engaged neighborhoods span The United States and two of them are even in The UK. They're not city names that you'll recognize. These are true neighborhoods. This underscores the hyper local nature of Nextdoor and the global opportunity we have ahead of us. So why invest in Nextdoor?
Let me give you seven reasons. First, the network effect for both online and offline connections. Nextdoor has a unique value proposition that is relevant to all and by all we mean neighbors and also organizations. Second, each social link is highly valuable because most commerce is local. Third, we face a robust current digital advertising market and there's opportunity for future new revenue models.
Fourth, there are many vectors for sustained revenue growth just doing what we do, including international. Fifth, high barriers to entry. We have a network that is very difficult and time consuming to build, but we've done it. Sixth, we're the only digital neighborhood network that is both purpose driven and authentic. And lastly, a proven team set up for acceleration and execution.
Let me introduce you to our leadership team and Board members, many of whom you'll hear from today. You'll also hear later from our three advisory boards. And I'm proud to share that across our various boards, we are 51% female and 41% underrepresented minorities. Everyone on our leadership team with the exception of our Co Founder Prakash has joined within the last two to three years. During this time, we've transitioned from the early stages of monetization and organizational maturity into the hyper growth and build phase.
Everyone on our leadership team has experienced that at some of the best known and most defining companies of the prior few decades, including Square, Google, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Expedia, Hyatt, Yahoo! And Oracle. And our Board needs no introduction. We have a seasoned world class Board of Directors with a wide range of expertise in finance, consumer Internet business, entrepreneurship, growing and scaling world class companies, content creation and storytelling, philanthropy and building community. We consider these diverse perspectives on our Board imperative to our business success.
We're excited to have Bill Gurley from Benchmark Capital join us a bit later on in the day for Q and A. And we also wanted you to hear from our newest Board members, John Hope Bryant and Andrea Wissham about why they joined us. John shares our passion for building community, spending much of his life's work focused on financial literacy and housing to empower people, particularly those who are underserved. And with the opportunity to contribute and effect change in their communities. Andrea has spent the last two decades working closely with storytellers such as Oprah and now George Lucas, finding creative ways to share powerful stories and bring people together around the globe.
Hi, I'm John Hope Bryant, Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Operation Hope and the Promise Homes Company and Brian Group Ventures. I'm an entrepreneur and someone who's deeply concerned about the state of community. The vision and mission and purpose of a company called Nextdoor really spoke to me. And so when my friend, Sarah Fryer, called me and asked me about the board of directors, well, I'd follow her anywhere, and it appears others would too. This is a rare company that has proven you can do well and do good too.
If you look at the numbers, you look behind the curtains at next door, you find one of the strongest, most resilient, and most relevant companies in America today. I like that they have gotten ahead of the curve and saw the issue of social justice as a positive and not a negative. They rightly so see diversity inclusion as a business strength versus something you tack on in the back end of your business plan. And the board directors now, thanks to Sarah's leadership, is also now more diverse and inclusive. So I think next door is the future.
You should too.
I'm so excited to be on this board, and I'm so excited to be part of a company that understands that at a time like this, meaning and connection mean everything. But at the same time, there's a huge business on the on the other side of that. I'm I'm I'm active on Nextdoor, which is one of the reasons I joined the board. I wanted to be an active participant with the product, and and I love it. It's good.
It's interesting. I love seeing what's on my neighbor's mind. I also love connecting with local businesses and municipalities where I am. And I will say one of the other things I love about being on this board is its leadership. And I was attracted to Sarah Fryer's vision and mission.
It was big and bold and gargantuan, which is exactly what we would have done at Oprah. And and NetSer is achieving that.
To recap, community and connection of the neighborhood is at the heart of the work we do. As Miriam, our Head of Marketing will highlight, purpose driven companies make for sustainable long term businesses and ultimately great investments. Lastly, I want to say thank you to those in the investment community, many of whom we've already partnered with and we are excited to partner with so many more of you over the coming weeks, quarters and years. Before I turn it over to Kieran, who'll share more on that product strategy, we're going to share a video of Penny's story on Nextdoor. Penny is an amazing neighbor in my neighborhood.
We met and connected because of Nextdoor and the pandemic. She activated a help group of over 1,000 people bringing new users to the platform and raising engagement in the neighborhood, all in the spirit of giving and getting help in person. She's connected neighbors to cook a meal, buy and deliver a chair for someone who was bedridden, and drive many people to get vaccinated. She could only do this because of the hyper local nature and trusted nature of Nextdoor.
Penny. People were in desperate need and and very scared. When the pandemic started, people were really stranded. They were sheltering in place. They needed someone to do grocery shopping for them.
We had folks, even people with disabilities. Suddenly, their caregivers weren't arriving. People did have the urge to help, but often they didn't know who to help or how. We describe ourselves as just neighbors helping neighbors. Our next door group took off quite so explosively.
Within a few months,
we had 800 members.
And with Nextdoor, I could match them with someone who was really geographically close to them. That's a sustainable relationship. That person will pop round to say hi. They can always nip out to do shopping. They'll be there to help when there's a wildfire.
It's a real neighbor. If you'd asked me three years ago, how do you feel about your neighborhood? I would have started talking about the trees and the trails and the beautiful weather. You ask me now, I see Marin as full of characters and stories. I love my neighborhood because every single person in my neighborhood and in your neighborhood deserves to be loved.
There is something magical afoot in Marin.
Hi, everyone. My name is Kieran, and I'm the Head of Product here at Nextdoor. I joined in March after ten years at LinkedIn. And like Sarah, I was drawn to Nextdoor because of our team, the purpose and the incredible opportunity ahead. When I was seven, my family and I moved from India to Shelby Township, Michigan, a small neighborhood in a place we knew nothing about.
And I was curious and eager to find a sense of belonging. The activities that became the biggest part of my life, playing basketball and working on old school bulletin board systems, all started with community. I fell in love with these communities because they welcomed me, taught me, and helped me belong. I learned that community is essential for a healthy life and can have a massive positive impact on the world. My local communities helped me become the person I am today.
And if my parents had a platform like Nextdoor, I know they would have found their local communities much sooner. I joined Nextdoor because of the opportunity to bring that sense of local community to every single person in the world. Everyone is and has a neighbor, which speaks to the massive opportunity. I was inspired by the purpose and positive impact that Nextdoor is having on local communities, and I'm incredibly excited to bring this impact to more neighbors through our product roadmap. So let me start with one, how our product works today and then two, what product evolutions can drive exponential growth.
Today, our neighborhoods are full of neighbors and organizations. My neighborhood, Saratoga, a suburb of San Francisco, has neighbors, the people who are living around me, major brands like Safeway where I buy groceries, local agencies like the fire department, and tons of small businesses like Nimbus Salon where I get my haircut. All these neighbors and organizations come to Nextdoor to accomplish hundreds of jobs. But at the core, they come to connect and get things done. We enable this by helping them build active valued community.
Let me start with community. A community is a group of people with a shared interest and feel a sense of belonging. At Nextdoor, that key shared interest is place. It could be as small as my building or floor or as large as the city of Toronto. Valued means trusted and dependable.
In my neighborhood during COVID, many neighbors helped the elderly get groceries. This is one of our key differentiators. Nextdoor communities move from online interactions to helping in the real world and vice versa. Active means we enable neighbors to organize, communicate and exchange value through conversations. These conversations allow neighbors and organizations to accomplish the full breadth of their jobs.
Earlier, Sarah walked through the key reasons neighbors come daily to Nextdoor. I'm going to go a bit deeper, highlighting the five jobs that neighbors use every day. First, neighbors want to stay up to date with what's happening around them. For example, if the local school is starting a fundraising effort or the local newspaper is sharing news about roadwork in town. Or if the power goes out in your neighborhood, you can post to Nextdoor to figure out what happened.
And agencies use it to understand neighbors. The city of Boston used polls to ask how likely is it that you'll take public transportation in the next month. Second, neighbors are constantly trying to find local resources from places to eat, service providers, buying and selling goods and jobs. If I'm a pet owner, I may ask about the best pet groomer nearby. Or in my case, next door is where I found the newest addition to my family, our pet bunny, Bella.
She's super cute, isn't she? And neighbors are constantly looking for plumbers, gardeners or financial advisors. Last week we had a neighbor who asked for a financial advisor and got five responses within a few hours. In fact, next door is often where we see people finding their first jobs. Every summer we see thousands of students across the country posting to find a job tutoring, teaching swimming, or babysitting.
Third, neighbors are looking to discover things to do, like nearby events and activities. This is even more true now with neighbors at home more than ever. My family is always looking for things to do on Friday nights and weekends. Last week, the city of Saratoga shared a movie in the park event for the local neighborhood and a 150 people showed up. Fourth, neighbors are getting together to connect.
They find people who have shared interests like parenting or gardening through groups. In Shell Harbour, Australia, a new mover posts on Nextdoor looking to make new friends. She received overwhelming interest and now meets regularly with her thriving ladies morning tea group. In New York, neighbors set up a rooftop meetup to network and learn more about the city. It's amazing to see people self organize and find each other to connect.
And finally, organizations want to show they are part of the community to grow their own business. Every day we see posts from local businesses looking to hire extra staff, small businesses are sharing about local community events, they are supporting like local football team or a pizza eating challenge, and local schools are running fundraisers to buy new equipment for their sports teams. These are just a few of the jobs that people come to Nextdoor for every day. Neighbors come to Nextdoor every day and they come for many different reasons. As we increase the reasons to come to Nextdoor, more neighbors will come more frequently and that creates more opportunities for monetization.
We've spent ten years at Nextdoor focused on neighborhood innovation, ranging from neighbor focused products like fines and maps to business focused products like business pages and sponsored posts to launching in 10 countries outside of The U. S. But as you can see here, we've increased the velocity of innovation and we intend to keep our focus on innovating for our neighbors as we look to the future. We learn from what the neighbors and organizations are already doing on the platform and build products that simplify their experience. We don't manufacture need, we facilitate it.
Let's take a look at three examples. First, we noticed neighbors posting to ask about the best trick or treat locations and so we created maps. Our treat map, which was sponsored by Party City, helps you find the best treat locations nearby. This one product has grown to spawn many use cases like the Help Map with Walmart for those in need, Cheer Map during Christmas or the current vaccine map sponsored by Albertsons and Moderna. It leads to more neighbors using Nextdoor more frequently.
Second, we saw posts where people were asking about what plants are best for the local soil. We created a groups product to help everyone who has a shared interest around gardening to connect with each other. Immediately there were groups created around the world across everything from gardening to tennis to parenting. There are over 200,000 groups and this leads to more neighbors using Nextdoor more frequently. And third, we saw that Nextdoor neighbors were posting about buying and selling used goods.
So we developed Fines as a more structured and simple way to buy and sell products. Now we have thousands of transactions every single day with over $1,000,000,000 listed on Nextdoor every month and that doesn't even include free listings. It's another reason for more neighbors to visit Nextdoor more frequently. When we focus on delivering value, we drive growth. Our next set of product initiatives are even larger drivers of value and growth.
These initiatives enable more jobs for neighbors already on the platform and will bring a whole new set of neighbors to the platform. First, we are enabling neighbors to connect with more than one neighborhood. Neighbors care about many different neighborhoods in their life. They care about the neighborhood where they work or the neighborhoods where their parents live or a nearby neighborhood they frequent. One of our most common requests is to connect to neighborhoods they might visit or move into.
This will give neighbors the ability to be part of many communities and enables more reasons to use the product every day. Second, we are enabling neighbors to connect with each other and organizations. Every social network grew by allowing people to form a graph. Whether it's a friend graph like Facebook or a professional graph like LinkedIn, we are enabling neighbors to build their local graph. Neighbors will be able to sync their contacts, get recommendations for neighbors they may know and connect.
My kids have a ton of friends and their friends' parents are important to me. I need to have their contact information and understand how they are involved with the local community. I may not want to connect on other platforms like LinkedIn because the context is different, but I need to maintain that relationship. Or I might want to connect with the local coffee shop, gardener, babysitter or kids tutor. This enables neighbors to form a unique local graph that can drive true viral growth.
Third, we are making content that has been trapped inside Nextdoor available through Google Search. As neighbors exchange information, find service providers, organize events, they're creating content on the platform. We will now enable guests to find that content through Google. For example, if you search for the best plumber in Columbus, you'll see results from Nextdoor. People who have never used Nextdoor will suddenly discover and join Nextdoor to become part of the community.
These three fundamental changes will drive more value for neighbors, which leads to even more neighbors to use Nextdoor more frequently. It's an incredibly sustainable and viral growth model. To recap, neighbors use us for many jobs, but ultimately to connect and get things done. We enable them to do this by building an active valued community. We discovered that if we watch what people do on the platform and make it easier, more people use the product and tell others.
We know that value drives growth. By allowing neighbors to connect to many neighborhoods, connect to each other and organizations and allowing guests to find Nextdoor content through Google, we will drive more value and enable viral and exponential growth. All this leads to a larger neighbor base, higher engagement and higher monetization. It's an incredible business model that gets stronger with each new neighbor that joins the flywheel. Before I turn it over to Heidi, let me share a neighbor story.
For Jamal, Nextdoor enabled him to give and get help by relying on proximity based conversation in his community. This is a great example of an active valued community at work and something he could only find on Nextdoor.
I couldn't have asked for a better neighborhood to live in. I realized I wasn't making enough to afford all the new clothes I needed to be prepared for my new job. I decided to post up on Nextdoor, willing to clean somebody's garage, even run errands for them, and barter for shoes. I couldn't even keep up with the comments. Just complete random strangers.
People willing to give me gift cards or take me to the store to buy me even more extra clothes. They said they just wanted to see me succeed. I ended up with more shoes than I could actually need for the next ten years. It put me in the mindset of exactly what I needed to be because I knew I had the backing of my community. I knew that they were behind me a 110%.
I love my neighborhood because when somebody's in need, the community will come together and help each other out.
Hi there, I'm Heidi, Head of Revenue. I joined Nextdoor because I'm incredibly excited about Nextdoor's ability to create opportunity for people and businesses in neighborhoods all over the world. Our Strong to Nextdoor's unique value proposition are giving national brands a local voice and small businesses a local online presence, reaching their best customers, their neighbors. With that, let's turn to our revenue opportunity. I'm going to focus on the digital advertising opportunity, our monetization arm today.
I'll you a view into who our advertisers are, the different ways in which they can engage with our platform and why they love Nextdoor. I'll wrap by sharing with you our near term product roadmap top priorities. As mentioned, our primary TAM today is digital advertising and it's a big and growing market. In 2020, The U. S.
Digital ad market TAM was 143,000,000,000 expected to grow at a 16% CAGR to $262,000,000,000 by 2024. Globally, this is even larger. Even just going into this current TAM is a tremendous revenue opportunity. And on the right of this chart, what you see are other available TAMs to Nextdoor. This includes local home services, local commerce, our vibrant classifieds business, real estate and local events.
Unlike advertising, these potential revenue streams aren't attached to platform impressions growth. Rather, they tap into and build on organic exchanges on the platform. All of this to say, we have additional ways we can monetize neighbors and businesses already on Nextdoor. Our focus today though is growing our ads business and we believe we have a unique opportunity to create value for businesses, small to large, given we are built on trust, local perspective and proximity. It is the power of proximity and that local perspective that is increasingly vital to our day to day.
For example, from an August 2021 Nextdoor member poll, we see 44% of shopping at local businesses now more than pre COVID. And I'd like to remind everyone that local doesn't just mean the local coffee shop or restaurant. It also means the local branches of large sized brands. And local is even more important than ever as a digital advertisers, helping us to accelerate the path to realizing our TAM. I'll now turn to our solutions, why customers come to us and examples of how customers are getting differentiated value.
We build products that allow us to meet customer objectives at every stage of the marketing funnel from awareness to consideration to direct response. And in fact, our revenue is fairly evenly split across objectives. An example of a recent awareness campaign was Traeger who asked and rewarded neighbors for sharing details about the Traeger Hood via submissions for the chance to win a grill and grill kit this summer. To drive consideration, McDonald's shared special offers available at the nearest location which drove store traffic. Another example is a national financial advisor firm who customized a local advisor's name and photo at the neighborhood level.
We can offer valuable customization. For example, advertisers can run ads about saving for a home in a younger neighborhood and about saving for retirement in an older neighborhood. And finally, on the direct response side, to drive action, brands can place contextually relevant ads and finds. For example, if I'm searching for a secondhand couch, I may see an ad from a furniture store in a classifieds section and decide maybe I do want something new. Local deals is another example.
Say, a pet store running ads offering 15% off your first visit or a restaurant advertising happy hour. To bring our suite of solutions to market, we have segmented our customer base into two primary groups, enterprise and SMB. Our field sales team supports our growing base of enterprise customers who are typically medium to large national and global brands. Our SMB customers are smaller in size, self serve and enabled by growth marketing programs. We serve customers across all verticals in both customer segments.
This year, we launched an enterprise vertical sales model, which has enabled us to quickly accelerate our success with verticals endemic to our platform, think home services, retail, financial services and telco. We've since expanded to all verticals and are already seeing strong traction in newer verticals, including CPG, healthcare and travel. There are multiple reasons why businesses come to Nextdoor. I'll share with you five key differentiators that our enterprise customers are particularly excited about. First, they appreciate our unique ability to offer local personalization at scale and highly flexible targeting.
Brands are able to run national campaigns with seamless local customization. We have the ability to target from a street to a neighborhood to a town or city to a state or to the whole country. For example, multi location auto dealers promoting a sale, national banks showcasing local branch managers or national retailers sharing specific store hours or news of a grand opening in relevant neighborhoods. Second, our customers appreciate our ability to quickly innovate and iterate to meet the moment. When our communities need brands to show up in big and impactful ways, we partner with them and build new solutions.
An
example is
the Nextdoor COVID-nineteen vaccine map, which we launched in June. It was sponsored by individual sponsors, Albertsons Companies and Moderna. The map allows neighbors to locate nearby vaccine appointment locations, schedule an appointment and learn about the vaccines educational information from the CDC. We meet the moment both for customers and neighbors. Third, brands get really excited when they learn they're able to drive incremental business for Nextdoor because of our unique and engaged customer base.
You can see that our customer base is incremental to audiences visiting other platforms. Based
on
a comScore study from March 21 of those who visited Nextdoor, eighty two percent didn't visit Snap, sixty three percent didn't visit Twitter and 27% didn't visit Facebook or Messenger in the prior month. And with weekly average users engaging around four times a week, our audience is highly engaged. Nextdoor is one of the most frequently visited consumer products ahead of many more widely recognized names. This is particularly exciting for advertisers who are looking to get in front of neighbors at high frequency. Fourth, advertisers are excited about our first party data.
Because we ask neighbors to sign up with their real name and address, we have user attributes that no other platform does. We also learn from actions taken in the app, including when neighbors join groups like a local gardening group or fitness group. We leverage some of our first party data and insights into our Nextdoor Insights reports in which we offer a look at neighborhood trends and consumer behavior. Our most recent report highlighted trends including new spending habits and how neighbors are increasingly saving and planning ahead for their purchases. These insights give us and advertisers valuable information about the customer base and help inform advertiser campaigns.
For example, we saw that our neighbors were moving in 2020 and this data helped us build our neighborhood welcome kit. In this kit, we partnered with brands to offer recent movers tips and resources to settle into their homes and community. And finally, a fifth reason is our community forward brand. We built a platform that is welcoming to all neighbors and our advertiser partnerships often exemplify and leverage this. For example, last year we worked with H and R Block on a Make Every Block Better initiative.
A sponsored post campaign helped create awareness of the initiative and encouraged neighbors to share communities that could use a boost. Together we selected 10 communities across America and completed their recommended community projects with volunteers and small businesses. We saw submissions from all 50 states two years in a row. Even our ad experience is built with community focus and we've shown that we can align advertiser success with neighborhood best interest. Given the success of our first campaign, we partnered with H and R Block again this year.
To give you a deeper view into how we're delivering value to customers, I'll take you through three more examples of our advertiser partnerships. The first is Hershey. They wanted to promote Visa's and KitKat brands as well as their assortment bags to drive action and awareness. They use sponsored posts to reach a national audience. The results exceeded both Nextdoor and Big Mac benchmarks.
The average ad to cart via Big Mac was 140% above the benchmark. A second example is Walmart who partnered with Nextdoor to launch the Neighbors Helping Neighbors program. The program is to connect vulnerable community members with neighbors who could pick up and deliver their items from a local store. We launched a HelpMap tool for neighbors to pin their house location and indicate they're available to help. Walmart and Sam's Club locations were also pinned to the map and included store hours and other relevant information for shoppers.
Overall, the efforts saw over 10,500,000 unique visitors to HelpMap. 92% of helpees and 94% of helpers reported they recommend the service. And Walmart saw a 25% lift in brand favorability for those who joined a Neighbor Helping Neighbor Group. And third, UpNest has an online marketplace that connects home sellers and buyers with local agents to inform and complete the process. To grow the base of buyers and sellers, UpNest connected with Nextdoor to drive sign ups from neighbors.
Using Nextdoor's localization tool, Upnest was able to substitute the city name and craft information specific to that market. Through this campaign, Upnest came in at 68% below the CPC goals and 48% below the CPA goals. As mentioned, we reach our enterprise customers through our sales force. Our enterprise high touch service model has successfully unlocked significant opportunity for large national and global brands of which some are investing at the millions of dollars level. Enterprise customers account for approximately 65% of our revenue today.
The majority are evergreen customers, meaning they spend every quarter. And our advertiser retention continues to improve year over year. We're excited about the growth as it speaks to the value our customers are getting from Nextdoor. I've talked a lot about who our enterprise advertisers are and why they love us. I'd like for you to hear from them now.
Nextdoor has been a key partner in helping us reach one of our most important segments, movers. By combining Nextdoor's first party anonymized data with our customer segments, we're able to identify move signals that enable us to get ahead of the move to drive a seamless move experience. This approach has really helped us evolve our retention efforts to execute locally at scale.
Hi. I'm Lisa Elliott, and I'm the Lead here at Manningot Leave working across Omnigave. Working with Nextdoor has been great, especially for the launch of test and trace app where we're able to sponsor their health map. This aligned really great with the campaign as we're able to align where communities were giving and receiving support during the pandemic.
Nextdoor's cost per store visit is 32% lower than Foursquare's cost per store visit benchmark.
Nextdoor's managed services is great. It allows LendingTree to partner directly with their experienced team so we can hit key demographics, specifically people interested in refinancing their homes.
Hi. I'm Henry Bulos, head of growth at the Mona Milkman, which is a sustainable convenience grocery delivery service. We operate in very localized areas, and we've been able to leverage Nextdoor's home location data to help us find customers in really specific neighborhoods. We look forward to expanding that partnership as Modern Oakland expands across The UK.
I am Matt Burton. I'm a director of digital acquisition at Leaf Home. We've been working with Nextdoor for about a year now. Our campaigns continue to exceed our goals. Thanks to our amazing partners, Mike and Sarah, and we can't wait to continue to
scale and grow the business.
We're the for marketing and for product development purposes. To Every time we dug into our platform with Nextdoor, we found some really interesting things. The first is that community is alive and well, especially the way Nextdoor does community. The second is that neighbors on Nextdoor are huge advocates for things. Whether it's matchmaking or banks, they will share what they love with their neighbors.
And then finally, important to note, they're also open to trying new things. As a as a point, 42% of neighbors on Nextdoor have tried some of the new hobby this last year. So thanks so much for being a great partner.
I'll now turn to our SMB customer segment. This is typically the local bakery, the plumber, realtor, mattress stores, etcetera. They love us for many of the same reasons that enterprise brands do. But we also provide two other significant and unique value propositions that are specific to SMBs. First, we provide instant distribution and access to all neighbors in a target area.
There is no need to build followers like there is in other platforms. When an SMB posts, the content can be viewed by everyone in the locations they choose. SMBs need to be discovered by people in proximity to the businesses and Nextdoor provides them with the most relevant audience. Everyone who sees content on Nextdoor is a potential customer for that business. Here you can see that Coco de Geek loves us because our content goes to the right audience, neighbors.
And second, neighbors are the most valuable customers because they can be repeat customers. They have high intent and they want to shop local. From our insights reports, know 88% of our neighbors shop local at least once a week. And we know from speaking with SMB partners that our content feels fresh and our truly local on the ground community feels more intimate and valuable than on other platforms. Raw Portraiture, a photography service, tells us they love how they feel support from the community, especially as a woman of color owned business.
Cheeky Spices highlights that they feel the love and support of real people, not just as a brand but as a neighbor, which is a sentiment we often hear. In fact, SMBs often first join as neighbors and then they create the business pages. Businesses of all sizes, but particularly SMBs are frequently mentioned and recommended by neighbors on Nextdoor. So we are able to prove value even before businesses become customers. Here one of our SMBs shares that there is a real value that comes from recommendations from the community.
Of the businesses that have claimed the page, we have over 30,000 active paying customers per month. We see significant opportunity to grow this space especially as we launch initiatives like connections which Kieran mentioned earlier and enhanced business pages. In addition to word-of-mouth, neighbor recommendations and product innovation, we also attract SMBs through paid marketing and e mail marketing. At this time, we have not invested in a sales force for SMBs. With that, I'm going to turn to our primary product focus areas on the advertising side as we look towards the remainder of 2021 and going into 2022.
Our key product investment areas are focused on creating even more value for customers. We'll do this in two ways. One, we will further invest in foundations to improve customer value. For example, we are investing in our new proprietary ad serving platform to drive improved ad relevance and deliver measurable ROI. We are also focused on delivering campaign management tools via our newly launched Ad Center.
We will provide all advertisers hands and keyboard access, the ability to manage accounts programmatically, provide improved measurement and reporting and allow for data ingestion and API integration. Two, we'll innovate in our ads experience. One example of improvements in ad formats and ad relevance is the development of our product listing ads. We are ingesting product feeds from many of our clients and dynamically deciding the most relevant SKU to display to our neighbors. This format is especially relevant for our Finds offering.
More broadly, we'll continue to build unique innovative ad experiences for our partners. In addition to listening to feedback from our customers and sales team, we work with our customer advisory board to guide our advertising product roadmap. Established in 2019, this group of marketing, branding and advertising experts whose experience has spanned iconic global brands like Nike, Target and Bank of America to name a few, advice on best practices, innovative ideas and guidance for advertising initiatives while ensuring value and differentiation for both advertisers and neighbors. With that, I'll turn it over to them so you can hear directly why they partner with us and why they believe we are a unique platform for our advertisers.
Hi, everyone. I'm Jonathan Mildenhall, and I am the Co Founder and Chair of Brand Consultancy, twenty first Century Brand. I have been involved with Nextdoor for a couple of years now, helping Sarah and the leadership team land the brand strategy in the first instance, and then, secondly, as part of the client advisory board. I really, really enjoy being a member of the client advisory board because simply put, it's a bunch of super smart people talking about, the future of things that are important to me, such as the future of community, the future of local organizations, the future of marketing, the future of advertising technology. So the client advisory board is, one of the highlights on my calendar.
I also, encourage a lot of my clients to seriously consider Nextdoor because there isn't a single client that I work with that isn't focusing on community driven marketing. And how can mega brands at huge scale feel incredibly local and work to serve local communities. And serving local communities needs change almost on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis. And Nextdoor can be that platform that can help big clients feel incredibly intimate.
What I hope you took away from today is this. We have a large and growing primary digital advertising TAM with future TAMs that are also available to us and do not depend on supply driven growth, including local commerce. We support our advertisers across the full marketing funnel and in fact our revenue is fairly evenly split between funnel stages. We offer solutions that range from custom, never been done before to off the shelf. We are rapidly building playbooks enabled by our vertical sales model and growth marketing investments.
And our customers come to us from all verticals. While some verticals are endemic to next door, home services, retail, telco and financial services, we see strong traction in other verticals too. For example, today we talked about brands like Moderna, Albertsons, Hershey's and McDonald's. As shared, our customers range from small businesses to large national brands. They come to us because of our unique value proposition.
For enterprise, this is our highly flexible targeting and localization at scale, our unique and incremental engaged customer base, our first party data and neighbor insights as well as our community forward brand. For SMBs, it's our instant distribution and access to neighbors, the most valuable high intent repeat customers. I'm going to end with a video of Ian, a small business owner. When Ian lost his job, he turned to Nextdoor to start a business of his own. The instant distribution that provides access to customers who can immediately make use of his local service was the key to his success.
When I started, it was just house calls. It was one bike at a time. So I had no idea if this was actually going to expand or if it was going to be successful. Pandemic struck. I was unemployed, and I didn't wanna sit around and do nothing.
People literally didn't know how to get their bikes tuned up. So I started doing neighborhood pop up bike shops. And word-of-mouth, obviously, But at a certain point, I can only reach so many people. So I started delving into how can I get the word out on a larger scale? One of the main ways is through Nextdoor.
The community honestly kinda just rallied around the idea. When I realized that I could fully support myself, that was an awesome moment. I love my neighborhood because it gives me a sense of purpose and community and it makes my day feel more fulfilling. If somebody offers me a job and they say, hey, come on back. Why would I?
Hello, everyone. Thank you for the time you spent with us so far on our Investor Day. We'll now take a brief ten minute break. When we return, you'll hear first from our CEO, Sarah and one of our earliest Board members, Bill. Then you'll hear from our Co Founder, Prakash followed by our Head of Marketing, Miriam and finally from our CFO, Mike.
After this, we'll take another ten minute break and then end the day with Q and A. During our Q and A section, we'll have Sarah, Mike, Kieran and Heidi with us to take questions. As a reminder, if you would like to submit a question for us to answer during the Q and A, please enter the question in the Ask a Question text box on your webcast console. With that, we'll turn to our break and we'll see you
in a few minutes.
Great. Thank you, Bill. Thanks for being with us today. We're delighted to have you. Now I got to talk a little bit about the founding story and that spark that came from the Pew Institute survey, but you were there right in the beginning too.
So talk us through a little bit the opportunity that you saw and why you invested in Nextdoor.
Yes. I'm super fortunate to have been involved very early when the idea was, you know, on a PowerPoint slide and hadn't actually been rolled out yet. And the team, the founding team came to us and said, you know, we have this notion of maybe building a social network for the neighborhood. They referenced, you know, HOAs that were maybe using a Yahoo group or something. And I had this unbelievable immediate enthusiasm for the idea because I just started thinking about all the things you could do if you connected that group together.
We had had social networks that started in colleges where you could share birthday pictures with your family or your grandparents that might be in a different place. We had social networks like LinkedIn that had this professional element. It just seemed like this amazing piece of white canvas, to be able to bring together the community, to connect them in that way. And one of the most exciting things for me as a venture capitalist is to see something at that ideation point and then be able to raise up now many years later and see us touching 63,000,000 verified members, 11 countries, it's like super rewarding. So it's been immensely fun journey for me.
All right, Sarah, now over to you. Why don't you share with us your long term vision for Nextdoor?
Sure. Well, taking the crystal ball and pushing it forward, when I look at Nextdoor, it's along the lines of what you said, right? Everything you talked about is global in nature. Everyone is a neighbor. And so when I think about what Nextdoor can be, even over the next three to five years, it has to become the place where people turn to every time they think local.
You talked about owning a graph, right? We own neighborhood and we own local. So there are two components though. Let's talk first about community building, Right? Nextdoor is all about proximity.
The beauty is that when you come to Nextdoor, you're automatically connecting to people who really live around you. So if you are interested in cooking, you could go cook in a kitchen with people that want to cook the same thing as you. If you're interested in gardening, you could have a community garden in the inner city and actually give back something we were talking about earlier. That's really inspiring to me. We also have an ability to show neighbors how to take collective action.
COVID has shown us that, you know, in a in a really amplified way, and we've always known it to be true, right, from things like hurricane Harvey. Today, during COVID, we saw The UK coming out and clapping for the NHS. We saw neighbors coming together and saying, okay, we want to actually, you know, do something within our neighborhood that really improves our neighborhood. So collective action, I think, is also interesting. And then things like the sharing economy, events, and so on, right?
They're all hyper local. So that's community. But the second piece is utility, right? We really spike high on utility as well. So think about I need a plumber, I need a babysitter, I need a dog walker, right?
Again, are all things that happen to me locally. We're just getting started with monetization. So when I look at three to five years, I would expect that we're a platform that can even over monetize relative to others, right? There's no reason why our ARPU today sits at about $10 on a Dow basis relative to Twitter and Pinterest at $60 right? We should be able to monetize on par, I could actually probably argue at a greater level.
I could do.
We have a massive amount of unique data. People tell us when they join where they physically live. And then often during the new user experience, they tell us eight, nine, 10 other things about themselves. And of course we have a proprietary ad platform. So it's pretty exciting three to five years, the platform for the neighbor spiking on community and bringing tremendous utility.
Makes sense. Talk about the near term. What should investors expect for 2021, the next twelve months?
Sure. So the great thing is that so far the trends in 2021 have been really strong. You saw our Q2 numbers. So Verified Neighbors hit 63,000,000 that grew about 17% year over year. Our Wow!
Growth equally built on what was an extraordinary period of time last year during COVID. So we grew 5% year over year. But if you look at it over a two year stack, it was 52%. On top of that, on monetization, right, we saw revenue grow at a really incredible rate, 66% year over year. And part of the driver for that is ARPU, back to my point about how we monetize.
So we are actually seeing those trends happen. So net net, the trends through the 2021 have been terrific and that momentum is continuing. So everything that Kieran talked about in terms of the product roadmap, Heidi talked about in terms of how we go to market, They're all building on each other. And frankly, it's a pretty exciting time to be at Nextdoor.
Sarah, a lot of investors are talking about COVID and they're trying to figure out did certain companies get a COVID bump or did they get hit by COVID? What's going to happen post COVID? And so it's a hot topic of conversation amongst investors. What what did COVID mean for Nextdoor?
COVID amplified some of the trends we're already seeing in our business last year. So the great thing is more people came to the platform during the middle of an emergency, but they came and they stuck around, right? As you know, we have best in class retention rates on the platform. When we look at the cohort that came during COVID, they're about 2.2x more likely to post about 1.2 x more likely to comment. So they're very engaged.
Why is that happening? Frankly, the product has gotten better and better, which is what you should expect of us. But people come and they're pleasantly surprised by what they see. And we know that's from history as well. Right?
We you were here during the time of hurricane Harvey. I already mentioned it in Houston. Houston at that time, everyone came together because neighbors were saving neighbors, but then they stuck around. And to this day, Houston is probably one of our most engaged cities. In terms of beyond that, we're starting to see content creators and groups create a flywheel of growth.
One of the things better lucky than good, we launched a new group's product at the beginning of twenty twenty, actually before the pandemic hit. At that stage, about 2% of people joining Nextdoor for the first time would have joined a group. Today about 20% of people joining the platform join a group. And when you join a group, you're more likely to post and you're much more likely to be retained. And then finally, think in terms of the local play, what I get super excited about and you know this because when you hired me, we talked about it all the time was local business.
So Nextdoor should absolutely be a place where local businesses thrive, particularly those SMBs. We know that neighbors want to shop more locally. They feel that it's more than just buying your groceries from the local grocery store or getting a coffee from a chain. It's about investing in people that you know live in your community. They might go have kids that go to school with your kids, whatever it is.
There's something very personal about sustaining local and more and more people want to do that. Our insights show us that. And so if we can help support those local businesses, I think that's a very long term structural change play for us as well. Okay. So Bill, talk to me a little bit about what you see as our competitive differentiators, right?
As an investor, this is always one of the key questions you ask before you put any money to work is what can this business do to build a moat around itself and is this moat sustainable?
Yeah, and look, that was part of the original thesis. Think it was what those moats were were visible even back then because if you could build out this local graph, if you could connect all the members of a community with the other members of the community, if you start to connect those members with the businesses, then you would have a strong form network effect. I think what we've seen over the years is that the value of next door to a community goes up and up over time as penetration goes up and up. And we see all those communities moving along that same march upward. If think about it this way, I think it really drives home the network effect.
The value to a consumer on Nextdoor is a function of the number of neighbors that are actually on the platform. And in the early days, that was a lot about conversation and community. But today, you know, we've added in other constituents. In many of our communities, the fire, the police, the government play a certain role in the platform. Businesses in the past few years, as you know, have really taken proactively coming in.
And for each of those constituents, the more of them that are on, the value to the other constituent goes up and up and up. And that's, you know, exactly what we're always looking for as an investor, those types of network effects. I get super excited thinking about the business part because there's this oddity. Here we sit twenty five, thirty years after the birth of the Internet and and in, you know, at least in The US, there's no digital way to interact with a local business. Some of them have email addresses.
Some of them, you know, have text. Some of them might have, you know, a page on a different social network, but they're not responsive. They're not alive. And I think we have this massive opportunity to be the connective tissue between local business and neighbors. Sarah, how do advertisers think about ROI on Nextdoor?
Do you have tools for them? How do they measure performance?
Sure. It's a great question because they think about ROI, I think, all the time. They live and breathe it. They probably dream it. So of course, we offer them measurement tools.
Some are third party tools because everyone's learned that they don't want you grading your own homework. Sometimes though, particularly in a proprietary ad platform, you have to use also first party tools. So to that end, I think the first thing with any advertiser as they come to us wanting a campaign is what are they trying to get done? And from that, what will be their KPIs? So for some advertisers, it's CPM, cost per impression.
Some at CPL, cost per lead. Grocery stores often want to measure the cost to get a new neighbor to come into a new store, for example. Example. So it's really key to set up for success. What do you want to do?
And then how will we measure it? And then from there, of course, as I said, we work with third parties, very industry standard and we're continuing to build out more and more of those third parties cause frankly, it's an expectation. We can also do things like foot traffic studies because again, where Nextdoor is unique, we're about online to offline. So getting that foot traffic is very important. And then there's our data insights, which is very differentiated, I think, from a lot of other ways to think about advertising, right?
We put out a quarterly insight series. And with that, we're able
to show
advertisers just even what is the zygest of the neighborhood, right? What do people care about in the moment? So things like our last insight series talked about how they want to see brands showing up as part of the community. They want to know that you are caring about that community. You're doing things that are perhaps how do you recycle?
What sort of packaging are you using? And with that, we see advertisers creating some really interesting campaigns. We talked about H and R Block earlier today, but H and R Block is a great example of a campaign that's all about how to make every block better. And then finally, in terms of how we differentiate to other platforms, we can locally target literally down to 0.1 of a mile. So this is not DMA targeting, this
is
neighborhood targeting. Second, we're getting to neighbors potentially, I would say your best customers because they repeat, right? People get into habits. They buy their coffee in the same place every morning. They go to the same dry cleaners every week or every month.
Neighbors tend to be very engaged, high intent. So they're not just randomly coming to where you are because they got a good deal. We have first party data plus we can add on to that insights and overlays because we know the physical address. And then of course our customer base is really unique. I often show the chart to advertisers that shows that people coming to Nextdoor are not visiting other social media platforms because we cross such a range of demographics, ages, rural, urban, suburban and so on.
So it's a very fertile ground for advertisers and they can measure the success they're getting.
Sarah, talk about advertisers. How do you add more advertisers to the platform? What are they seeing? Why do they find this a compelling place to advertise?
So number one is targeting, right? Of course, we know that to get great return on advertising spend, the ability to target to know that the right ad in front of the right neighbor at the right time, we know we'll have the best possible performance. So I talked about data earlier. Because we have a proprietary ad platform, we are able to do better and better things with targeting. And clearly, we're just at the beginning of this climb.
The second thing that we're seeing is how do we scale our sales and marketing efforts overall. Heidi talked about shifting to a more verticalized model, and we've seen real fruits of that in 2021. We made that change just at the beginning of the year. So things like being able to have a sales force just go after a health care vertical or just go after a financial service vertical, now they're speaking their language, and often that language includes what are the KPIs for this particular campaign. Like I never thought I would see the day where Moderna was advertising on Nextdoor and yet here we have Moderna and Albertsons companies sponsoring the vaccine map.
It's a great example of two brands coming together on a surface that only Nextdoor could do. Beyond a format like maps, we're also seeing the beginning of traction with two other formats, one we call MLA, which is a way to do multiple listings. So a single brand message, but going out in a very localized way. And then the final thing that we're working on right now is what we call PLA or product listing ads. Those are ad formats that are going into surfaces like fines, which is our classified business.
And it just allows for a very context relevant ad in the moment. For example, if I were to go on and search for outdoor furniture, yeah, I might want to see what's on offer in my neighborhood, maybe because it's cheaper, maybe because it's just better for the environment. But if I can also serve, say, a Wayfair ad or a Walmart ad or an IKEA ad, maybe ultimately I prefer the brand new. And so again, it's a way of putting context to the ad, which creates much better performance. Beyond just large advertisers, I don't want to forget about the SMBs.
Clearly we're doing a lot there. 2,000,000 of them have claimed the business page.
And
what's great about their ads is they feel like content. So often they'll advertise an event, that's content, it's not an ad, but both sides are kind of getting value from it. The neighbors getting value and the local business is getting value. So lots to do as far as I can see in terms of building a great business model.
Yes. I'm As an investor and Board member, I'm particularly thrilled with this small business element where they're coming in building ads directly. It shows that they have awareness of the platform. They know what it's there for and how it can impact their business.
That's exactly right. Okay, well bring us home. So I've been telling investors all day what I'm excited about, but what are you excited about when you look at the future?
There's two things that really stand out for me. One I already mentioned, which is when we look down into the details of the company, each of these neighborhoods gets better over time. And so the more people that get on, the more businesses that get on, the more agencies that get on, that actually increases the value of the network to everyone else. As we bring new features and new functions to the table, that utility keeps going up and up and up. And that's super exciting to me.
The second thing is just the optionality of it all. And you and I sit around and ideate all the time about what's possible. But I could go on endlessly about all the different types of things you could do once you have that local graph in place. Once you have these constituents there, how can you connect them and make their lives better? And I know we're just getting started.
Thank you, Bill. That was great. Always great to hear
a
different set of perspectives, particularly from someone that we so admire in terms of your investment acumen. Hopefully, that answered your questions. And of course, those that are still building, We have the rest of the executive team for Q and A a little bit later on. Thank you.
Thanks everyone for tuning into our Q and A with Bill. Before we turn it over to our co founder Prakash, I'm going to share a video of Charla who paints murals on neighbor's garage doors. Charlo wanted to be creative, but he needed access to a canvas, and it needed to be local. Charlo's murals give people interest and pride in their neighborhood, spreading positivity and kindness, exactly what Prakash intended when he started Nextdoor.
We had only been in this city for about six months before we were in lockdown. I need to get to know my neighbors. I need to get out or at least get to see their faces or do something. And my art was a great way of doing that. So I decided to make a post on next door asking for a neighbor or anybody really that will be willing to donate a wall in order for me to create a mural in there.
Fortunately, someone came through. He loved the results so much that he made a post on next door, and then it took off from there. A lot of people start reaching out to me directly and trying to see if they could also get one. Every neighbor that I've met through this project has really welcomed me, feeling like I'm part of where I live and makes me feel like I'm home.
Hello, everyone. I'm Prakash, and I'm one of the cofounders of Nextdoor and also our chief architect. Growing up, community was important to me. I had friends who were supportive of me. I had neighbors whose houses I could go over to play or we could borrow a cup of sugar from.
I knew that my neighbors were there and they had my back. But then growing up, as I moved through college and then eventually moved to San Francisco, I felt very alone. I felt like a stranger in a strange place where I didn't know any of my neighbors and immediately felt a sense of disconnection and loneliness. As you now know, we started Nextdoor because we've seen a precipitous decline in social capital in our local communities. We felt like technology could play an important role in bringing neighbors together for everyday things from finding a babysitter or a plumber to more critical things like banding together after a natural disaster.
When we first started this company, we piloted in a small community called Lorelei right here in California. It was a 90 household neighborhood that was using a listserv and a blog to stay connected with one another. Within a week of beating the HOA, we were able to get almost half of the neighborhood signed up on Nextdoor, using it to organize their annual Halloween parade, to buy and sell things from one another, and to stay informed about what was going on in the community. And with that, we knew we were on to something. We knew that sense of community that existed in that little neighborhood in Lorelei could be something that we could scale out to hundreds of thousands of neighborhoods all around the world.
Nextdoor is uniquely positioned to do this because for ten years, we've been building with the neighborhood front and center. From the ground up, neighbor by neighbor, brick by brick. From the first day we launched our first neighborhood in Lorelei to today, with over 275,000 neighborhoods around the world, we've been building a network like no other. With that, I want to turn to one of the most important underpinnings of what makes our platform what it is today and one of the things that differentiates us among others, neighborly participation on our platform. It's key to the health and ultimately the success of our platform.
Nextdoor has taken an innovative approach to fostering civility on a social platform. Our policies are grounded in kindness, trust and neighborly behavior. This all starts with our neighbor pledge, which we ensure everyone signs as they join our platform. This pledge highlights our values and our expectations to be helpful, not hurtful to be respectful, to never discriminate, and to never post harmful activity. And because of the nature of our platform, we know that our neighbors already have incentive to engage respectfully.
On Nextdoor, you use your real name. And what you post can be seen by the person who lives down the block from you, the person who you see at your child's soccer practice, and even that person you stand behind in line at the local coffee shop. In fact, only 0.7% of posts are reported for moderation by more than one party. This even translates to our business recommendations. We know our neighbors come to Nextdoor to ask for questions and recommendations from their neighbors.
If someone asks, what is the best hair salon in the neighborhood? A neighbor is more likely to respond with a helpful recommendation like, I love Renaissance Salon, rather than a negative response like, definitely not Prakash's hair salon. Of course, like all online platforms, we do have to turn to moderation when we're not seeing the participation we'd hoped for. We work with leading experts, including those on our Neighborhood Vitality Advisory Board to inform our innovative stance on moderation. We also recognize that Nextdoor exists within the cultural zeitgeist.
Our strength is building products at scale. And since our products are being used by millions of people every day in the real world, we have to supplement our work with experts in the fields of social psychology, procedural justice, and community activation to develop our products and to evaluate our progress. Our expert advisory board includes Mark Dunkelman, a fellow in international and public affairs for the Watson Institute at Brown University. We also work with Doctor. Jennifer Eberhardt, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University.
Kelly Harding, an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University's Irving Medical Center, as well as Derek Johnson, CEO and President of the NAACP among others. Our Neighborhood Vitality Advisory Board plays an important role in advising us on how to create thriving communities as well as building deeper connections between neighbors. They help us create products that improve the quality of lives for our neighbors. With that, I'll turn it over to a few members of our Board so you can hear directly from them.
I'm thrilled to be part of Nextdoor. Over the course of the last half century, we've really invested a lot in technology that connects us to the people we love most. Texting, for example, connects people who are know each other well. We're invested a lot in technology that connects people who are really far afield from our own lives, who are have ephemeral connections. That's what Twitter Twitter is.
Nextdoor is connecting a unique building block of society, and I'm thrilled to see it grow, and I hope to help.
Hi, everyone. I'm doctor Kelly Harding. I volunteer my time on the Nextdoor Advisory Board because I truly believe in the mission of Nextdoor and how they are changing the world. There is a tremendous potential for social good. And what is so exciting to me is I see how the leadership is really walking the walk.
They are aligning their actions with the values of the company, and it's tremendously inspiring to see how building kinder, more connected neighborhoods could change humanity.
Our approach to moderation employs a blend of human review and technology. We recognize that each local community is different. Technology helps recognize patterns of behavior, but humans bring empathy and local context that are not easily recognizable by technology, and they're more adaptable to our constantly changing world. On the human side, our approach is threefold. First, we provide product features that enable neighbors to report content that violates our community guidelines.
Our neighbors are our first line of defense when it comes to ensuring neighborly participation on the platform. Second, our neighborhood leads and community reviewers play an important role in reviewing this content and ensuring that Nextdoor remains trusted and kind. Our leads or reviewers, our neighborhood moderators, are volunteers who have opted into our community moderation program. They're often motivated by giving back to their communities and keeping those conversations on Nextdoor Neighborly. We've been impressed by the volume of reviewers and leads that have signed up.
We have hundreds of thousands of people around the world who deeply care about their communities and want to help. The third pillar of our human review system is our internal neighborhood operations team of trained specialists. This team reviews content that has been flagged and takes appropriate action to support the members involved. On the technology side, we employ algorithms to detect harmful content. One example of our technology is the kindness reminder.
Our Kindness Reminder uses machine learning to detect language that potentially violates our community guidelines and encourages the author to consider editing their content before they publish. This prompt, developed in conjunction with Doctor. Jennifer Eberhardt, slows people down and allows them to rethink or edit their comments before posting. Over 30% of the time when people see the kindness reminder, they choose to edit or not publish their content. And after seeing the success of our Kindness Reminder, we use that framework rooted in human psychology to launch similar reminders to improve civility and to discourage the use of misinformation on the platform.
Here, you can see a few of our other applications of the kindness reminder. We work hard to meet the moment while demonstrating Nextdoor's importance to thriving local communities. And we have seen that we have an effective and scalable system in place for moderating content. Before I turn it over to Mariam, I'd like to share a video that features one woman's story but represents a much broader experience. When Sarah Harmeyer moved to a new neighborhood in Texas, she didn't know anyone.
But she trusted that by reaching out to her real neighbors on Nextdoor, she could begin a potluck. She didn't know what to expect, but the result was transformational for her and her neighbors. Take a look.
I think it's really important to be connected to your neighborhood. It's your home base.
I want my neighborhood to feel like home.
I want my kids to feel like they belong in the neighborhood.
I don't know that we are as connected these days.
When my family and I
first moved, we didn't know anyone. We didn't know a soul. I didn't know anybody.
As a single parent moving to a new town,
I was terrified. When I moved to Dallas, when I moved to this neighborhood, I didn't know anybody. I felt our neighborhood could be better connected. The people that were living just outside my door, I didn't know them. I had this idea to invite my neighborhood to dinner.
Well, I went to the Nextdoor app, and I said, if you've never stepped outside of your house to meet your neighbors, would you consider coming this night? I would love to meet you. Yeah. I I was a bit nervous. I didn't know if people would actually show up.
I was excited to be invited.
I was kinda like, mom, why do we have to go to this thing?
Of course, I was nervous.
We walked down that driveway and into the backyard, and I felt at home.
When I saw all these people in my backyard, it was incredible. 91 people showed up that night.
When you sit down for a meal, people just really let their guards down and just really connect over pizza and wine or whatever it is.
I met people I would not have ever met.
Random people interacting and meeting and laughing and sharing stories. You wanna sleep?
I never thought about doing that. You how does he get started?
It takes a lot of courage to kind of take that next step and get out and meet someone face to face.
By the time I left, I felt like I had
new friends. There's nothing new, but something is extraordinary when we reach out to each other as neighbors.
There's something extraordinary when neighbors come together. Sarah Harmeyer says it best. It's a simple story and a reminder of how our neighborhoods can unlock the power of humanity. Hi, my name is Miriam, and I am the Head of Marketing at Nextdoor. I've spent twenty years working at purpose driven companies, and I've seen firsthand the power of purpose to align companies towards a common goal and drive results.
Our purpose is to cultivate a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood they can rely on. And as Jim Collins and others have documented, purpose driven companies outperform the market. Now I've lived in Chelsea, New York for some twenty years. Those who know me know, I love New York City and I love Chelsea. When I think about my neighborhood, I think about Nathaniel and Troy, who live down the street from me.
I think about Bergamot, the French bakery, where I run into neighbors every morning when I'm walking my dog Charlie and getting a cup of coffee. And I think about the EMT station for whom the neighborhood organized a bagel drive in the spring of twenty nineteen. What I love about Nextdoor is that it gives me a way to instantly reach my entire neighborhood to give and get help, to get recommendations and find out when a new restaurant has finally opened as it did the other day on the corner of 20 Fourth And Ninth or simply to see the humanity right next door. Nicole posted the other day to see if someone would be willing to drive her and her 90 year old mom, Lois, to Staten Island so they could visit her father's gravesite. She got 30 responses.
Who says New Yorkers aren't friendly? Since I joined Nextdoor, I have seen firsthand our purpose come to life, how neighborhoods have the potential to unlock our world. And as the world reopens, we are enabling real world connections. From May till July, our data shows that our neighbors talked about hosting an event nearly three times more frequently than in the prior year. Mentions of block parties, they're up 140%.
And kindness, it's just showing up. A 2021 Nextdoor poll showed 75% of neighbors have experienced a recent act of kindness. Nextdoor is living its purpose and driving results. Total global Wow has increased to 29,000,000 in Q2 twenty twenty one, and we expect that momentum to keep going. But what we've learned from our research is what is behind these numbers.
We've heard from neighbors why they love their neighborhoods, why their neighborhoods are so important to them, how they crave a sense of place, how neighborhoods are not just a source of pride, but also a source of identity, and how I may not love all my neighbors, but I sure do love my neighborhood. Now more than ever, we're also seeing culture realigning around the neighborhood. 73% of U. S. Adults say neighbors are one of the most important communities in their lives.
Eighty seven percent of customers are traveling fifteen minutes or less for everyday purchases. 57% do it to keep money close to home and support their community. You've heard us say next door is where you go to connect to the neighborhoods that matter to you. And here is what happens. Neighbors come for the utility and then they stay for the community.
Now let me bring this to life for you by way of three examples. First, let's meet Abraham. A few years ago, moved his family from New Orleans to Kingstown Thompson Center, Virginia, where he didn't know anyone. Abraham is a real estate agent, and so he wanted to connect to new clients. Nextdoor was an easy way to get in front of real people, specifically in the ZIP codes he covered.
He then discovered Nextdoor was a natural place to get recommendations for a tutor for his son and even tracked down a pasta machine that he borrowed to cook a dish he read about from a chef he follows. He then posted on Nextdoor asking, are there any dads or guys that want to get together socially for pool or bowling? 50 neighbors responded and Abraham's dad group was formed and it's going strong. Now that is community. Second, let's meet Dawn.
Dawn lives in Atlanta, and she turned her passion for baking into a business. A couple of years ago, Dawn started Delights by Dawn, a local cupcake shop, and who doesn't like a good cupcake? For her, Nextdoor was an easy way to instantly connect to those nearby. For example, on Nextdoor, she can quickly let neighbors know when and where she's doing pop ups so they can find her. She can also successfully find a social media specialist, which she did.
And in the process, she's also found a community of other small business owners where she can give and get help, utility and community. Now let's meet Cecile. Cecile works at the San Mateo Fire Department in California. She came to Nextdoor to better serve her neighborhood, where as you can imagine, fires are a seasonal occurrence. Cecille uses Nextdoor to build awareness ahead of the wildfire season.
And in the moment of crisis, she's also able to post real time alerts to let neighbors know if there's danger at a street level or at a neighborhood level. Cecile comes to Nextdoor for the utility, and her entire job is about serving her community. Now a unique differentiator for Nextdoor is our relationship with public agencies, from the San Mateo Fire Department to FEMA to the U. K. National Health Services.
95% of the top 100 cities in The U. S. Have at least one verified public agency on Nextdoor, and we are seeing strong adoption in our international markets as well. Now neighbors rely on public agencies, and public agencies know that Nextdoor is a critical tool in connecting in a hyper local way in real time with neighbors. Nextdoor shares a purpose with public agencies of all kinds.
We both want to create neighborhoods that you can rely on, which is why in 2019, we started a public agency advisory board. Our advisers include a range of civic experts from Janelle MacGregor in Tampa, Florida to Francis Zamora in San Francisco. By listening to and working with these agencies, we are creating the tools that enable them to best serve their communities. Now let's hear from Leah who's going to tell us herself how she at the City of Atlanta leverages Nextdoor to help meet the needs of her neighbors.
Hi. My name is Leah LaRue, and I'm the assistant director of neighborhood planning for the City of Atlanta's Department of City Planning. I'm very excited to be a part of the Nextdoor Public Agencies Advisory Board. I appreciate that we have the opportunity to share the perspective of of the great city of Atlanta. We're a very diverse city, and I'm grateful to be the the one that can represent our city, with Nextdoor.
One of the things that we appreciate the most about Nextdoor is that it gives us the ability to reach residents who may not know that we exist. On Nextdoor, we have access to every member of Nextdoor who lives in the city of Atlanta, and that enables us to reach them and to get messages to them about things that are going on in their neighborhood, to invite them to participate in the civic process, to poll them and get their thoughts about any given topic. So we really do appreciate Nextdoor and how it enables us and empowers us to really engage our neighbors here in Atlanta.
And in an age when people everywhere are actively searching for reliable real time information, be it for vaccines, fires, hurricanes, power outages, or even Internet interruptions, new neighbors are showing up on Nextdoor daily. Which brings us back to the topic that I know is top of mind for all of us. What is the opportunity for Nextdoor? And how do we accelerate growth? Well, the answer is simple.
The opportunity is everyone is a neighbor. And accelerating growth, well, now that is exactly what we're poised to do. As you heard from Kieran, there are three fundamental changes that are going to fuel our growth. First, we're widening the aperture of the product. Neighbors can connect not just to one, but all the neighborhoods that matter to them.
So I can keep track of Chelsea, I can check-in on the neighborhood outside of Boston where my son is in school or Laguna Beach where my mother lives or Paris before I get to visit. This means next door equals neighborhoods, that's an S which makes it plural, a natural multiplier that makes it possible and easier for those already engaged to engage more and for more reasons. Two, we're simplifying connections from neighbor to neighbor, neighbor to businesses or public agencies and vice versa. Now you can sync your contacts, give and get recommendations and connect effortlessly. Three, Nextdoor's business pages and Free Finds content are now searchable everywhere.
When my friend went to Google in search of a vintage typewriter for a photo shoot, the results showed up, including listings from Nextdoor neighbors. This allows a whole new set of users to discover Nextdoor, come in for the utility and then stay for the community. Our platform is already global and it's already scalable. Today, we're in 10 countries outside of The U. S.
Our most recent market, Canada, was one of our most successful yet, and we continue to improve our global expansion playbook. In terms of raw numbers, we're currently in over 45,000,000 homes around the world. If we reach global penetration in line with our more mature U. S. Neighborhoods, we have the opportunity to grow our reach by 4.5x to two zero three million households just in our current markets.
And you know what? There's still a lot of cities and countries to go. So in short, we are just getting started. If everyone is a neighbor and next door equals neighborhood, we are well on our way to cultivating a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood to rely on. In other words, our purpose powered company is poised to make the world our neighborhood.
Now before I pass it to Mike to walk you through the numbers, let me share a news clip from Channel seven in Australia that underscores this. The coverage is from May and it points to the product market fit that Nextdoor is experiencing around the globe and the competitive differentiation and growth that is driving it.
A growing number of communities are turning off the social media giants. That's because of a new app connecting Sydney siders with people who live in your neighborhood. Those who use it are claiming it's friendlier and safer than Facebook.
When Shannon Gunston resettled in Western Sydney, she felt nothing short of unsettled.
When I was growing up, like, we knew all of our neighbors, but these days, everyone seems to be Yeah. Sort of hiding away.
Like one in four Australians, she felt lonely and alienated.
Just wanting, you know, someone to talk to or something to do, and I was really shocked at how many people were in the same situation as me.
Unable to find friends on Facebook, she signed up to Nextdoor, a platform in which you can only connect with your actual neighbors. First, you'll need to get verified by proving where you live, meaning you're still handing over that personal data.
Because it's a safe and trusted place, people then catch up in real life.
At the peak of last year's pandemic, people really turned to social media seeking new connections, and Nextdoor recorded a 90% increase in the number of people signing up to their service. Now here in Coogee, one in four residents are using the platform. It's the same in Mona Vale where one in four households have signed up, one in five in Cherrybrook, and one in nine in Ride. And almost half of those on the platform from the Central Coast are 40.
Making new friends and meaningful social connections is really critical to health and well-being.
Yeah. It's definitely given me a lot of independence and confidence.
And genuine friendship. Tom Hartley, seven News.
Hi. I'm Mike Doyle, Nextdoor's CFO. Before we begin, our lawyers would like me to remind you that we will be making forward looking statements today and you can read their handiwork in the disclaimers. Thank you for joining us today. I joined Nextdoor three years ago.
I spent a dozen years prior to my joining Nextdoor living in Asia and Latin America, helping to take two consumer Internet companies public and helping them to scale. During this time, I experienced firsthand what it's like to arrive in a strange new neighborhood and try to figure out which way is up. Boy, I would have loved to have had Nextdoor then. Today, you've heard from various members of our executive team as they talked about the powerful business model we have created. Perhaps you've heard them mention that Nextdoor equals neighborhoods, and indeed it does.
But to a CFO, Nextdoor also equals the world's definitive platform for businesses to reach, engage and convert local audiences. And it is in my capacity as the Chief Financial Officer of Nextdoor that I would like to share some financial highlights which reinforce our value proposition, drove our recent performance and serve as the underpinning of our financial outlook. First, we offer a differentiated set of business solutions to meet the campaign objectives of our advertisers and local businesses. All of our monetization strategies are outcome driven, whether they are designed to help businesses to create awareness, build reputation, drive intent or enable local action. In other words, we enable our advertiser customers to achieve their campaign objectives and as a result encourage retention and future spend on the platform.
Points two and three shown here are important to consider in combination. As Sarah noted earlier, we have best in class neighbor retention more than sixty five percent six months after joining the platform and we have proven network effects where deeper penetration of neighborhoods drives better engagement. This gives us great confidence to continue to invest aggressively in product driven growth and member acquisition as we scale our base of engaged members. We understand the behavior of engaged neighbors on the platform, the ARPU outcome and the resulting return on investment, which brings me to the fourth point here on ARPU. We are early to monetization and our ARPU expansion can be driven by many levers, which can be bucketed into three groups.
We can deepen engagement. Our product roadmap is focused here. ARPU opportunity grows by driving more sessions on the platform, up from the four times per week that we are currently at. And by increasing the depth of each session, we're driving more impressions per session. We can optimize our supply of impressions by increasing fill rates, owning advertiser relationships directly and through better targeting, which improves advertiser performance and as a result, CPMs.
We also have unique ad services such as maps, local sponsorships and local deals, which are not purely impression driven revenue models and can provide leverage to ARPU. Not only are we early in optimizing the levers of ARPU, but we are also early in the maturation of our revenue products. In other words, as you're hearing as a common theme today, we are only just getting started. We have products in all stages of development to address the objectives of our advertising partners. One example is our sponsored maps product.
To date, this has been seasonal like our Halloween treat map or holiday cheer map, but we've heard from advertisers that they would like the product to be available year round. Another example is our new self serve ad platform, which increases our advertiser TAM by allowing local businesses with smaller budgets to spend on the platform in ways our enterprise sales force could not support historically. And a final example is our addition of contextual ads in our Finds Classified product, where advertisers can display new products served up besides similar used items posted by members. In the same vein, our international businesses are untapped. We are monetizing in only one market outside The U.
S, which is The U. K. We've seen the same member adoption, retention and engagement trends across the portfolio and know that with scale, we've been able to attract and retain advertisers in The U. K. In the same way we have in The U.
S. We are in one in six households in The UK and one in five in London. And as we've reached these levels of penetration and engagement, advertisers have taken notice and seen strong performance on the platform. This gives us great confidence in our ability to monetize in other markets outside The U. S.
Let's take a step back and look at how far we've come over the past three years. We have scale. We are in one in three households in The U. S. In a network of neighborhoods that cover 99% of U.
S. Households. We have more than 63,000,000 verified users on our platform, including 10,000,000 in international markets outside of The U. S. This number has grown 122% over the last three years.
We're at a 30% compound annual growth rate. Importantly, we are scaling organically. In 2020, 68% of our new neighbors came to the platform through earned media, word-of-mouth and product driven initiatives, and we are growing even faster in international markets. We also invest in paid marketing and have developed a highly efficient mailed invitation channel where neighbors are able to invite their neighbors onto the platform. Between the 2018 and the second quarter of twenty twenty one, our most recently reported quarter, we grew weekly active users by 123%.
Our growth in Wow! Has been driven by our value proposition, a compelling combination of utility and community and our product innovations and launches that have led to both increased engagement from our neighbors and top of the funnel growth. Our extraordinary growth and engagement in the 2020 was accelerated by the pandemic when neighbors found real value in Nextdoor. We are very pleased with our sustained growth in Wow since that time, which now exceeds $29,000,000 In the second quarter of twenty twenty one, international Wow's represented 17% of the total, an increase from 14% in the prior year quarter. We are seeing stickiness, retention and engagement in line with The U.
S, which highlights that the relevance, draw and utility of our platform is a global opportunity. For example, Canada Wow grew over 100% year on year in Q2 of twenty twenty one, giving us confidence that our strategy is global, scalable and repeatable. And we think we have lots of runway for future Wow growth as we convert more of our verified users to Wow's and add more verified users and convert them to Wow's over time. Over the past three years through Q2 of twenty twenty one, our revenue has grown 298% or at a 58% CAGR. Our revenue started with our sponsorships product in the newsfeed.
And over time, we've added new segments like small and medium businesses, new products like local deals, new verticals like CPG and healthcare and new countries, notably The UK, where we have just started monetizing. In Q2 twenty twenty one, our revenue grew 66% year on year with strength in both enterprise as well as SMB. On the enterprise side, we had our strongest ever advertiser account retention and continued to improve advertiser diversity. Local was another bright spot in 2021 as we saw growth in our customer base and in ad budgets. We benefited from a great response to two end of the year 2020 initiatives.
First, we expanded the Neighborhood Sponsorships product to include all verticals. Newly opened verticals now represent more than 50% of the sponsorship revenue. And second, we enabled recurring local deals where local businesses can set their promotions to automatically renew. This now represents more than half of our deal volume. We continue to enhance customer value by determining which SMB products work for which types of businesses and then better tailoring acquisition messaging and targeting.
We are also working on creating unified ad buying experience for our SMBs and enterprises to provide all advertisers equal access to our ad inventory, which helps us optimize supply and CPMs. In the second quarter, we drove improvements in the onboarding process for local businesses wanting to claim their business page, which drove a 57% year on year increase in page claims as a result. This top of the funnel growth provides momentum to local business revenue in the second half. In Q2 of twenty twenty one, annualized ARPU of $6.28 grew 58% year over year and 78% over the three years from 2018 to Q2 of twenty twenty one. Our sustained higher engagement is a primary driver of our increased monetization.
We are also able to better optimize our supply to drive higher fill rates, improve our mix of campaigns sold through direct relationships with advertisers and improve ad targeting, which drove higher CPMs. As I mentioned earlier, we have three levers for increasing ARPU. The first is through increasing engagement. The second is through improved ad delivery or in other words, optimization of the unique supply we have on the platform. And lastly, we grow ARPU through revenue not directly tied to impressions such as maps and neighborhood sponsorships.
We also have numerous under monetized surfaces on the platform such as fines, popular posts and groups. As you can see from our steady ARPU growth in The U. S, we are making progress across all three fronts. As a reminder, we are just getting started when it comes to ARPU. This slide for us really highlights that runway.
If we look at Twitter, for example, we're about one third their size, but only one sixth the ARPU. And there's no structural reason why we should under monetize. In fact, if you think about our unique value proposition that Heidi walked you through, things like our unique and incremental audience, high intent, engaged, repeat customers and their desire to spend locally, one could even make the case that we should exceed the monetization level of our peers. Our outperformance in Q2 has allowed us to increase our full year revenue estimate by $3,000,000 taking us to $181,000,000 and increasing our 2021 expected growth rate to 47% year on year. The tailwind of product driven growth, increasing engagement and new monetization opportunities gives us confidence in our ability to deliver sustained growth.
We have also increased our revenue expectation in 2022 by $3,000,000 to $252,000,000 Importantly, this plan does not assume the use of proceeds from this transaction, which we can deploy to further accelerate growth. Let's turn now to our investments. Our plan is to remain in investment mode for the next several years given the tremendous opportunity we believe lies ahead and the exciting and rich product roadmap that we've built out. Investment for us will come from three categories. In order of priority and size of spend, these are product development, sales and marketing and finally, general and administrative capacity.
Let's start with product development. 54% of our nearly 600 employees are in product development and engineering. We will always prioritize teams that drive our product and neighborhood ecosystem. I want to remind you of a slide that Kieran showed earlier today, which highlighted our focus on innovation and meeting the needs of neighbors and businesses on the platform. We are excited by our product roadmap that now enables you to connect to other neighbors, follow multiple neighborhoods and share content broadly, whether you're a business or a neighbor.
This will continue to drive engagement and monetization. We are also investing end to end across our proprietary ad platform to improve the ROI we deliver for advertisers as well as enabling a self serve advertising model, which greatly expands our addressable market. Our goal is to make it easy for advertisers to access our unique inventory, reach neighbors and deliver and measure results. Investment in our product roadmap is how we will bring more members to the platform and deepen engagement. It is also how we'll attract and retain more advertisers.
And you can see here that we are efficiently scaling our R and D investment. In 2021, we are expecting a 22% increase in R and D efficiency despite ongoing investment in building the team and investing in product. Our second source of investment is in sales and marketing. We also plan to invest in member acquisition to grow top of the funnel both in The U. S.
And international markets as we expand the business across the world. We grow top of funnel in four ways. The first is through neighbors inviting neighbors through mailed invitations and our newly launched contact sync feature. The second is through broader sharing of content. One example of this is AnyOne content, which we launched in Q4 of twenty twenty.
The third is through organic word-of-mouth, which drove 68% of growth in 2020. Fourth, we supplement with low CPA paid marketing. Across all our countries and channels, we see a five quarter payback on our paid acquisition spend based on our current ARPU. Our high levels of organically acquired members further reduce our effective CPAs. Our third category of investment will be in G and A.
These are the teams and systems that enable world class financial analysis and insights which drive our business decisions as well as build scalable financial operations. It also includes building the legal, people and IT teams needed to help scale the business. I also want to touch on international as an area of investment and one that will become increasingly important as we look ahead. In 2021, one of our focus areas has been on growing our largest international markets, The UK, Canada, Australia and The Netherlands. Overall, international neighbor growth is showing great momentum.
And as shown in our last video, we are continuing to invest to deepen penetration in the markets we are currently in. We also plan to expand our reach beyond those markets given that everyone is a neighbor. The investment in growth is driving results. U. K.
Neighbors on the platform have increased six times in the last three years and Canada has doubled in the last twelve months. And international revenue has scaled even faster than our impressive neighbor and engagement growth. In Q2 twenty twenty one, UK revenue tripled year over year. Our strong revenue growth performance and ARPU expansion story is driven by deeper engagement, scaling new revenue streams like sponsorships and improved advertiser retention. We are in investment mode and focused on driving growth, yet we are already seeing leverage drive significant improvements in EBITDA margins.
We expect to improve margins by 13 percentage points in 2021 and another 10 points in 2022, leading towards long term EBITDA margins of approximately 40%. Our business model is well established as is the path to our EBITDA margin targets. Before I recap our investment thesis, I'd like to share what may be a familiar diagram, but one that is relevant and proven with our business model, the flywheel of growth. We see the pattern play out in all of our neighborhoods and in new market launches. As penetration increases, so does engagement.
This isn't just neighbor engagement, but business engagement and public agency engagement. All stakeholders benefit from the moats we've established and are investing behind. Our platform is real people at real addresses. We facilitate hyper local messaging and actions, we provide local perspectives and give local businesses instant distribution. And this is all built on a foundation of trust.
When we are able to improve neighbor engagement, we expand the unique audience for advertisers which allows for better targeting, larger budgets and improved performance. This drives advertiser retention and evergreen campaigns which improves unit economics and enables us to reinvest in the business. This flywheel is in motion and will turbocharge our growth. To end, I want to recap our investment thesis. First, next door equals neighborhoods.
Next door is where you go to connect to the neighborhoods that matter to you. This gives us a strong competitive moat. Second, we are a purpose driven brand. This informs what we do and how we operate. And as Miriam noted, we also know purpose driven companies outperform the market.
Third and fourth, we have a unique value proposition built on trusted information, physical proximity and a uniquely local perspective. We have more than 63,000,000 verified neighbors today and high retention rates. We know that when people come to Nextdoor, they stay engaged and active on the platform. Fifth, we have two major opportunities in engaging neighbors and businesses on the platform. Our total addressable market is both large and underpenetrated.
Everyone is a neighbor. We believe our near term opportunity is to grow to more than 200,000,000 households and the long term opportunity is to grow to over 300,000,000. And this is just in our existing markets. We will continue to expand in new markets as well. On the revenue side, we know the digital ad space is massive and only continuing to grow.
The most important thing for us today is to stay focused on our existing opportunity in the ad space to attract new advertisers, upsell existing advertisers, grow our scale and build out internationally. Sixth, we have spent ten years focused on neighborhood innovation. In order to achieve our scale goals, we're increasing product development and velocity and investing behind initiatives on both the neighbor and advertiser side of the business. And finally, each of our multiple drivers of monetization, we are only just scratching the surface. Thank you for your time and attention.
We'll now take a ten minute break and then Sarah, Kieran, Heidi and I will be back and look forward to your questions.
We're excited to welcome you back to Q and A and to welcome Sarah, Mike, Kieran, Heidi to address your questions. So we'll jump right in. Let's begin with Sarah with the first question. Sarah, can you tell us more about your management philosophy and top priorities for Nextdoor for the year?
Great. Thanks, Matt. So first of all, in terms of my management philosophy, for those of you who know me or have worked with me, you'll know it always starts with people first. That's my mantra. So in terms of my work so far at Nextdoor, it's been getting the right leadership team in place, the right board in place, the right set of advisory boards and of course this great Nextdoor team that I get to come to work with every day.
In terms of my leadership team, I'm so excited that you got to hear from many of them today and there's many more that you hear from over time. What they bring of course is knowing how to grow at scale, how to put up build out the right people, products and processes that really allow us to scale quickly but efficiently and really build not just for the short term but for the medium and the long term. Second, it's about leading with purpose, right? Why we all show up in the morning at Nextdoor is to cultivate a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood to rely on. Why that's important is it brings great people, it retains great people, but it's also our competitive differentiator, particularly in a world right now that's quite tech phobic.
At Nextdoor it creates a strong business model as well. Over 70% of the new neighbors to platform come through word-of-mouth. And then finally we need to make sure that we keep growing growth and engagement. I'm staring at Karen right now because a lot of that comes from the product. So at the top level it's things like notifications, connections, a much more modern feel for the feed, all of which Karen has already talked to.
We also want to be the go to place for businesses to help them find new customers and upsell their current customers. That's true for large brands who want to be hyper local but at a national scale, but it's also true for those SMBs who are often the lifeblood of our communities. They're often time starved and they're often quite tech savvy. So it's important we build products for them as well. And then finally public agencies.
These are the people right on the front line. We are the only platform that can go from a broad almost national and beyond level right down to that surgical level of a neighborhood even down to a street level. And we want to make sure that we're there for them to help them get the message out to their constituents.
Alright. That segues nicely to our next question, which is for you, Karen. What is your strategy for adding new neighborhoods and to further increase penetration in existing ones?
Yeah. Let's break this down to just two major areas. One is launching new neighborhoods, and two is increasing penetration in existing neighborhoods. So on the launching new neighborhoods, everything starts with a community team. We have community teams in every single neighborhood.
And they are the first few neighbors that join, and then they invite other neighbors onto the platform. And we're adding some new features like the ability to be able to connect with other neighbors that'll drive more viral growth from those first few invites. So imagine it like this. You'll be able to sync your contacts, and then we'll recommend neighbors you may know so that you can invite them onto the platform. So for all of you that might be parents, think about your kids, friends, parents.
You probably wanna connect with them. You probably wanna maintain their contact information. And now on Nextdoor, you'll be able to do that with connect. This is the fundamental aspect of a rut morality on our system. Don't forget, the whole ecosystem is made up of more than just neighbors.
It includes businesses, agencies, and local organizations like the PTA, and they're all activated by this community team. Remember that we're in over 275,000 neighborhoods over 11 countries, so we know how to do this. We've been doing it for over ten years. And recently, we launched Canada Canada, and it was our most successful launch to date. This gives us confidence that our strategy is repeatable and scalable globally.
Second, let's talk about penetrating existing neighborhoods. So in The US, our neighborhoods currently cover 99% of all homes. So our primary goal is to actually grow penetration in those neighborhoods. So we're doing that by launching a few additional features. One, we're allowing you to connect to more neighborhoods, which means you can connect to not just the place you live, but potentially the place you work or maybe where your parents live or a neighborhood you're about to visit or one that you want to move to.
We're also going to enable you to connect to groups, businesses, and agencies. So you might want to connect to the local fire fire department to see if there's any local fires in the area or the local bakery so you know when the latest croissants are coming out of the oven. Or you might want to connect to a tennis group so that you can actually go out and play some tennis. And all of these connections, what it does is it drives improved relevance because of machine learning improvements in our feed, notifications, search, and our ad platform.
Great Sarah this next question is for you. What are the characteristics of the most penetrated neighborhoods versus the least penetrated. And what does a typical neighbor look like.
Okay so in terms of overall penetration, we're remember already remember in one in three U. S. Households, so we covered 99% of all the households as Karen mentioned. So you'll find next door in suburbs, in urban areas, in rural areas, we're on the coast, we're in Middle America. We really are across every neighborhood and every neighbor.
You saw on the map earlier if you look at our top 10 most engaged neighborhoods, really span the country. In fact, two of them are in The UK, back home for me. We do see a lot of traction in suburban and rural and urban more so than rural at the moment and given the most Americans live in and around cities we think our biggest opportunity is to continue the penetration and engagement there in particular. And that's why we're investing in the product initiatives that Kieran talked about. You asked about what does a typical neighbor look like or what are our most successful neighborhoods.
There isn't, I would say, a specific We do see that the good thing is that as we penetrate more neighborhoods the number of neighbors who are active increases right that is a true not scale effect but an actual network effect in action. So our top quartile neighbors we see over 65% of the households in that neighborhood come on the platform. And in the top 10 neighborhoods we see over 60% of those households or those people come daily to the platform. So it's really exciting to know that Nextdoor is a daily use case. In terms of if you look at if we get everyone up into that top quartile level of engagement, that's almost a 2.3 X number of households that we grow to about a 2.7 X growth in Wow.
So we are just getting started. There's so much more ahead of us. And then finally in terms of groups that we target from a go to market perspective, four really came to the forefront this year. Millennial parents,
on
the movers, rapid responders and urban enthusiasts. The first we already do great ones. So kind of the 25 to 34 age group. Once people start to have kids, there's a lot on them for next door. New movers is a natural one and it's a place for being able to add interesting advertiser links and as well as Heidi showed during her presentation.
Rapid responders this year we took a real surgical note to that and went after those looking for vaccine- information. And so why we- hooked up with folks like Albertson's companies and Moderna to do the vaccine map. And then urban enthusiasts is a big target for us this year but it's going to be ongoing. Lots more that we can do particularly in for example vertical cities but it's an exciting way to be moving into 2022, and we think that the products that we're building is going to help us grow both more new neighbors and more neighbors engaging with the platform.
Alright. Karen, we have another question for you. How are neighbors engaging most with the app? And what are the most important KPIs that you're measuring when it comes to neighborhood activity? Is it time spent on app?
So time spent is not a metric that we're optimizing for. Neighbors come to us for a combination of utility and community. So on the utility side, think about apps like Amazon. You probably aren't going to ask, you know, how much time are people spending in an Amazon app. It's about whether people are able to find what they're looking for and are able to purchase the good.
And so similarly, on our platform on Nextdoor, people come here and maybe they're looking for a plumber. And our goal is to make that process as efficient as possible. Can you find the plumber, and can you get your issue fixed in your house? On the community side, we're not an entertainment focused social media site. That's just not who we are.
We're more about driving conversations that take those online conversations and move you into the offline world. So for example, it's potentially finding a local tennis group and then actually moving to a to where you can play tennis in the real world. So both these community and utility use cases are driven through conversations. So that's primarily about helping you discover what you wanna do and then moving that into real world interactions. And so we primarily focus on driving contributors.
Contributors are the number of people that are posting, commenting, reacting, and messaging on the platform. And so when we see these conversations increase, we can see that neighbors are getting more value. And when you get more value, you get more weekly active users. And so to us, weekly active users is a hyper important output metric. Many of our weekly active users come almost four times a week, which gives us an indication that real community and utility are being built, and things are going to continue to grow.
Great. I think with that, you can take us home with one last question, Karen, which is how are you thinking about wild growth for the rest of 2021 and going into 2022?
Sure. So FY twenty was pretty spectacular for us coming off an amazing growth and engagement in Q two of FY twenty. It was driven primarily by neighbors who are finding value during the pandemic. And so on the growth side, we're excited to share that we're over 29,000,000 weekly active users now, which is higher than we were at during COVID nineteen highs. And over the two year annualized growth in Q two of FY twenty one, it's in the mid 20 range.
And the retention is incredible, 75% at three months and greater than 50% at two years. So what this really means is that when neighbors come to Nextdoor, and they may come for a number of reasons, they all stay or a large percentage of them stay and get engaged. So let's talk a little bit about the engagement side. In FY twenty, we had double digit year over year growth in engagement, and we expect a similar trend in FY 2021. In fact, the bright spot for us is the international weekly active users.
In FY 2020, we're about 14% of total members were weekly active users. And today, we're at 17% of total members are weekly active users. So not only is the top of funnel growing, not only are there more neighbors joining and total more neighbors on the platform, but we're actually increasing the percentage of those that are becoming weekly active users. And while we don't provide weekly active user guidance, we do expect growth is up in the second half of the year. This is because of less difficult comps as well as some of the product innovation that we all talked about, which are things like the contact sync, connecting to neighbors, organizations, as well as groups.
Heidi, we have a question for you. Sarah talked about advertiser ROI during our conversation with Bill. Can you help us understand how Nextdoor measures ROI and how that compares to peers?
Absolutely. Thanks, Matt. So as a reminder, we are in the very early days of monetization here at Nextdoor. And having said that, measurement is our top priority because ultimately advertisers come to us expecting return investments. So it's at the core of everything that we do and everything we invest in currently.
And we offer a range of platform based measurement tools and third party tools on investing aggressively in enhancing this area with our own proprietary ad serving platform. We provide reporting in all the standard measurement areas including reach, conversion, share voice, sentiment for both brand and product. And we measure through both pixel placement and through our first sorry, pixel placement and through our third party verification as well as conducting offline foot traffic studies. What's unique to next door is our data insights. Through our first party data.
We offer a look at neighborhood trends and consumer behavior that you can't get anywhere else. And you can get really excited about our sixth installment or insight series, which is coming out very soon. And to your second question, how our our eye compares to those appears. It's really important to keep in mind that our advertisers love us because we offer areas that other platforms can't compete in, which is owning the space of truly local targeting. Sarah talked about it earlier.
We have a unique ability to target all the way down to the street level. So 0.1 mile radius. Neighbors are repeat customers and they want to shop local. We know that from our insights, we know that 88% of neighbors are shopping local at least once a week and 44% are shopping local more than ever. And when it comes to engagement and high intent, are the platform to be on.
For instance, we are driving foot traffic where our cost per visit is 32 below the four square benchmark. And finally, we have a unique customer base. 27% of our neighbors are not active on Facebook and that's 52% for Pinterest. What's really exciting is that we are growing our advertiser base and we are getting increasingly better retaining them, which signals our advertisers are getting value. We had our strongest advertiser retention in Q2 of this year.
Heidi, have another question for you. As you look to the second half of this year and to 2022, which of your revenue offerings presents the largest opportunity?
It's a very good question,
but here's what we're really excited about. We're excited about that in Q2 of this year, our growth of 66% came from strength across the business. And what that signals is because we are early in our monetization, we have so much opportunity and upside still. And so for instance, by enabling self-service, we're going to instantly give businesses access to advertise our advertising solutions, and those are businesses of all shapes and sizes. Right?
So you're democratizing access to our platform. It just opens up for many more businesses to engage with us and to buy our advertising solutions. The largest share of revenue is currently coming from our sponsors post offering which is in our newsfeed followed by our neighborhood sponsorships. And we see many opportunities for growth still in our newsfeed as well as in more nascent services like fines and maps. And when you look at revenue by segment, approximately 65% of revenue is coming from our enterprise segment today.
In the near term, we expect for enterprise to continue to drive the majority of our revenue. What's really exciting here is that over half of the revenue that we seeing in enterprise is actually coming from campaigns that are evergreen on our platform. We do expect SMBs to have an increasing share of revenue growth over time and we are riding on that great momentum right now with small businesses. We expect for that to continue. As a reminder, and I really want to highlight this, Nextdoor is incredibly differentiated because we own the local graph.
I mentioned this earlier, but it's such a core and key part to why we are different than any other platform. And there are three stakeholders in our platform. Again, it's neighbors, it's businesses, and it's local agencies and that gives us so much opportunity. And when you think about our opportunity in general when it comes to monetization, it really comes down to three core areas. It's about increasing our supply which is increasing engagement on our platform.
It's about optimizing our ad delivery and that comes down to things like higher fill rates as well as improving the ads performance. And then third, it is creating sources of revenue that are not directly tied to our impressions. And that includes finding ways to really give our advertisers value on maps and in groups.
Great. Heidi, what are the biggest asks you hear from advertisers that are informing your product roadmap and go to market strategy? What are you most excited about?
The core ask is always do you care about value? So advertisers come to us looking for value, and they'll come back to us and stay with us if they're actually getting value. And in the simplest level, this really comes down to reach and targeting. And we're gonna get better in both of these areas as we continue to scale. And targeting as we sort of look at it will improve, primarily in the short term as we transition off of Google's Ad Manager onto our own proprietary ad server.
We also focus on areas like campaign management and automation tools. And that's through our newly launched Neighborhood Ad Center. As I spoke about in the presentation, we are going to enable self serve campaign reporting, self serve buys on our platform. We're going to enable opportunities to do data ingestion which is going to further enhance targeting and we're going to open up for things like API integrations which I spoke about earlier on today as well. In addition, I want to underscore that we are investing in our sales and marketing functions to really support our advertising partners and as you heard me talk about in the presentation, we have verticalized our sales team as of January and we saw the benefit of that already in Q2 where we had a really, really strong retention rate coming in.
We also continue to build our unique ad experiences. I mentioned many of them in the presentation today. Really excited about our product listing ads, our multi location advertising offering, and what we can do on maps. Much option and so many possibilities. An example was the vaccine map that I mentioned earlier as well.
And when you ask about like what are you really the most excited about, well it's really about giving our customers hands and keyboards access which is transparency and it is empowerment and the opportunity to use our automation tools which means to be more easily accessible to businesses of of all shapes and sizes. This combined with our focus on helping customers create and get differentiated value on our platform and our investments in measurement will really help them both see and understand the value that Nextdoor can give for them And that makes for a very exciting near term road map.
Sarah, we have a question back to you. How do you think about Nextdoor versus other players in the local space?
Great. Thanks. So first of all, most social networks start by planting a flag, right? And they want to own a graph. And for us, Nextdoor is about the local graph.
Right? Nextdoor equals neighborhoods. Nextdoor equals neighbors. Nextdoor equals local. So very differentiated from say the professional graph or your friends and family graph.
What do you get when you own the local graph? Well, it's a number of really core pieces of differentiation. Number one, proximity based interactions. So when you come to Nextdoor, you're automatically connected to everyone nearby and that's great for those who want to build an active valued community. It's great for local businesses.
It's great for those national brands. Second thing is you get to also think about online to offline connections. Again, differentiated from other platforms where I might go on and maybe talk about cooking and share recipes, but I probably can't go into someone's kitchen because it's unlikely that they would be my next door neighbor versus on next door, they are my neighbor. So the chances of us cooking together is actually quite high. If I have a walking group, of course, I want those people to be nearby so we can walk together.
If I'm Abraham like Miriam talked about earlier and I do that dad's group, want to be able to meet in real life. So online to offline, a huge potential differentiator
for
us or huge actual differentiator for us. On Nextdoor everyone's a real person, right? We've taken the time to confirm you and that means when you compare us to say other platforms that might do things like recommendations, you're getting a review that is local by the person who lives in that town and that village and that city and there's a lot more trust in that review. Often you recognize the person themselves they might be that parent that Kieran talked about that you know from standing on the side of the soccer pitch and now you can see they're recommending a local restaurant or maybe a plumber. There's a lot of trust involved there.
Nextdoor is all about utility. So unlike platforms that might be focused on entertainment, we're really thinking about what's that near term needs. I already talked about the plumber or the babysitter or maybe you just are super active in your community and you want a way to bring people's energy together around a local cause. I see that happen all the time in my neighborhood. In terms of thinking about businesses, right, what's great on Nextdoor is that neighbors have a high intent and desire to spend locally.
Heidi talked about the fact that 88% of neighbors spend locally at least once per week and they have a vested in keeping those businesses alive and thriving. We have insights that others do not have because we've taken the time to aggregate all of those neighbors, 63,000,000 of them. That is a lot of data on which to base insights and really provide quantifiable outcomes for businesses. And for advertising that advertisers that ability to do local but at a national scale, no one else can do that. So we really feel we've built something unique and differentiated here.
There is no next door to. Right? Next door equals the neighborhood. Next door is all about local.
Karen, we have an additional question for you. Which of the product launches that you mentioned today are you most excited about for user growth and engagement?
Sure. I think I mentioned this in the presentation earlier, but the three strategies we talked about that I'm super excited about, one is connecting with more than one neighborhood. So the ability to be able to connect with, for example, my work neighborhood or where my parents live or where I might wanna move to or if you are gonna go visit somewhere, being able to see what's happening in that neighborhood. Just being able to connect to more neighborhoods will just increase the amount of liquidity I have in my feed, more conversations, more engaging with other people on the platform. The second is connecting with neighbors and organizations.
So as Sarah mentioned and Heidi mentioned, the local graph is the most important thing to us. And so while social networks have built up things like a friend graph or a professional graph, the local graph is really unique. A local graph is a set of relationships with people that are directly around you. Those are people and businesses. So for example, the local bakery or maybe your your gardener or maybe somebody else that is nearby that you wanna establish a relationship with.
Maybe it's your tennis partner. And then third, we're gonna be making content that has been trapped inside Nextdoor available through Google search. So now when you search for the best plumber in your area, Nextdoor results will start to show up, which enable people to discover some of the value of Nextdoor before they've even joined, and they can become part of the community and get more utility. So these product changes, they're not all independent of each other. They're kind of compound on top of each other.
Right? More neighbors are joining, which enables them to create more connections to neighborhoods, to other people, which bring more people, which adds more content, which is then available in the Google search, which brings more neighbors. And so it's kind of a loop. It's an increased loop, and this drives to more depth of engagement as well as increased monetizations.
Mike, we get to turn it over to you now. We have a question. Can you help us understand the major drivers of ARPU uplift year over year and quarter over quarter?
Sure. We're really pleased with our Q two ARPU growth of 58% year on year, which is an acceleration from the 26% year on year that we saw in in Q one. The primary driver, is that our sustained higher engagement has provided us more monetization opportunities. But we're also seeing higher CPMs across the platform. We're up 32% year on year.
We're seeing improved advertiser diversity, which drives performance and yield. We're seeing higher fill rates, which were up nine percentage points year on year. And our recent verticalization that that Heidi talked about in our our go to market improvements are helping to drive a higher mix of direct sold advertising campaigns which were up five percentage points year on year and an increased mix of evergreen spend by advertisers. We also saw momentum from newer revenue streams as a result of product releases such as our opening up of local sponsorships to all verticals on the platform and allowing local deals to be recurring. The important thing is we have three groups of levers to drive ARPU, in the future and they all have runway.
So we have increasing engagement and that's where our product roadmap is focused. We can improve our ad delivery. As you know, we're a platform with significant proprietary data we're investing in ML and data science disciplines to drive value to advertisers and our neighbors. And revenue that's not directly tied to impressions, which Heidi mentioned, including maps, our local advertising products like local search and local sponsorship.
Mike, as a follow on to the last question, how are you thinking about ARPU relative to peers?
Yeah. So I think a common refrain today is is the point that we're just getting started. So we're much earlier in the development of our ad platform than our peers, including expanding our addressable market with things like self serve, unifying our ad inventory across the platform, and improving our ad targeting and our ad formats. Today, we're roughly half the size of Pinterest and a third the size of Twitter in terms of Dow, but we're a sixth in in ARPU. And we believe there's no structural reason why we should under monetize versus our peers.
You heard this from Sarah and Heidi earlier today. We have a compelling value proposition to advertisers with a unique base of high intent engaged customers that wanna spend locally. We're adding more neighbors on the platform and our product efforts to drive engagement are working.
Kieran, so Mike talked about a few major drivers of ARPU. Is ad load a lever? What is your ability to increase ad load?
So as a quick reminder, we're a utility based product. So often ads are the right way to answer questions that neighbors have on the platform. For example, if people are looking for what are the best rates for refinancing, although it may come in the form of an ad, it's primarily the question that you're trying to answer. So although there's more opportunity here, our outlook is not premised on increasing ad load. In fact, the three areas of revenue growth that we're really focused on is increasing engagement, improving our ad delivery optimization, and other non impression based revenue sources exactly as how Heidi and Mike talked about it.
So on the increasing engagement side, we've talked about this. It's about adding features like connecting to more neighborhoods, connecting to organizations and other neighbors, and making our content available to Google search. On the ad delivery optimization side, it's about better targeting on our first party data, our unique unique local graph based first party data, and then smarter audience expansion. This is just using machine learning to make sure that when an advertiser puts an ad out, it gets to the right person and new ad formats. And the third is non impression based revenue sources like Heidi and Matt talked about, which is maps and groups sponsorships.
So we have a lot of runway for growth before we start thinking about avenues like higher ad load.
So we had some questions about our advertiser base. Mhmm. Heidi, which verticals are seeing the most traction today?
Yeah. So when we initially launched our enterprise ads business, we focused on primarily four verticals, of which, the first one was home services where we partnered with brands like LeafGuard and Trigger. We focused on financial services, which, were brands like Leading LendingTree, which you heard in our, presentation earlier today,
and
retail, imagine party cities of the world. Right? And then finally, tech and telco, where we partnered with with Comcast and and similar brands in that space. And these four verticals continue to be our very fast growing endemic verticals on the platform. Now when we verticalized earlier this year, we did it deliberately to really understand better what fit we would have in the marketplace when it comes to other verticals.
And so we rolled out a model where we allowed ourselves to staff against verticals like healthcare, travel, entertainment, CPG, and government. And what's really exciting to see is that we're seeing strong early success in all of these verticals. You heard me talk about today, like, for instance, our success with grocery stores. You heard me talk about the vaccine map that we launched in q two of this year, but we did it in partnership with Albertsons and Albertsons companies and Moderna. And you heard us talk about restaurant chains like McDonald's that are running hyper local ads at scale on our platform.
When it comes to SMBs, we initially launched SMBs, as was mentioned earlier, in just a couple of verticals. Of those verticals, examples were real estate and home services. And in Q4 of last year, we decided to increase our our reach. So actually opening it up for many more verticals on the platform. And so we ended up opening up fully to all verticals and seeing strong traction, across some of these newer verticals coming in, which is really exciting because it just means that our products and our solutions are resonated more broadly from where we had a starting point.
So lots of upside still across all verticals.
Mike, the next question is for you. What are the key levers to achieving profitability? What is the right time frame to breakeven? And what are the big areas of investment on the horizon?
Yeah. I think the the first point to understand is we are very much in investment mode for the next several years. This is given the tremendous opportunity we believe lies ahead of us and the confidence that we have in our product roadmap that we have described for you today. Our business model is well established as is the path to our EBITDA margin targets. In particular, we're seeing benefit from high incremental gross margins in our business.
In the long term, we are working towards an EBITDA margin of around 40%. But in the near term, we're investing to maximize the opportunity in front of Things like continuing to grow our audience and deepening engagement will add incremental margin and we're investing in teams to unlock more viral growth. We have the opportunity to drive ARPU higher through increased engagement and by accelerating the investment in our advertising platform and we're investing in product development such as video and machine learning capabilities. We have the opportunity to deepen investments in international markets and we plan to be opportunistic with M and A. In Q2, we beat our expectations and increased our full year guidance and revenue growth will drive leverage in the business.
We have and we have great confidence in our ability to sustain high levels of revenue growth going forward.
Mike, we have one more for you. Do you have plans for monetization beyond that?
Well, Heidi talked earlier, today about the the current TAM in the digital, ad space, and there's so much opportunity in this addressable market, especially given the expected growth of more than 80% over the next three years in The US, and we have international markets as well. We have a unique audience, ad surfaces, and ad formats for our advertisers with the ability to help them deliver hyper local messaging at the neighborhood level. We have differentiated ad services that are not supply driven like maps, local sponsorships, and search. We have new ad formats like lead gen, video, and contextual ads on fines, our our classifieds marketplace. We're continuing to attract new advertisers and increase budgets with existing advertisers and grow our share in the digital ad space.
And the verticalization that we talked about has allowed us to open up new verticals like CPG and healthcare. And we have local businesses that are claiming their business pages every day, which gives us the opportunity to introduce our paid advertising products to them, which will help them to grow their businesses. A common refrain today has been that we're just getting started and we're really excited about the many innovations in our product pipeline for advertisers, but the most important thing for us right now is to stay focused and focused on the ad opportunity.
So we're on to our final question, and Sarah, this is for you. How do you think about the strategy and timing for international rollout? Are there structural differences in The US versus international markets?
So the great thing is that our TAM is global. Everyone is a neighbor. Literally, everyone in the world is a neighbor. In 2021, to Mike's point about focus, we wanted to stay focused on growth in existing markets and that felt like the right thing to do. I believe it has been the right thing to do.
But absolutely as we go into 2022, we're starting to think about how do we open up more broadly. We have seen big strides in our playbook for international. We're much more efficient as we enter new countries, Canada being a prime example where as Kieran said earlier, it's our latest market to enter and it's been our fastest growing to date. And that's because we're learning things like how to shift from maybe a country model to more of a city model. How to think about bringing quickly that community team to bear.
How do we bring them products for all of our stakeholders? So not only neighbors but also businesses and public agencies. So as new countries come on board, they get the benefit of all of the product development we've just done in the last couple of years. In terms of how we're doing in some of these countries to give you confidence, UK is a great example. Today we're in one in six households.
We're on track to be in one in five by the end of this year. If you look at a city like London, which is really important from an advertiser standpoint, already in one in five and I love London because it actually is almost like a series of small villages coming alive on the platform. The growth in international is outpacing growth in The United States and it's even ahead of our own expectations. So as we think about international we continue to evolve the playbook. We know that we want to do more.
We know that we can do more. And of course we know that the business model works as well and that's important because when you put a dollar down you want to know that there's line of sight to a strong ROI on that dollar. So, yeah, watch the space, but we absolutely think that 2022 is a year when we start to go broader.
So that marks our final question for the day. On behalf of the whole Nextdoor team, like to say thank you to our audience, for your participation and your thoughtful questions. We know there are many more that we didn't get a chance to answer here, so we look fall look forward to following up with each of you directly. On behalf of Nextdoor, thank you for your time today.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.