The Arena Group Holdings, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the Arena Group fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Rob Fink, Investor Relations at Arena Group. You may begin.

Thank you, Operator, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Hosting the call today are Ross Levinson, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, Doug Smith, Chief Financial Officer, and Andrew Kraft, Chief Operating Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to note that some of the comments made during this presentation may include forward-looking statements. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking. Forward-looking statements relate to future events or future performance and include, without limitation, statements concerning the company's business strategy, future revenues, market growth, capital requirements, product introduction, and expansion plans, and the adequacy of the company's funding. Other statements contained in the presentation that are not historical facts are also forward-looking statements. The company cautions investors that any forward-looking statements presented in this presentation or that the company may orally or in writing make from time to time based on the beliefs, assumptions made by, and information currently available to the company. Such statements are based on assumptions, and the actual outcome will be affected by known and unknown risks, trends, uncertainties, and factors that are beyond the company's control or ability to predict. Although the company believes its assumptions are reasonable, however, these assumptions are not guarantees of future performance, and some will inevitably prove to be incorrect. As a result, the company's actual future results can be expected to differ from its expectations, and those differences may be material. Accordingly, investors should be cautious in relying on forward-looking statements, which are based only on known results and trends at the time that they are made, and anticipate future results or trends. Certain risks are discussed in the company's filings with the SEC. In addition, there will be references made to non-GAAP financial measures, adjusted EBITDA. Information regarding the reconciliation of this non-gap-to-gap measure can be found in the press release that was issued this afternoon on Arena Group's investor relations website at investors.arenagroup.net. With all that said, I'd like to turn the call over to Ross. Ross, the call is yours.

Thank you, Rob, and thanks to everyone for joining us here today. 2022 was a milestone year for the Arena Group. We have become a highly efficient company with top line and bottom line growth, successful acquisitions and partnerships, and a diversified business model. At our core, our technology platform can support rapid expansion without growing expenses significantly, which has led to our first full year adjusted EBITDA profits with record revenues and lower operating expenses. Some highlights I'd like to share with you before I hand the call over to Doug Smith, our CFO, to take you deeper into the numbers. For the full year, we generated nearly $221 million in revenue, an all time high for our company, driven by a 74% year over year increase in digital advertising. For the first time, we generated a profit for the full year, delivering $3.1 million of adjusted EBITDA in 2022. That's a $15 million improvement from 2021. For context, this represents a positive swing of more than $26 million from 2020. We cut operating expenses by nearly $19 million year over year, which helped us improve operating income by $28 million in 2022. We acquired Parade, a morning read, which has become SI Golf, Men's Journal, Men's Fitness, Surfer, Powder, Bike, Skateboarder, and more than 70 additional domains last year, while also adding over 100 new digital sites to our platform, significantly increasing the breadth and depth of brands utilizing our technology. We have built a dynamic media and tech leader. We grew page views by nearly 50% last year to over 6 billion, our organic page view growth was 32%. We improved advertising yield, direct sales revenue, and licensing and syndication revenue while launching an e-commerce business across our brands and expanding our online betting efforts. Since 2019, we've grown our revenue from $53 million to more than $220 million and believe we will generate between $255 million and 270 million this year without any further acquisitions, all while reducing certain operating expenses. We now own nearly 50 properties and power another 225 brands who utilize our technology and sales apparatus with a combined audience of more than 109 monthly users, according to Comscore. We're now the 32nd largest publisher in the United States, according to Comscore, in January. and that's up from number 47 a year ago. Let me speak to the progress at specific properties. Our sports vertical continues to see robust growth, with total page views up 76% to 3.6 billion during the year. The Sports Illustrated Media Group was number four in the Comscore sports rankings in January of 2023. As compared to full year 21, The spun delivered 70% growth in page views and fan nation grew by 66%. The street had a particularly strong year with page views up 139% to 326 million. In October, the street opened its news desk and studio on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, enhancing our ability to bring dynamic real-time video content to our investor audience. Our lifestyle vertical continues to grow nicely. During the year, Parade and Pet Helpful both delivered strong growth in page views, with Parade growing by 44% and Pet Helpful growing by over 360%. We have expanded into a fourth vertical, Men's Lifestyle, through our acquisition of Men's Journal in December. And we are very optimistic that it will see strong growth in the coming months as we apply our proprietary playbook and technology. Across our platform, we continue to focus on expanding our distribution and reducing our overall cost of content. We now have recirculation in place across our entire ecosystem, as well as third-party distribution to over 600 outlets, which helped generate 127% growth in our licensing and syndication revenue in 2022. We enter 2023 poised for accelerating full-year adjusted EBITDA and robust cash generation, all while continuing to deliver outstanding revenue growth. I also want to be transparent about our challenges. First and foremost, we continue to aggressively manage a shrinking print subscription and print ad business. But once again in 2022, our Sports Illustrated Magazine business generated strong cash contribution and we expect it will again in 2023 with 1.2 million paying and profitable subscribers. Doug will get into the details in a minute. We have aggressively managed this business to deliver premium journalism, a beautiful product, and profits. We also managed a rapid shutdown of the parade print operations the minute we saw it turn negative and quickly and successfully transitioned our partnerships and audience to digital-only content. Since then, we've seen strong adoption of our Parade e-edition with more than 500 newspapers offering the digital magazine to their subscribers. Parade's digital presence continues to grow, with Parade.com users nearly doubling since we added it to our platform in June 2022, reaching 21 million unique users in January of 2023, according to Comscore. At the street, while digital subscriptions have decreased by 39% since Jim Cramer left in October of 2021, engagement growth at thestreet.com has driven monthly page views up 261% from 8.8 million in December of 21 to 31.6 million in December of 22. Clearly, there are also some inefficiencies in our capital structure. Some investors have noted that we have a significant debt expiration in December of this year. For the past several months, we have been working with our board and external advisors to either replace or extend our current facilities, and I expect we will have an announcement to make in the near term. This is one of my top priorities as CEO, and I am confident that we will secure a positive result shortly. The results we are sharing today especially given the backdrop of a challenging economic time, demonstrate the strength of our business plan and the differentiated foundation we've created over the past two years. The strategic investments that we made in late 2020 and 2021 to transform our business have clearly worked. While others in the industry are struggling, our growth continues to accelerate both on the top and bottom lines. I'm extremely proud of the growth that we've achieved across all of our verticals this quarter. I'd like to share more about our outlook for 2023, but first, I'd like to let Doug Smith, our Chief Financial Officer, take you through the numbers. Doug?