Digital Turbine, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Digital Turbine Fiscal First Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Brian Bartholomew, Senior Vice President, Capital Markets and Strategy. Please go ahead, sir.

Thanks, Rocco. Good afternoon. Welcome to the Digital Turbine Fiscal Year 2023 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. Joining me on the call today to discuss our results are CEO Bill Stone and CFO Barrett Garrison. Before we get started, I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on our current assumptions, expectations, and beliefs, including projected operating metrics, future products and services, anticipated market demand, and other forward-looking topics. Although we believe that our assumptions are reasonable, they are not guarantees of future performance and some will inevitably prove to be incorrect. Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. For discussion of the risk factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those contemplated by our forward-looking statements, please refer to the documents we filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Also during this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP measures of our performance. Non-GAAP measures are not substitutes for GAAP measures. Please refer to today's press release for important information about the limitations of using non-GAAP measures, as well as reconciliations of the non-GAAP financial results to the most comparable GAAP measures. Now I will turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Bill Stone.

Thanks, Brian, and thank you all for joining our call tonight. I know the vast majority of investors are currently focused on the macro environment headwinds and what they mean for our business versus the micro operational details. And while I'm going to cover both in my prepared remarks, I'd like to begin the remarks talking about the macro environment and what it means to us before diving into our results for the first quarter. The macro environment we've experienced over the last two and a half years has been the most dynamic I've seen in my 30-year career. It's required companies to operate lean while being nimble, flexible, and open to change. I'd like to break out some macro commentary across how we think about it in four primary dimensions. The COVID pandemic, inflationary pressures, recessionary, economic growth fears, and geopolitical concerns. First on the COVID pandemic, the biggest negative impact we've seen in our business results has been the slow decision-making at large companies, resulting in a longer sales cycle for items such as signing up new operators and OEMs, licensing partners for single tap, or adding new features with our existing partners. With many now back in the office, Combined with our ability to travel without restrictions to most locations and the need for our partners to find new income streams in the current recessionary environment, we've seen a positive trend of progress over the past few months. And while this progress is not yet impacting our current results, we're optimistic it is a lead indicator of being a growth catalyst for us over the next year. COVID also changed the work model for tech companies. Today, we are seeing more in-person work here at DT helping with our innovation, collaboration, and connection to the company versus working 100% remote. Companies that figure out a hybrid model versus a one-size-fits-all model for the future of work will have a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Also, on the lockdown restrictions going away, I believe there's an investor hypothesis that the output of that dynamic is that the engagement in applications especially games, is being reduced as society returns to outdoor and office activities. And while that may be true across certain publishers and app titles, at a macro level, we've been able to increase our supply of ad impressions and have not seen a decrease. We are increasing our penetration in many verticals, and I'll discuss those later in my remarks. Second, regarding inflation, We don't have input costs or physical supply chain issues, so we are largely insulated from inflationary pressures. There are two exceptions to this. First, we've seen a modest impact caused on device supply chain issues with our operator and OEM partners. And secondly, we have experienced some modest wage pressures for hiring tech talent. But as you can see in our OpEx and device results, it has had a minimal impact on our overall results. as we have now expanded EBITDA margins for five consecutive quarters. And also, as you'll see in our gross margins, compared to last year, they have expanded, which we believe is a sign of strength in an inflationary environment. Third, on recessionary fears, as many other public ad tech companies have already reported, we've seen a slowdown in the digital ad market as advertisers rethink their investment strategies. This has negatively impacted our recent results in near-term outlook. However, we expect this to be a temporary versus permanent dynamic. The overwhelming feedback we see in the market is that the majority of ad spenders are more in a wait and see mode versus a we don't have money to spend mode. And the reason for this is simple. Since the invention of the printing press hundreds of years ago, ad dollars have always followed eyeballs. And our eyeballs continue to be on digital devices. Today in 2022, we spend nearly four hours per day on our devices compared to less than three hours in 2018. And if that dynamic ever changes, we could see a long-term shift or decline in digital ad spends, but that's not something we see as probable. In fact, we believe the opposite. And combining this macro dynamic with the micro value of our differentiated end-to-end platform will provide a more compelling reason for customers to expand their partnerships with us compared to other less differentiated or commoditized competitors. I'll provide more details later in my remarks, but we do believe the slowdown is not just temporary, but also important for investors to understand the nuances of this dynamic by geography, ad type, operating system, business vertical, direct versus response, and brand, and so on. And finally, on geopolitics, there's two main issues impacting our results. The first is the war in Ukraine, where we have seen some very minor impacts from stopping our direct involvement in Russia, slowing spends in Europe relative to other geographies, and juggling product development activities, given a few of our development teams were operating in the Ukraine. The second geopolitical area has been China, where the combination of zero COVID policy, limiting our ability to travel to China, and broader U.S.-China relations have slowed our progress with Chinese OEMs trying to expand outside of China. Neither of these geopolitical issues are materially impacting our results, but they are minor headwinds nonetheless. Now turning to our first quarter results, we had $188.6 million of revenue, $51.9 million of EBITDA, and $0.38 of non-GAAP earnings per share. That is an as-reported growth of 19% for revenues, 30% for EBITDA, and 12% for non-GAAP earnings per share. In addition, since we've now closed our ad colony and fiber transactions, we've had exactly one full year of comparisons. And over that past year, we've delivered nearly $150 million of free cash flow since we've been reporting as one company. That compares to less than $50 million of free cash flow for the 12 months prior to the acquisitions, or in other words, a 200% increase. So before we dive into the specifics, I do want to highlight and remind investors just how much our company has achieved in such a short amount of time, and in particular, our ability to showcase the operating leverage of the model. We're not just profitable, but growing that profit faster than the top line. And during the first quarter, we specifically made a conscious effort to focus on gross margins versus top line growth. Non-GAAP gross profit improved sequentially from 49% to 50% compared to a reported margin of 45% in the first quarter of last year. Being able to increase our margins in this current inflationary environment is something we are proud of. Combined with strong operating expense management, it's driven EBITDA margin expansion to 28%, which is an all-time high for us. For our on-device business, the driver of these results were driven by more devices, more products, and more media relationships. In particular, we added over 67 million devices in the June quarter, which compares to 63 million devices in the June quarter last year. This growth was predominantly internationally, as U.S. device sales were marginally down year over year. I was pleased with our continued improvement in revenue per device, or RPD. In the United States, our RPD of over $5 per device was an all-time high for us and up approximately 20% year-over-year. Given the direct response or performance nature of our on-device platform, seeing that double-digit growth is encouraging. We also made progress on our single-tap licensing product. As we stated on the last earnings call, the plan is to begin seeing revenue in the current quarter and ramp the product in our third quarter. We are on track against this plan and anticipate having more than five partners live by the end of this September quarter and north of 10 by the December quarter. The product market fit is very strong. And similar to the early days of our business where we launched one mobile operator or OEM and then ramped another and added another and so on, it layered on nice sequential growth as we expanded both the depth and breadth of carriers and OEMs. I expect a similar trend to emerge with our single tap licensing business, and ultimately we expect this part of the single tap business to exceed our current direct approach for single tap. On the app growth platform, or AGP business, our year over year revenue growth was 13%. The slowing in macro digital ad spend is being offset with a higher volume of impressions as we continue to add additional supply into the market. From a regional perspective, we continue to maintain a diversified global footprint. In the current quarter, we saw impressions grow year over year across all of our major regions, with APAC showing particular strength. In EMEA, impressions were up double digits from the prior year, despite the geopolitical challenges in Eastern Europe. We have seen sequential slowing impressions but it's primarily been offset by higher rates or ECPMs in both North America and the Europe-Middle East-Africa region. And looking at placement types, we've also maintained a balanced portfolio weighted between banner, interstitials, and video. Banner saw accelerated growth this past year with the continued expansion of the digital turbine exchange and DSP. Video growth for the quarter was in the high teens, and continues to be the placement format we believe has the most future upside. In addition to this volume growth, we also saw improvements in our HEP margins that went from a pro forma 67% last June to 71% this quarter, as we were able to drive improved revenue synergies across our platforms. And finally, regarding Apple's IDFA changes, now that we're a year in on IDFA, we can conclude that our business really saw little impact from the Apple changes. Our iOS share of revenues is now approximately 15% of our total revenues, and it's even smaller than that when you consider budgets tied explicitly to Apple's platform that we are able to shift to Android. There are many ad tech companies with a much higher percentage share of their revenues tied to the iOS platform, and thus are experiencing greater headwinds than us. In addition, many have also seen that Google has delayed the implementation of their privacy sandbox activities. And while this is more relevant to the mobile web versus applications, we do think it highlights the difference in approach on how Google as an ad company versus Apple as a hardware company are approaching the market and do think investors should take note of these differences. As we turn towards the future, I want to highlight our top three priorities, which are first, focusing on the fundamentals of our business and executing on the $300 billion total addressable market. Secondly, integrating our companies into one. And third, making the right strategic moves so the company, as Wayne Gretzky famously said, skating to where the puck is going, not where it's been. On the first priority of fundamentals, we're going to grow our business by continuing to add devices, add additional products, and expand our media relationships. We expect to expand both our device and product offerings. I mentioned single tap licensing earlier in my remarks, but also want to highlight our other growth drivers. We've begun pivoting our content media business to focus increasingly on post-pay subscribers versus predominantly pre-pay subscribers today. And while that's negatively impacting our short-term content media results, We have increased traction with Verizon and AT&T on post-pay with a bigger addressable market that should serve as a nice growth catalyst into the future. We're also making solid progress on our mediation solutions, adding many additional app publishers in the quarter. And finally, I mentioned additional supply traction on devices earlier in my remarks. Now that the operator and OEM partners are looking for additional revenue streams more than ever in a recessionary environment, and we're seeing increased traction with many global operators in OEMs. And finally, we want to expand our media relationships. I'm excited about is our expansion into verticals beyond gaming, even while we grow our gaming relationships with leading providers such as TripleDot. Our social media vertical, led by companies such as TikTok and Pinterest, our utility verticals such as Weather, and our financial verticals with customers such as Square and PayPal, all grew more than 50% year over year. The only real material verticals showing decline were the crypto and news verticals, which are a low single-digit percentage of our revenues. Also, we're working to realign our channel strategy and our brand business. AdColony's legacy brand business had been operating with a direct sales force in some countries and channel partners in others. We want to realign this approach and take a more direct approach in larger brand spending countries, and work with channel partners in smaller markets. Specifically, we are going to bring our channel partners in-house in the UK and look to scale up our efforts in Europe. This should have the benefit of adding both margin and revenues to our brand business. Our second priority is to continue to integrate our company into one. We've made material progress on internally facing things like our systems, tools, processes, and organizational design. And with these net elements now in place, it provides us increased ability to deliver as one company versus four, and we're now turning our focus externally to deliver to our customers and partners. Specifically, we're now putting increased focus on building the DT brand in the marketplace. We rebranded the company last month with a new look and feel. But more importantly, we've unified the legacy DT, mobile posse, appreciate, ad colony, and fiber teams under a common umbrella, leveraging their unique assets now as one. We are working surgically to ensure our partners, customers, and other stakeholders see the benefits of 1DT in the marketplace, leveraging our on-device position, our independence, our direct demand, and our differentiation solutions such as Singletap across the entire enterprise. Early feedback from customers has been very encouraging. Our final priority is making the right strategic moves for the future, which includes making investments in our ad tech scalability and our app store strategies. While we see both of these more as a driver beyond 2022, we're already seeing traction today. And as a reminder, we're expecting numerous pieces of bipartisan legislation in the EU and the US to become law over the next year that will disrupt how applications and digital advertising work. We view these regulations as a tailwind for our business. As a parallel in the e-commerce world, we're all used to having companies like Amazon that sell nearly everything and then more segment specific stores that white label e-commerce capabilities from companies like Shopify to sell their goods and services. Due to the dominance of Apple and Google bundling the operating system in store and smartphones, this white label capability has been difficult to execute in the app distribution world. Today, we offer up things like games folder, that can be from a single company like Zynga, or for a specific type of game catalog. But the idea of a carrier store, Disney store, streaming video store, and so on, are not widely utilized today due to the bundling of the operating system with the app store. We see DT as being in a unique position to potentially power these type of offerings, agnostic of platform, and our early conversations have been encouraging. And to make a specific example of this point, we're entering into strategic partnerships with leading app distribution platforms, which we see as a precursor to our ability to deliver on a more democratized app ecosystem over the next few years. And as we've mentioned on prior calls, we believe the regulatory framework is favorable to build a Shopify for app stores, and a key element of that is our ability to port apps from a publisher into various app stores. We're looking to accelerate our efforts in this area, and these arrangements should help accomplish the objective. We look forward to updating investors on our progress in this area. In conclusion, while we're seeing some short-term headwinds that are impacting our near-term results, we believe the combination of our company-specific growth catalysts and investments and rebounding secular tailwinds for the digital ad spend will generate strong, profitable growth for us into the future. And on a personal note, One of the requirements about being a public company CEO is the ability to focus simultaneously on both the short and the long term. That goes with the territory of the job. Today, investor focus on the short term is the greatest I've seen in my time at DT. I definitely understand why it is, but would encourage investors that are able to take an outlook beyond a particular quarter are more likely to be rewarded over the long term. And by looking at our past performance, of being able to work in difficult times, that's definitely true for apps investors that have been with us for many years versus just a few quarters. With that concludes my prepared remarks, and I'll turn it over to Barrett to take you through the numbers.

Thanks, Bill, and good afternoon, everyone. Before I cover our financial results, I'll start by echoing Bill's sentiment around the challenging macro climate and the headwinds observed in Q1. And despite the current macro conditions, we continue to be excited about the expansive opportunity ahead of Digital Turbine, especially as we execute on this transformational phase of the company. Now turning the results in the quarter, our Q1 results reflect our focus to deliver sustainable profitability. And as Bill mentioned earlier, we have made conscious efforts to expand our gross margin and EBITDA margins even during these dynamic times. Revenue of $188.6 million in the quarter was up 19% as reported and 5% on a pro forma basis. While revenue growth decelerated from the fourth quarter, linked to the macro challenges discussed, our on-device business also experienced anticipated headwinds, largely from two other areas. First, as Bill mentioned earlier, our content products have been impacted as we evolve the products and ramp users with new partners. Secondly, a focused effort on expanding margins in certain areas resulted in expected top-line deceleration while driving growth in absolute gross profit dollars. As we've integrated our businesses over the last 12 months, we have made an update to our segment reporting to align with how we operate and manage the business. While our on-device solutions business remains the same, Beginning in this June quarter, we aggregate the legacy fiber and ad colony ad tech businesses with a single app growth platform segment. And before I leave revenue, I'll note that in this environment, global companies are facing headwinds driven by the trending strength in the U.S. dollar. Fortunately, foreign exchange rates have had only a modest impact on revenues, despite the macroclimate. This is due primarily to our current business model where we only have modest FX exposure given the majority of our revenues are nominated in US dollars. Our top line growth enabled gross profit to increase 33% as reported and 7% on a pro forma basis to 93.6 million in the quarter. Gross margin on the platform was 50% in Q1, up from 45% as reported in the prior year, and up sequentially from 49% in Q4. While focus on margins enabled expansion across our business line, our on-device business was an important driver in the sequential increase. In addition to our core business expansion, we also experienced a one-time benefit in the quarter from a partner agreement extension that improved margins in the quarter. While this benefit should not be expected to occur, we believe it's a testament to the company's value delivered to our partners. As a reminder, while gross margin rates can fluctuate from quarter to quarter, we anticipate further margin expansion as we continue to execute on our growth and synergy strategies. We continue to deliver healthy expense scale on the platform. As cash expenses were $41.6 million in the quarter, up 2% over a prior year on a pro forma basis, while revenues were up over 5% in the period. Total operating expenses were $67.9 million, including $16.1 million in amortization of intangibles and $1.3 million in transaction-related costs, and compared to total as reported operating expenses of $50.7 million in the prior year. While we've experienced lower than expected operating expenses, partly driven by the virtual work environment, we continue making investments in our teams, infrastructure, and our recently announced unified brand relaunch. We have been experiencing increases in return-to-work expenses that were much less during the pandemic period, including events, travel, and other operational costs. The integration of our acquisitions continues to be a focus, and we expect to make continued investments to migrate certain systems to a unified platform. These near-term investments are anticipated to derive continued cost benefits to be realized over the coming quarters as integration efforts are successfully implemented to further improve our efficiency and operating leverage. Our adjusted EBITDA of $51.9 million in the quarter increased 30% over prior year, and our EBITDA margin expanded to 28%, up approximately 300 basis points over the prior year, and we're pleased to deliver in Q1 our fifth consecutive quarter of sequential EBITDA margin expansion. I'm proud that our operating leverage and consistent EBITDA growth is being achieved even as we continue to make a number of focused near-term investments. primarily within our sales force and technology teams, to support new partners and products to drive future incremental revenues on the platform. In this context, we would expect our EBITDA margins to continue to expand over time, given the inherent operating leverage in our business and the return to be realized from our near-term investments and synergies to be generated from the integration of our acquisitions. I continue to be pleased with the profitability and the free cash flow delivered by our business. In the quarter we achieved non-GAAP adjusted net income of 38.6 million or 38 cents per share as compared to 33.4 million in income or 34 cents per share in the first quarter of last year. Our GAAP net income was 14.9 million or 15 cents per share based on 102.7 million diluted shares outstanding. Compared to our first quarter of 2022 net income of 14.2 million, or 14 cents per share. Healthy free cash flow from the quarter grew 120% to 31.5 million in the quarter, up versus prior year of 14.3. We exited the quarter with 89.3 million in cash after paying down 60.5 million in debt using free cash flows from operations to further deleverage our debt position. Our debt balance ended the quarter at $47.1 million drawn on our revolving credit facility. And as our business continues to produce strong cash flow, we would expect to continue to pay down our revolver. We are confident in our balance sheet and our capital position. With a low-cost credit facility, strong free cash flows, combined with the strategic acquisitions integrated on the platform, We're excited and poised to execute on our growth plans for fiscal 2023 and beyond. Now let me turn to our outlook. As we consider the ongoing macro environment, we currently expect revenue for Q2 to be between $170 million and $180 million, and adjusted EBITDA to be between $46 million and $50 million. and non-GAAP adjusted net income per diluted share to be between 32 and 34 cents, based on approximately 104 million diluted shares outstanding, with an effective tax rate of 25% on our non-GAAP adjusted net income. With that, let me hand it back to the operator to open the call for questions. Operator?

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star then one on your touch-tone phone. If you are using a speaker phone, we ask that you please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To enjoy your question, please press star then two. Today's first question comes from Dan Day, IPI Rally FBR. Please go ahead.

Yes, afternoon, guys. Appreciate you taking my questions. As it relates to Singletap, maybe just talk about any incremental progress on the direct side you've talked about. I appreciate the commentary on the licensing. You laid out the number of advertisers using the product, the monthly spend per advertiser in the investor day last November. Just any updates on that? Is that generally trending in line with what you guys have expected so far?

Yeah, Dan, sure. Yeah, as we think about Singletap, there's really four different ways we're currently approaching the market with it today. One, as you mentioned, was Singletap licensing, and we talked about the progress of that in my prepared remarks. I know there's a lot of investor interest around that. Secondly is direct. Third is working on Singletap through our fiber exchange, which we're just in the process of launching right now, and we're excited about that. And the fourth is in leveraging our prior ad colony relationships. So we're working it across all four of those items. On the single tap direct side, if I want to look at the comps for that year over year, we actually generated more margin dollars. But it was really focused on improving margins versus a top line. As you're well aware, we arbitrage CPMs for CPI. Uh, and so, you know, last year we're really focused on top line growth. Um, you know, this year we're much more focused on margin. So I've been pleased with the progress, um, you know, that we're making there, but, um, we really think about single tap more as an enablement capability across all four of those things and just, you know, kind of one single, um, element. Um, we really think it's a nice differentiator for us in the market.

Oh, great. Thanks, Bill. And then one more for me, just maybe, um, You know, I think the midpoint of guidance for the third quarter is like, you know, 5% this year over your revenue decline. Maybe just break that out between the, and just give any detail you can in between the on-device side and the outgrowth segments. Just, you know, and just would be helpful after quarter end and how things have trended a little more specific on where you're seeing some of the macro weakness between those two segments.

Yeah, let me start at a high level of kind of how I'm thinking about it. And then I'm going to let Barrett kind of chime in on some of the specifics of your question. I think what we've seen right now is some of the COVID dynamics really created what I'll call a supply slowdown for us. And as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we've seen that really improve over the last month or two as we're starting to get more face-to-face and travel and some of the recessionary concerns that I think our partners have to drive more revenue. So we've seen that really improve recently. And I think that'll really be a driver for us of results as we go forward. But in the very current time, You know, that's created some, you know, supply headwinds for us because we weren't able to make some of the progress that we wanted to. And then we were able to kind of work through that because of the demand strength. And, you know, with some of the demand slowing down, the macro headwinds, I think it's created a trough for our business in the present. But we really view that as a temporary thing, you know, going forward for us. So it's kind of like just that combination of those supply and demand dynamics have been a little bit problematic in the very, very short term for us. But I really want to emphasize on how we believe those are temporary. But as far as some of the specifics, Barry, you want to take that?

Yeah, sure. So we called out on the call between Bill's comments and my own, Dan, really three factors. The first one being macro conditions. We saw some dampening across demand across both our businesses. And while others may have been harmed a bit worse, we weren't insulated from that. The second piece The second two pieces were largely centered around our on-device business, which we anticipated in our guidance in last quarter and have been planning for this. They're twofold. One is on our content business. Bill referenced this. As we're migrating our products towards, you know, tailored to more post-pay devices, we've changed those products and begin to migrate during – migrate to ramp new partners, and that's created a bit of a headwind. The second one is we've looked at when we've, you know, a focus for this year was to look at our growth in margins and expand those margins. There are certain areas where we tighten things to increase our margin profile, and that came at, you know, a reduction in revenue in some areas, top line revenue. but an absolute growth in gross profit dollars. But those are the three areas that gave us a headwind. And we're mostly planned for with respect to the on-device segment.

Got it. Appreciate the time, guys. I'll turn it over. Thanks, Dan.

And our next question today comes from Dan. I have Tali with Roth Capital Partners. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Two, if I may. It's encouraging to see the focus on the margins. I'm curious if you could quantify perhaps the revenue opportunity you may have given up in the quarter. And then I just wanted to further understand the content piece on the media side with – prepay versus postpay. When you say kind of headwind, could you just dive a little bit more into that to clarify? Thank you.

Yeah, so why don't I start, Darren, on the content opportunity. You know, Barrett can talk some about the revenue margin tradeoffs. Yeah, on content media, you know, our legacy content media business has been largely, you know, prepay. I think, you know, more than 90% of our revenues had come on prepay. We made some, you know, material investments of really going after postpay just because of the you know, larger addressable market, you know, both in terms of, you know, users as well as advertising dollars. And so, you know, I'm excited about some of the progress we've made on that front. But it's come at the expense a little bit of prepaid and slowing down in prepaid because we haven't been focused on that as much. So that's really about the commentary, you know, there. And, you know, now we're starting to see some, you know, much more engagement, you know, from our larger providers. U.S. carrier partners around that, you know, again, given some of their desires to, you know, drive increased revenue and engagement from their users. So that's been a positive development. But, you know, the offset has been, you know, a little bit less of a focus on prepay for us.

Yeah, and then just regarding the tradeoffs in revenue and margin, just as a reminder, when we launched, you know, the acquisition of Appreciate and our DSP and single tap strategy, You know, we had a broad reach there. And so while we've seen, you know, growth in those areas, we've refined our approach in certain areas to increase those margins. And so those have, you know, Darren, to quantify that, you would see our margins expand. You know, I mentioned 300 basis points year on year. Some of that is related to that effort and that initiative. I wouldn't break out or comment on what's the specific revenue impact, but you can get an idea of how we're expanding our margins and what areas we're driving those.

Great. And if I could just squeeze one more in. Your comment about the five partners in September and then 10 in December for the licensing business on Singletap. Are those broad-based, meaning once a licensing deal is signed, is it applicable across the entire entity's platform, or is it kind of piecemealed out? Thank you.

Yeah, I think you're going to see it's going to be somewhat dependent upon partner. Obviously, the intention is to go 100% across the platform, but I think what you'll probably see is similar to how we started with our carrier partners, where we do dynamic installs, and then we go to Wizard, and then we go to SingleTap, and we add things over time. I think you'll see something kind of similar here. We'll start, we'll get going, and then we'll continue to ramp it broader and broader. But I think that's the intent of both parties involved. If you're going to go through the technical work and integration to do it, you're not doing it without the intent of trying to go across to everything you're doing because it's improving conversion and efficiency. But obviously you want to make sure that everything out of the gates is working as advertised.

Thank you.

Thank you. And our next question today comes from Anthony Stossel, Craig Hallam. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. Pretty solid execution, especially on EBITDA in a tough environment, so hats off on that. Bill, of the 10 single-taff licensees that you expect to have live by the end of the December quarter, how many are you planning will be Tier 1, and what impact as you ramp single-taff licensee revenue will that have on overall gross margins with you know, take it up or take it down? Then add a couple follow-ups after that for Barrett.

Yeah, sure. So the first point is on the gross margins, we absolutely expect it to be accretive since, you know, this is more of a licensing SaaS model, you know, for us and, you know, something we're excited about. You know, in terms of kind of the breakout of the partners, you know, there's definitely a mix of partners in there in terms of what I would call, you know, kind of tier ones and tier twos. But if you think about our business today on our device business, You know, we have tier one partners like, you know, AT&T and Verizon and Samsung. And then we have a variety of tier two partners as well. And I wouldn't sleep on the tier twos in terms of paying the bill and generating that EBITDA you were just talking about. So it's really going to be for us a blend of both on single tap licensing as well.

Okay. And then, Barrett, you know, not asking for a guide for the December quarter, but December is typically strong seasonally for you guys. And if you expect to ramp, you know, quite a bit of single-top licensing revenue in the December quarter. Should we expect December to be up sequentially from September as you see things right now?

Yeah, I think it would be unusual to not have a December quarter above September absent something odd. You know, that would be our normal kind of plan for that seasonality. So, yeah.

Okay, and then lastly, just kind of op-ex going forward. I know it bumps around. but are we generally now in a range there's not additional significant investments on the OPEX side?

Yeah, so for those that have followed the digital turbine story and even pre the material acquisitions last year, we've been able to drive scale and operating leverage and do that while we make investments. So those efficiencies have been masking some of the investments we're making, but On the surface, you would only see modest increases in expenses relative to revenue, certainly. But we're still actively making investments, as I mentioned on the call, that, you know, will drive future returns. But there's not any transformative expenses we're making. We actually anticipate, you know, savings from unifying the systems onto one platform.

If I could sneak in one more for Bill, on the last quarterly conference, Kelly, you talked about revenue synergies with the acquisitions being about 10%. I know it's tough in a tougher economic environment, but where do you say you're at on that 10% revenue synergies?

Yeah, I think we're hanging in that ballpark. But really what we're seeing, especially since we moved from the gross to net reporting, is really where you're seeing the benefit is on the margin side, Tony, on those synergies. So I talked about in my remarks is we saw pro forma margins go from 67% to 71% year over year. And the biggest driver of that are those revenue synergies. So it's starting to really start paying some dividends for us.

Thanks, Bill.

Best of luck, guys. Thanks.

And our next question today comes from Tim Nolan with Macquarie. Please go ahead.

Great. I've got a couple as well, actually. First, I'm just curious about pricing in the ad market. It looks like maybe a little bit of volume pressure, but it looks like pricing may be holding on. Could you just talk a bit more about how that developed in the quarter and maybe what you're seeing in the current quarter? And then secondly, there's been quite a lot of consolidation on the ad mediation side over the last several months. Could you just speak a bit to your ability to compete and win revenues on that side of things? Thanks. Yeah, sure.

I'll start on the mediation side. So one of the things that I think most people are aware is you've seen some consolidation in the space announced recently with IronSource and Unity. Unity had a mediation solution. IronSource had a mediation solution. So there's consolidation there. About a year ago, you saw consolidation with Twitter selling their Mopub mediation solution. service over to Applovin. So there's consolidation there. So there's actually fewer players now in the market. And we've been able to add publishers with kind of two primary things that have been our differentiation in that space. Number one is our independence. A lot of the other players in the markets have their own app publishing titles. And so the ability for us not to have that and really truly be independent for the publishers is something I think that resonates with them. And then second is our ability to offer them new users and user acquisition and, you know, leveraging things like our relationships with Verizon, AT&T, Samsung, but also with single tap. So, you know, having some differentiators in the market, you know, there is something that's really allowed us to compete. You know, we're not a major player in the space, though, relative to some of those others. But, you know, we are seeing some nice traction there and growth. As far as your question around the pricing and the ad market, you know, goes right now, Yeah, I'd say it's kind of varied. You know, what we're seeing is some nice, you know, pricing, you know, with social media companies, streaming video companies. I mentioned some of my remarks, you know, some of the verticals that are growing, utilities such as weather, financial apps, and so on, where the pricing power has been, you know, very strong. But if we want to look at certain geographies, You know, such as Europe or, you know, other certain programmatic DSP players that may have some softer spends from their advertisers. That definitely flows through onto our exchange. So, you know, kind of it's a little bit of a mixed bag. around right now. I think the thing I was probably most proud of on our on-device business was the fact that we're well north of $5 here in the U.S. for revenue per device. And so if you don't have strong pricing, you're not going to be able to put those kind of results up on the board with the 20% year-over-year growth. So that's something we're pretty proud of.

Okay. And would you be able to comment on how things are going in the quarter now? I mean, if you're talking about macro risks and things and some advertisers may be holding off on spending, does that weaken your pricing ability?

Yeah, I think it's, again, it's kind of similar. I think we're seeing kind of similar trends. And as we think about our guidance, we always want to think about it in the sense of, you know, things don't improve versus do improve. I think you saw with our guide last quarter in terms of how we thought about things. And I think similar philosophy, you know, here now. But I think it's kind of similar commentary that, you know, it varies by vertical. It varies by market. It varies by operating system. It varies by brand spend versus performance or direct response spend. So it's kind of a mixed bag, you know, right now. There's definitely some headwinds and tailwinds we're seeing in the present on all of those variables right now.

That makes sense. Thanks a lot.

And our next question today comes from Mitch Pindus with Wells Fargo Private Bank. Please go ahead. Thank you so much. Actually, my question was just answered, so thank you, and nice quarter, gentlemen.

Thank you.

And, ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our question and answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to Bill Stone for closing remarks.

Yeah, thanks, everyone, for joining the call today. We look forward to reporting on our progress against all the points we made on today's call, and we'll talk to you again on our fiscal 2023 second quarter call in a few months. Thanks, and have a great night.

Thank you, sir. This concludes today's conference call. We thank you all for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect your lines and have a wonderful day.