Magnite, Inc.

Hello and welcome to the Magnite fourth quarter 2025 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'll be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press the star then one on your telephone keypad. 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 Nick Kormiluk of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Magnite's fourth quarter 2025 earnings conference call. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. Joining me on the call today are Michael Barrett, CEO, and David Day, our CFO. I would like to point out that we have posted financial highlight slides on our Investor Relations website to accompany today's presentation. Before we get started, I will remind you that our prepared remarks and answers to questions will include information that might be considered to be forward-looking statements, including but unlimited to statements concerning our anticipated financial performance and strategic objectives, including the potential impacts of macroeconomic factors on our business. These statements are not guarantees of future performance. They reflect our current views with respect to future events and are based on assumptions and estimates and subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that that may cause our actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from expectations or results projected or implied by forward-looking statements. The discussion of these and other risks, uncertainties, and assumptions is set forth in the company's periodic reports filed with the SEC, including our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and our 2025 annual report on Form 10-K. We undertake no obligation to update forward-looking statements or relevant risks. Our commentary today will include non-GAAP financial measures, including contribution ex-tax or less traffic acquisition costs, adjusted EBITDA, and non-GAAP income per share. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP metrics for our reported results can be found in our earnings press release and the financial highlights deck that is posted on our investor relations website. At times, in response to your questions, we may offer additional metrics to provide greater insights into the dynamics of our business. Please be advised that this additional detail may be one time in nature. and we may or may not provide an update on the future of these metrics. I encourage you to visit our investor relations website to access our press release, financial highlights deck, periodic SEC reports, and the webcast replay of today's call to learn more about Magnite. I will now turn the call over to Michael. Please go ahead, Michael.

Thank you, Nick. And what an end to 2025. We exceeded consensus expectations for both the quarter and the full year. In a mixed macro environment, Our results reflect the durability of our model and the accelerating shift towards streaming. In Q4, TTV contribution ex-tax grew 32% ex-political, meaningfully above our guide. That acceleration began in Q3 and strengthened into year-end. As we enter 2026, CTV is now larger than DV+, making streaming the majority of our business. That is a defining moment for Magnet. The long-anticipated ramp of programmatic CTV is no longer emerging. It is underway at scale. Adoption is broad-based across media owners, agencies, and DSPs. We saw strong growth from many of the largest players in the industry, including LG Ads, Netflix, Paramount, Roku, Vizio, Walmart, and Warner Brothers Discovery. TV OEMs are leaning aggressively into programmatic across home screens, pause ads, data enablement in marketplaces. Programmatic enablement in live sports continues to expand across the largest global stream. On the demand side, the largest global agencies are now driving meaningful volume through buyer marketplaces and DSP agnostic pipes powered by Magnite. Clearline activation continues to gain momentum as buyers increasingly seek direct, transparent, and efficient access to premium streaming supply. Stepping back, The industry trajectory is unmistakable. Consumers have moved to streaming. Time spent has already shifted. Advertisers are following and dollars are now catching up. CTV combines the brand impact of television with the precision and measurability of digital. As inventory has scaled and pricing has normalized, CTV has become accessible to a broader range of advertisers, from global brands to performance marketers to SMBs. For Magnite, this shift is structurally advantageous. In DV+, we operate in a highly competitive market where we hold mid-single-digit share. In CTV, our share is multiple times higher. As dollars migrate into streaming, they move into a segment where we have deeper integrations stronger publisher relationships, and differentiated infrastructure. Now turning to DBplus. DBplus grew 4% ex-political in Q4, modestly below expectations, and that pressure has increased in Q1. We observed accelerated budget reallocation from DBplus into CTV across agencies, DSPs, and brands. This trend has intensified in Q1. This makes sense. As CTV becomes more measurable and performance-driven and inventory scales, dollars are naturally consolidating into streaming environments. Within DV+, there are encouraging signs. Our mobile in-app business remains healthy. Commerce media partnerships are gaining momentum with more than 15 partners announced. 11 of which are deployed and ramping, including United Airlines, PayPal, Pinterest, and Best Buy. These partnerships combined owned inventory with first-party data layered through clear line curation. We do not believe that the decline in search referral traffic is impacting our DBplus business. Our footprint remains diversified across open web, mobile app, online video, audio, and digital at home. In fact, Our DV Plus supply continues to expand with ad requests growing over 30% year over year in Q4 and at similar rates in Q1. Our DV Plus business has never been supply constrained. Now, turning to AI. There has been speculation that generative AI and agent-based buying could disintermediate infrastructure platforms. We believe what is actually unfolding reinforces the importance of scaled, sell-side infrastructure. In Q4, we embedded an advertising context protocol, or ADCP, based seller-agent directly into Spring Serve and executed what we believe would be industry's first agent-to-agent campaign. Scope 3 served as the buyer-agent on behalf of MIQ, with media running across LG, and Warner Brothers Discovery Inventory. While still early, this marks an important milestone. It represents the first step toward a future where buyer and seller agents can interpret campaign briefs, intelligently match inventory with audiences, and ultimately transact media in a more automated and efficient fashion. Magnite is uniquely positioned on the south side. We believe we will be long-term winners in digital advertising, giving our differentiated access to supply, scaled and interoperable data assets, and ability to apply AI across the end-to-end workflow. Layering AI into that ecosystem modernizes the buying experience, streamlining historically manual insertion processes matching briefs with audiences and inventory at scale, and enhancing traditional programmatic execution. Even in a world of autonomous agents, infrastructure becomes more critical, not less. Agents may interpret intent, but they still rely on scaled marketplaces to clear transactions, enforce auction mechanics, ensure compliance, manage fraud prevention, and handle financial settlements. As the ecosystem evolves toward potentially thousands of buyer and seller agents, aggregation and interoperability become essential. You cannot have a market where every agent negotiates bilaterally with every other agent. Standards-based scale platforms are required to make that system function. That is the role Magnite plays. In Q1, we are continuing to run test campaigns and refine the ad CP framework. It's early, but we are encouraged by the progress and view this as a meaningful step toward a more intelligent and efficient advertising marketplace. AI is not displacing our infrastructure. It is increasing throughput across it. Lastly, on DBplus, we continue to await the court's final order in the Google ad tech remedies phase. We believe remedies could create meaningful share reallocation opportunities. As we have stated, every 1% of market share gained could represent approximately 50 million of incremental contribution expat annually at very high incremental margins. We remain prepared. To conclude, we are in the early innings of a multi-year replatforming of television and video advertising. Streaming is now the dominant form of video consumption. CTV represents the majority of digital video time spent, yet ad dollars still lag engagement. Industry forecasts call for sustained double-digit CTV advertising growth for years to come, with tens of billions of dollars expected to shift from linear television and fragmented digital channels into streaming environments. Magnate sits at the center of that shift. GTB is now the majority of our business. We are deeply integrated with the largest streaming publishers and OEMs in the world. We operate in premium, largely logged-in environments that are inherently more defensible and more measurable. And as dollars consolidate into CTV, they move into a segment where our market share is meaningfully higher and our infrastructure is embedded. At the same time, automation and AI are increasing efficiency across the ecosystem, expanding working media, and driving more volume through scale platforms like ours. Secular CTV growth, expanding total addressable markets, increasing automation, strong share position. Those forces are durable. We believe Magnate is foundational to how the next era of advertising will transact, and we have never been more confident in our strategic position. With that, I'll turn the call over to David for more detail on the financials. David?

Thanks, Michael. As Michael mentioned, we had a strong Q4 and finish to the year with a great performance in CTV, achieving 20% contribution XTAC growth or 32% excluding political, significantly exceeding our expectations. CTV reached 48% of our total contribution XTAC for Q4. DV Plus came in below expectations, declining 1%, and up 4%, excluding political. Adjusted EBITDA grew 9% to $84 million, resulting in a 43% margin. We're pleased with the results, particularly the continued acceleration in CTV growth we saw in Q4. For the full year, contribution XTAC totaled $670 million, a year-over-year increase of 10%, or 14%, excluding the impact of political. For CTV in 2025, we achieved contribution ex-tac of $304 million, an increase of 17% or 22% excluding political. And for DV+, we reported $365 million for the year, growth of 5% or 8% ex-political. We processed total ad spend approaching $7 billion. Adjusted EBITDA for the full year 2025 was $232 million, an increase of 18% from 2024, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin for the year of 34.7%. Total revenue for Q4 was $205 million, up 6% from Q4 2024. Contribution ex-tax was $195 million, up 8%, within our guidance range and up 16% excluding political. CTV contribution ex-tac was 94 million, up 20% year-over-year or 32% excluding political, significantly exceeding the top end of our guidance range. DVplus contribution ex-tac was 101 million, a decrease of 1% or an increase of 4% excluding political from the fourth quarter last year. This result was below our guidance range. As Michael noted, we saw a growing spend shift from DV Plus to CTV. Our contribution X-TAC mix for Q4 was 48% CTV, 37% mobile, and 15% desktop. From a vertical perspective, retail, health and fitness, and financial were the strongest performing categories, while automotive was, again, one of our weakest performing categories. In DV+, we saw additional weakness in technology and food and beverage. Total operating expenses, which includes cost of revenue, were $153 million, a slight decrease from $154 million for the same period last year. Adjusted EBITDA operating expense for the fourth quarter was $111 million, $1 million better than the low end of our guidance range, and an increase from $104 million in the same period last year. The increase was primarily driven by higher cloud and data center costs and higher personnel related expenses supporting the growth of our CTV business and investment in CTV related features and functionality and was better than expected due to lower personnel expenses including slower than anticipated hiring. Our net income was $123 million for the quarter compared to net income of $36 million for the fourth quarter of 2024. This was driven by a $90 million one-time tax benefit resulting from the release of the valuation allowance on our deferred tax assets. As background to the release, we met the specific accounting criteria of 12 quarters of cumulative positive pre-tax income and the necessary expectations for future profitability. Adjusted EBITDA grew 9% year-over-year to $84 million, reflecting a margin of 43%. As a reminder, we calculate adjusted EBITDA margin as a percentage of contribution next hack. Gap earnings per diluted share were 80 cents for the fourth quarter of 2025 compared to 24 cents for the fourth quarter of 2024. Non-gap earnings per share for the fourth quarter of 2025 was 34 cents compared to 34 cents last year. Reconciliations to non-gap income and non-gap earnings per share are included with our Q4 results press release. Our cash balance at the end of Q4 was $553 million, an increase from $482 million at the end of the third quarter. Operating cash flow, which we define as adjusted EBITDA less capex, was $61 million. Capital expenditures, including both purchases of property and equipment and capitalized internal use software development costs, were $23 million, consistent with the expectations we discussed last quarter. That interest expense for the quarter was $4 million. Net leverage for the quarter was zero, down from 0.3x at the end of Q3. As a reminder, the remaining $205 million principal balance of our convertible notes is a current liability on the balance sheet as the notes mature this quarter. We plan to pay off the converts at maturity with cash on hand next month. As you know, $400 million in converts were part of our original financing for the SpotX acquisition, and when all is said and done, provided capital at an extremely favorable rate. During 2025, we repurchased or withheld over 5.2 million shares for approximately $79 million. We're also announcing a new two-year share repurchase plan today, which authorizes the repurchase of common stock with a value up to $200 million. Following the repayment of our convert, we plan to be more aggressive with share repurchases, given our future expected significant and consistent free cash flow generation. Our capital allocation strategy will target approximately 50% of free cash flow generation to be returned to shareholders via share repurchases over time, provided our share price provides a reasonable return compared to our estimated intrinsic value. Note also that M&A opportunities may arise in the future that might change our perspective. I will now share our expectations for the first quarter of 2026 and our current thoughts for the full year. For the first quarter, we expect contribution XTAC to be in the range of 157 to 161 million, which represents growth of 8 to 10%. Contribution XTAC attributable to CTV to be in a range of 81 to 83 million, which represents growth of 28 to 31%, surpassing 50% of total contribution XTAC for the first time. BV Plus contribution next act to be in the range of $76 to $78 million, which represents a decline of 6% to 8%. We anticipate adjusted EBITDA operating expenses to be approximately $122 million, which implies adjusted EBITDA margin of over 23%. As a reminder, the first quarter is always seasonally our lowest margin quarter. For the full year, 2026, we anticipate total contribution extract growth to be at least 11%, adjusted EBITDA percentage growth in the mid-teens, adjusted EBITDA margin greater than 35%, free cash flow growth greater than 30%, and CapEx of approximately $60 million, a reduction from prior year. I want to point out that our estimates do not include any potential market share gains as a result of remedies from the Google AdTech trial. And finally, regarding our tax position, we would not expect to have any significant increases in cash taxes for the next few years. We are proud of our team's execution and our resulting fourth quarter and full year results. we believe we are very well positioned to continue winning and thriving with the changes that are taking place in the programmatic ecosystem. We continue testing and implementing the right AI capabilities to build on Magnite's industry-leading platform and making strategic investments to improve our efficiencies. With that, let's open the line for Q&A.

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing any keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you'd like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question comes from Laura Martin of Needham. Please go ahead.

Hey there. Congratulations. Good numbers. I wanted to talk about the breadth of CTV and how much of that is sustainable. So ex-political, CTV up 32% in growth. Can you break down how much of that is SMVs? How much is by vertical? You named a lot of really big studio companies that are growing. I'm really interested in what's growing and whether you see that continuing. That's my first question.

Yeah, hey, Laura, great question. I'll handle it first, and maybe David will dive in with some specifics. We really haven't gotten into breaking it out. Lord knows we have a hard enough time figuring out TV plus and CCTV buckets, let alone getting a little bit more specific on the CCTV. I will say, and you did see the announcement from Mountain recently about their direct connection into us as their first platform to do so. So that's a very encouraging sign of a high growth area of performance-oriented SMBs. But we are seeing just across the board, you don't grow at 32% and not have everything firing at all cylinders. So big branded advertisers that used to advertise in TV, we had cited a big shift from performance advertisers that were digital online video, digital display, Shifting into CTV, you know, throughout all of our channel checks, the same note was sung by every major agency, brand, marketer. The appeal of CTV, the pricing, the performance metrics of it, it's really just increasing in velocity of appeal. So we're just seeing it across the board, Laura.

Okay, great. And then my second question is about risk. It feels like, Michael, we're moving more towards an infrastructure. You have a lot of really specific deep infrastructure integrations into some of these large CTV performers. Do you get the sense that elongating your client relationship time, increasing your lifetime value, and lowering the risk of investing in Magnite as a stock?

Well, no question. You hit the nail on the head, and I think we try to harp on that in the call and the script. We look so different in CTV than we do perhaps even in DV Plus and Display. We are highly differentiated. We have a leading programmatic ad server that's coupled with the leading SSP platform. We're building more and more tools. We have a buying tool, Clearline, that's integrated across the board. So we look quite different, unique, and with an enjoyable moat that we built in CTV. which is, as you know, the fastest growing segment in the digital advertising sector.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, Laura.

Our next question comes from Dan Kernos of Benchmark Stonex. Please go ahead.

Great, thanks. Michael, let me just stick with the CTV question for a second. Is there any way to kind of parse out the mix shift to CTV versus your organic partner growth, like what you had before? Because there's a clear acceleration, I think, on both fronts. And how much of that's coming from live events?

Yeah, so live is an increasing contributor each quarter. So that's definitely a good guy for us. as it relates to parsing it out, you know, David, do you want to say kind of the dollar shift that we saw from DV plus into CTV and that to give you some idea of the baseline growth level versus the accelerated?

Yeah, I guess, I mean, if you just look at the expectations versus consensus for like Q1, for example, you've got DV plus, you know, $8 or $9 million you know, lower and CTV, you know, higher by that same amount. But I'm not sure you can differentiate spend shift versus organic because the spend shift is rolling into our organic numbers and is rolling through, you know, all of those same, you know, obviously all of those same partners. But it is a very dramatic shift, right?

Go ahead.

Yeah, no, so I was saying if you looked at it, let's just say if the expected performance is 20% and it winds up being 32%, it's pretty easy to parse it out as to what the accelerant was from a spend shift from platform to platform.

Yeah, no, that's helpful, Culler. I mean, I'm just trying to make sure to flag, I guess, the underlying is still growing X to shift. So just want to make sure that we get that. Oh, yeah. Very much so.

Yeah, very much so. Yeah, I think the cool, the thing, Dan, from a larger perspective, from what we talked about is, you know, those very marketers in making up a number, say someone spends $100 less, they're just spending it differently, allocating it differently. And big news for us, they're allocating it into the faster-growing platform of that you certainly look ahead three to five years from a Kegger standpoint, it's going to be super impressive. So, you know, number one, the allocation is happening on our platform. So we're catching dollar for dollar and we're still having that organic growth on the CTV side that's far exceeding the marketplace. So both very positive for us.

Yeah. And just to layer on, I was going to say layer on to Laura's point, you know, it's de-risking, you know, so, a dollar of CTV revenue and growth is more protectable and sustainable in some ways than BB+, which can be a little bit more volatile. And so we love where this is heading ultimately.

Not just that, David. I mean, I guess the next question I'd ask is like, I mean, margins are still improving, but there's always been question around take rate and economics and you're still driving margins higher. So some of that's been your cost to take out cost to serve initiatives, but you know, just, just maybe any comments you guys have on that would be great. Thanks.

Yeah. And in fact, and we talked about this a little bit last, I think the last quarter or two because of the opportunity that we have in CTV to we've actually made some additional internal investments into CTV, so into engineering, into accelerating some of our feature and functionality in the CTV business. all things being equal, our margin expansion could have been even greater in 2026. So we'll still expand margins, but with this opportunity in CTV, it's sort of a little bit of a one-time shot on the headcount and continuing to make the improvements on our tech stack infrastructure, as you mentioned, getting better leverage out of that. to really set us up for more rapidly expanding margin in future years.

Our next question comes from Sham Patel of Susquehanna.

Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. I had a couple of questions. I guess maybe following along the lines of the previous two as well. what do you guys think is the right way to think about, uh, CTV growth and then DV plus growth, um, kind of going forward. I know you gave kind of one Q outlook and kind of high level for, for, for the year for overall, but what's, if we kind of look at the two businesses, like what's the right way to think about the, you know, the growth rate kind of going forward on a sustainable basis. I know, Michael, you said CTV is, you know, double digit grower. And obviously we've seen that, uh, strong, strong growth rate. And then, um, Just a follow-up, just on OpenPath, can you just maybe talk about that a little bit, you know, just kind of the impact you had seen? It seems like, you know, that situation might be behind us now. Maybe if you could just talk about, you know, that and if you think that, you know, that that's been resolved and kind of behind us or if there's potentially any, you know, anything to be aware of on that front. Thank you.

Yeah, sure. Great questions. And I'll let David jump in. Yeah, certainly if you look at CTV, you know, the market from an estimate standpoint has always been probably lagging the actual growth rates. But I think some of the latest numbers out there are in the, you know, mid to low teens. And certainly at 32%, that's far exceeding. market growth and and that's where we expect to be given our market position so you know i think you know a growth rate in that you know high teens uh 20s is very sustainable given the secular shift that's going on and as it relates to dv plus i think it's fair to remind everyone the diverse portfolio that dv plus is certainly There's desktop and mobile web, and that is definitely under pressure. You have all sorts of things happening there, and the big budget shifts that we talked about that we caught on the CTV side were essentially coming from that bucket. But you also have emerging categories like audio, digital out-of-home, mobile app, which, you know, you look at the numbers Apple is putting up, Mobile app for a long time was kind of out of our reach because the brand advertising that we source really couldn't compete with the app install. And now it's been on a better level playing field than it ever has. And so we view that as a big opportunity for us. We're deploying RFDK. We're partnering with AppLevel, we're partnering with Unity, we're partnering with all the big players. And we think that that's a big growth area for us. So where does that net out? It's hard to say. But I think the encouraging thing is from a growth profile for MagMate, any weakness that we are seeing in DVplus is manifesting itself in the CTV bucket. So again, If the budget's $100, we're catching the $100. It's just being allocated differently by the marketer. So it's a little hard to put a growth rate on DB+. But if you parse it all out, there's going to be growers like mobile app that's going to be in the teens, and there's going to be desktop mobile web that's probably flattish to slightly down, if that's helpful. And you would also ask about OpenPath. Yeah, as you noted earlier, OpenPath has been around for years. The reason why it became a subject of focus last quarter was the COCAI deployment and OpenPath being a default. We had painfully walked through the Q&As and the scripts. about our efforts to turn that around with our biggest buyers. By most degrees, we've been successful in that. And the longer tail of OpenPath users, those smaller advertisers, smaller agencies, we had already said that that was going to be more of a, you know, street fight. So, you know, OpenPath, as... played out exactly as we thought it would. It's a modest impact in terms of the DV Plus performance. There's no impact on the CTV performance. And everything that we said we were going to do, we did. And I think OpenPath has been with us for years and will continue to be with us for years. I think, if anything, we've proven that it's not an existential threat to the business, that we have embedded ourselves with our largest buyers to the degree that we become invaluable to them to execute their programmatic businesses.

Thank you, guys. That's very helpful.

Our next question comes from Jason Cryer of Craig Hallam. Please go ahead.

Thank you, guys. So, Michael, you talked about running volumes through ADCP. Just curious what you think the evolution is on that front and what is the client interest in running volumes through AI agents?

Yeah, so, you know, interest very high.

Reality, very little. Budgets are being allocated to it. I think to frame it correctly is – Think of this as a massive remodeling of your house, but we're not knocking it down and building a brand new house. So I think that it's all going to sit on top of the existing infrastructure in the industry. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested by Magnite alone to make programmatic work. And what AI agents are going to do is make it work better. It's going to alleviate menial tasks from the traders, the planners, the ops people. And it's going to put more working dollars to play, which is awesome. And we feel it's all going to flow through our pipes. And so I think we're doing the exact appropriate amount of investment in it. And we are ready to catch the dollars when they come scaled. But that is not going to happen any coming quarter. So interest high, execution, actually putting your money where your mouth is, is not high, but we believe we're in a great position technically and from a market position to take advantage of this next wave of innovation.

Is that more likely to occur on the DB Plus side or on the CTV side?

Well, I think across the board. I mean, the world I described, there's a lot of – heavy lifting that goes on in terms of planning campaigns, introducing opportunities for publishers, publishers introducing opportunities for buyers, making sure it works. Wine item's broken here. This deal doesn't work here. Why doesn't it work? 20 hours of troubleshooting to figure out and then half the budget's already not been spent and you're wasting time. And so I think there's all sorts of efficiencies that are in play across both platforms with an agentic approach as the UI level and then the plumbing and the infrastructure powered the way it used to be, the way Magnate does it.

A quick follow-up for David. The EBITDA OpEx is a pretty big jump from Q4 to Q1. Just curious if you can maybe talk about what investments are embedded in there.

Yeah, and if you recall, we kind of have that jump literally every year. You have personnel raises effective January 1st that kick into place. You also have employer taxes that kick into place, and some of those are attached to some annual grant vesting in that Q1. We have, you know, an off-site... that occurs in the first quarter of the year. Certain years, it's full company. Certain years, it's the commercial team. And so you just got a number of those things. And then the other component there would be some of the investment that I mentioned earlier, which is engineering the product talent for, you know, supporting the pace of development and velocity in our CTV business. And so those kind of make up that increase.

Great. Thanks, guys.

Our next question comes from Shweta Kujari of Wolf Research. Please go ahead.

Okay, thanks for taking my questions. Let me try two, please. I have a follow-up on the prior one. So, Michael, if you could please explain the context protocol, like how it works, what the real value proposition is, and what your differentiated advantage is there. And as it relates to CloudX, is that a competitive product? Is that even related? How should we think about how all this evolves in an agentic world? And what the impact will eventually be, is it that you're going to get greater share of ad dollars? Is it that the TAM will expand? Like, how should we think about the impact and how it works? And then the second question I have is just on the ad tax case, you touched on it in your prepared remarks. What is the base case expectation at this point? What should investors be expecting in terms of a realistic outcome? And if you have any sense on the timeline, that would be great too. Thank you.

Yeah, sure. So, yeah. So, you know, ADCP is kind of a – it's a protocol that allows agents to talk to agents. And so there's nothing particularly – There's nothing particularly unique about that. It's making sure your program can be agentic. It's making sure your platform can have agents talk to each other. So I think that what we were – given the size of our platform and the appeal of the types of publishers we have, we were approached by Scope 3 first to execute that. So I think it's a lesson to the fact that we're prepared – for to move beyond the API world and get into the MCP, ADCP world where agents are talking to agents that need a point of connection as opposed to APIs where it was more people connecting to machines. So I think that we feel very good about that. Where I think our point of differentiation will lie not just in our readiness But I think in this, the vast amount of data that we sit on in the years and years of the data that we have, when we can help our publishers and help our buyers from an inventory discovery price discovery, uh, to maximize a yield for publishers from, uh, from mediation. I think that that's where it really, the magic really happens. So anyone can build an agent. The question is, what data is that agent working on? And I think we feel that we sit on this repository of data across tens of thousands of publishers, many, many years of data worth to be able to inform decisions. We've also organized the taxonomy of all the publishers on our platform so that if someone's looking for sports enthusiasts or auto enthusiasts, that the same protocol exists across all publishers so we can scale what would be very niche buys across agents. So feeling very good about that. You also asked about CloudX. Obviously, that's more germane in the mobile area, but we're integrating into CloudX right now, which is a newer mediation platform for mobile app. Uh, so we're excited. Uh, we know the guys well. Uh, I think it's just another opportunity to gain access to a super fast growing area of the DV plus businesses, which is app. And, uh, we, uh, you know, are working closely with them. So it's a, it's a good thing for us, not kind of a different intermediation by any stretch. Uh, and lastly, in the ad tech case, you know, very hard to pick timing, um, The expectation is it's any week now, but that could be delayed a little bit longer. As it relates to predicted outcome, again, that's a little difficult. Given the types of conversations that were had in the final prejudgment hearing between Google and the DOJ, it certainly seemed that given the questions from Judge Brinkman that structural was probably not going to be the likely outcome that behavioral remedies were. I think some people misinterpret that as, oh, that's not a good guy for Magnite or their peers, which we couldn't disagree with more violently. We were always expecting behavioral, and we thought that as long as through behavioral or structural, it really didn't matter to us. As long as the playing field was more level, that we would be a huge beneficiary of that, and we still believe that to this day.

Okay. That's helpful. Thanks, Michael.

Excellent.

Our next question comes from Matt Swanson of RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. This is Simran for Matt Swanson. Congrats on the quarter. It seems like you guys have hit this tipping point in CTV, which has been great to see. What would you think from an ecosystem standpoint has changed, and how much would you attribute to the secular market shift versus your growing company-specific moat?

Yeah, thanks for the question.

I think David touched upon that when he gave us specifics about – You know, perhaps it was the $9 million came from the DV Plus platform, and that was placed on the expected $9 million that we thought were going to be spent on DV Plus was now spent on CTV. But that's on top of the already high-growing base of organic spend there. So, you know, I think no matter how you look at it, you take the $9 million off, you put it back on DV Plus, you're still looking at a 20-plus percent grower value. which is significantly above market average. So I think that you're right about the tipping point. It's being accelerated by a spend shift from one platform to the other, but it's inherently a much higher-growing platform to begin with, and as we pointed out a couple of times, with a much, much bigger moat for us. It's an area where we're very differentiated deep integrations with all the top streamers, add server capabilities, quite, quite different from the DB plus market.

Got it. That makes sense. And then on the progress with these partnerships and integrations, could you double click on the ramp of some of these and maybe touch on Netflix specifically or any other partners that have progressed particularly well?

Yeah, so particularly in the streaming area, when we do our script and we talk about the largest, the most impactful clients of that quarter, we talk to LG Ads, Netflix, Paramount, Roku, Vizio, Walmart, Warner Brothers Discovery, so really across the board we're seeing. In terms of the commerce partner, uh, in the DV plus part of the script that we talked about, um, you know, you see a United Airlines, which has taken a while to ramp, but it's, it's now, you know, uh, uh, contributing well, you know, PayPal, Pinterest, Best Buy has taken a while, but you know, all of these have different flavors of ramp to them. Some, if, if someone is in the ad business to begin with, uh, having them allow programmatic into their world, tends to impact the revenue line quicker than if, say, you're United Airlines and you've never been in the advertising business and you're starting from scratch. That's a longer gestation period. So they each have their different flavors, but from time to time we'll cite the ones that are active and contributing, and that was the list there.

Great. Thanks, guys. Our next question comes from Barton Crockett of Rosenblatt.

Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to ask about your kind of view of the future with AI, given that that's what's really driving all the stocks. I know there's been some questions on it, but I want to see if you can give us your view of how this evolves in this way, which is Do you see AI as a force for compression of take rates throughout the kind of ad tech sector generally? Do you see this evolving to a circumstance where perhaps LLMs are a front end for ad plans and then SSPs are kind of a processing agent, so maybe DSPs get squeezed? Or do you think that DSPs and SSPs are main kind of players and maybe the smaller competitors in both sectors get squeezed or any other kind of circumstance? How do you see this evolving in terms of players and take rates?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think that, you know, I think if you look at an agentic world and you see where the value is created, there's still a tremendous amount of value being created by Magnite, not just in the plumbing piece of it, but in educating these seller agents with the data that we have to make informed decisions on pricing, to mediate the buyer agents that come in. I think what you really generally see, again, is a renovation of this house, not a leveling of it. And it's a much more efficient world where folks are being freed up to do much more sophisticated tasks as opposed to this back and forth of campaign management, fixing broken line items, all that kind of stuff. So I think that what you'll see is far more media going to work. I think you'll see certain people in between the agents become less valuable. But I think that if you look at the top DSPs and what they have built and the rails that they run on, in the top SSPs like a Magnite and what we've built, that the value creation is the same, it's not greater, so I don't necessarily see a take rate impact in a future, in a genetic future for a Magnite.

Okay, all right. Now, the other topic I was curious about on antitrust, you know, there's been essentially an adoption of behavioral remedies in Europe with Google essentially just kind of moving to adopt some of the key things that could be coming here. Would you agree that that's kind of a fair description, and if so, are you seeing any impact in terms of share shift in Europe from what Google's been doing over there?

Yeah, great question.

I don't know if that's – it's an astute observation, but I'm not so sure it's the exact – remedies behaviorally that is being sought here in the States. So let's just say it's a portion of that package, the lowest hanging fruit of the package, and it's also the one that requires kind of the most lift on the publisher side. So what we have seen is the publishers that actually readjust the rankings of the exchanges and readjust the price floors, that there is improvement But that's a process, right? And this came down in Q4, so no one really starts the monkey with things during Q4 just given how important the quarter is. So we'll see that play out. But I think it just kind of scratches the surface of what the DOJ is looking for here and what Judge Brinkerman has been alluding to. So I think it's not apples to apples to compare Europe to the United States.

Okay. All right. That's great. Thank you.

In the interest of time, if questioners could please restrict themselves to one question. Our next question comes from Robert Kulbrith of Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.

Great. Thanks. Just to go back to the CTV strength, any key unlocks, whether it's around demand partners, supply partners, or maybe things that maybe had happened earlier in the year where you know, the momentum just sort of built up in Q4, you know, surpassed your expectations. I'm just wondering if we could maybe take another crack at that. And then secondly, on the agentic piece, is there anything, you know, that can come into the market incrementally in terms of, you know, volumes that remain, you know, sort of offline negotiated, inserted by I.O., whether that's through some sort of electronic data interchange or a fax or whatever, you know, things that can come into the market incrementally, net new to programmatic, from this sort of agentic shift in the market. Thanks.

Great. Yeah, so I'll take the last verse. Certainly, I think that that is the area of hope, right? There is still a tremendous amount of dollars that are frozen in the linear world that are insanely rate sensitive. So it's more of an automation as opposed to agentic. But if you can build tools that allow at a very efficient pricing, allow those dollars to be transacted programmatically, that is something we've been trying to affect its clear line for a couple of years now. So I think if you can make it even easier and add an agentic piece to it, that could make it that much easier to have it talk directly to the ad server, have it inserted into the ad server. I think that that's something that is of appeal, that it's not just all biddable, it's not just programmatic, that it is taking insertion orders and just taking the people out of it and making it automated. So, We have high hopes for that occurring, and I think it would be very beneficial to the Magnate platform. And I'm sorry, Robert, the first question again was?

Just wanted to take another crack at the CTV question about the inflection point. Was there any demand partner unlock, supply partner unlock that drove the variance versus your expectations for the quarter? Anything that may have happened in prior quarters that, in retrospect, when you look at it, you're like, okay, that unlocked in Q2, but it, you know, ramped in a big way in Q4 beyond our expectations. Just wanted to get a sense of, you know, would it unlock anything that was sort of...

I would say broad-based across the board. You know, obviously, certain DSPs have become stronger. You know, you look at the strength of an Amazon in the space. That's been impressive. Certainly Mountain, we've talked about them and the partnership that they've delivered. But I think across the board, you've seen strength in DSPs. I think if one of the things that could be the unlock, Robert, is the, you know, upfront negotiation. So they went stronger than anticipated. But the big question mark was how much was streaming going to be a part of it? Because all these guys, the big ones still run linear businesses. And I think what we're finding out is streaming played a huge role in the upfronts. And you're starting to see that come to fruition because those dollars don't get spent until the second half of the year into the first quarter of the year. So I think that combined with some of the strengths of particular partners has really led to outside growth in addition to the platform itself. switch from the DV Plus spending in the open web and now spending in CTV. You add those all together and you get turbocharged growth rates.

Our next question comes from Eric Martinuzzi of Lake Street. Please go ahead.

Regarding the CTV performance, I think your comment on verticals was that there was retail, strength, health and fitness, financial, and then you talked about weakness in auto tech, and I can't recall the third one. But just wondering if the guide has any change in the assumptions for those verticals. Is it status quo maintains, or is there an expectation of recovery in some of the weaker verticals?

Yeah, I think... Yeah, I think status quo is sort of what we've been, you know, what we've been seeing. So I would say the trends that we saw, you know, latter half November and December are kind of continuing across the board into this first quarter. So no significant changes on those trends.

Our next question comes from Omar Dusuki of Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. So Netflix, I think, recently said that they expect their ad business to double in size in 2026. So I wanted to ask you how you're thinking about your contribution from Netflix as you progress through 2026 and how that might affect the overall take rate. of your business, and then I have a follow-up.

Sure. So, yeah, I think that, you know, Netflix has been a terrific partner. We anticipated them to exit this year as one of our top, if not top, on a run rate basis partner, and that certainly has come to fruition. And so, yeah, We are anticipating a bigger year for them this year, given their aspirations in this space. And I don't, from a concentration standpoint, you know, their take rate varies, obviously, on the services that we provide. In some markets, we do more than others. And so, therefore, I think from a blended standpoint, take rate isn't going to impact anything. the overall up or down.

Okay. On Netflix in particular. So, you know, how do we think about, you know, CTV growth, you know, as we kind of progress through, you know, through 2026, right? It looked like you had a nice acceleration for the last couple of quarters. You know, should we kind of think of, an acceleration for the next few quarters as well as you try to upsell your products as Netflix gets bigger. Is that kind of the outlook for how you expect the year to pan out? You want to grab that, David?

Yeah, sorry. Just clarify when you say CPV growth.

Yeah, so year-on-year.

So if you look at the year-on-year growth in CPV... No, on CPV, I mean, we have CPM, take rate. I just want to make sure we're talking the same language.

Growth in contribution XTAC.

Okay, all right. Yeah, I think... I mean, I think we're still... So I think what you're getting at is sort of mixed changes overall, and I think in our take rates. And so I think our take rates on a blended, mixed basis in CTV have shallowed out, so they're becoming fairly stable. But there still is a significant influx of what I would call you know, premium inventory at our lower take rate tiers. And so I would expect, you know, and we're having the contribution extract growth rates that we are even at those, you know, those lower levels. So I would expect that bottoming out, you know, to sort of, I think that continues to And then I think just from a mixed perspective, we have opportunity to grow those take rates in the coming time. I don't see a huge inflection, an increase in that average take rate in CTV in the near term, but we're building the foundation and the opportunity to provide those additional services on the demand side and so forth where we do make a slightly higher take rate as we go forward.

Our next question comes from Zach Cummins of B Reilly Securities. Please go ahead.

Hi, good afternoon. I'll keep to one question just given the extent of the call. David, or maybe Michael could address on this. I'm just curious of the strength you've been seeing with agencies, particularly in agency marketplaces. Can you talk about the opportunity you have there specifically with maybe more clear line adoption with some of these key agency partners?

Yeah, Jack, we're very enthused by the adoption and the volume You know, these things take a while to get going. There's a bit of a sell-in process from agency to their clients, and so it's kind of a crawl, walk, run. And the ones that have been up the longest are at run right now, and the others are in various stages. So I think that I'm super encouraged by the model, super encouraged by the contribution for the company, and I think the stickiness is what really matters that – when they build their business with Magnite as the backbone of their programmatic marketplaces, we become more than just a vendor or a partner that can be put in competition every quarter. We become much more of a partner that's a much more strategic, longer-term partner, which isn't the easiest thing to do, particularly in the DBplus world. So they've been essential to our growth and the success of ClearLink.

This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Michael Barrett for any closing remarks.

Thank you, operator. Before we close, I want to thank our investors and our team. To our shareholders, thank you for your continued confidence and long-term partnership. We remain focused on discipline execution and building durable value. To our employees around the world, thank you. CTV becoming the majority of our business The acceleration across streaming and our early leadership in AI-driven transactions are direct results of your innovation and commitment. The shift towards streaming and automation is structural and still in its early innings. As ad dollars move into CTV, they move into an environment where Magnet has scale, deep integrations, and meaningful market share. We believe we are building foundational infrastructure for the next era of advertising, and we are confident of our best days are ahead. Thank you for joining us. We look forward to updating you next quarter.

I'll turn it back over to Nick to cover our upcoming marketing events. Or I won't. You know what? I'll hand those to Nick.

Thank you, Michael. Yes, sorry. So upcoming schedule, we've got Susquehanna conference now virtually tomorrow. We've got meetings in San Francisco with Needham on March 5th, Sydney Roadshow on March 11th, meetings in Boston with Bank of America on March 17th, an investor lunch with Susquehanna on March 19th, Kansas City with RBC on March 24th, Dallas and Houston with Stevens on the 25th and 26th of March, and then San Diego and LA with Wolf on the 30th and 31st. Thanks again all for joining.

Everyone else has left the call.

This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating and have a pleasant day.