Outbrain Inc.

Good morning, and welcome to Outbrain's second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Today's call is being recorded, and we have allocated one hour for prepared remarks and Q&A. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Jason Kiviat. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us on today's conference call to discuss Outbrain's second quarter 2021 results. Joining me on the call today, we have Outbrain's co-founder and co-CEO, Yaron Ghalai, co-CEO, David Kosman, and CFO, Elise Garfalo. During this conference call, management will make forward-looking statements based on current expectations and assumptions, which are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from our forward-looking statements if any of our key assumptions are incorrect. Because of other factors discussed in today's earnings press release and the comments made during this conference call, or in our latest reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, each of which can be found on our IR website, investors.outbrain.com. We do not undertake any duty to update any forward-looking statements. Today's presentation also includes references to non-GAAP financial measures. You should refer to the information contained in the company's second quarter press release for definitional information and reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to the comparable GAAP financial measures. With that, let me turn the call over to Yaron.

Thank you, Jason. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. As we have just completed our initial public offering, I want to acknowledge and thank everyone who has helped us reach this exciting milestone for our company. Employees past and present, partners, customers, and investors old and new, thank you for being part of this journey. We're very excited for what's next. Since this is our first earnings call as a public company, I'll take the opportunity to provide some highlights about Outbrain's founding story. Ori Lav and I founded Outbrain about 15 years ago, and we pioneered the space of recommendations on the open web. We tried to solve two things. First, enable consumers to more easily discover content from publishers and media owners. Second, to create a sustainable, scalable business model for those media owners. At the time, The prevailing model for the entire online industry, advertising industry, was focused on extracting higher prices from advertisers. But as consumers, we didn't feel like the ad prices mattered to us at all. And yet, even today, most of the advertising industry optimizes primarily for extracting higher ad prices, regardless of the impact on the user's experience. We founded Outbrain to be a leader in recommendations and content discovery focusing on users engagement first. We believe that this is the key to maximizing long-term yields for both our partners and for ourselves, because user engagement has a compounding effect. I wrote in more detail about this compounding effect in the founder's letter in the S-1, and I encourage you to read it if you'd like to better understand Outbrain's differentiation and long-term focus. The founder's letter is also posted on the investor section of our website. Why does this matter? Let's discuss how our recommendation engine creates user engagement, which in turn creates value for our three constituencies. First for us, the consumers, recommendations drive value by being more personalized and therefore more interesting and engaging. Second are our advertisers. A powerful recommendation technology engages the right users at the right time. Advertisers pay us primarily for actual user engagement or cost per click. They love this because it drives measurable results with superior ROAS or return on ad spend. The third constituency are our media owner and publisher partners. For them, the recommendations are the driver of LTV or lifetime value. In the immediate term, those operating ad recommendations drive tremendous revenue for our partners. we've generated over $3 billion of revenue from our ads for our partners to date. In addition, our focus on user engagement when providing what's typically called organic recommendations for media partners drives them more engagement and user loyalty, which translates for them into more revenue in the future. We believe that this is what drives the scale and accelerating growth that you can see in our results. We reach about a billion people per month through partnerships with more than 7,000 media properties, including many of the world's best media owners, companies such as Sky News, CNN, MSN, Der Spiegel, Washington Post, Sanke, New York Post, Le Monde, and many, many others. Nearly all of these partnerships are exclusive with Outbrain. More recently, we've been growing our recommendations on new media environments, such as mobile device manufacturers, push notifications, and web browsers, which is a good indication of how our brain will be able to power recommendations wherever content is consumed in years to come. Switching gears, I want to briefly touch the topic of cookies. Now, all companies in our space use third-party cookies, but for us, they are just one of a variety of solutions that we use. Two other technologies that we've built and used for over a decade are much more important for us. First, Since we power the entire feed experience on many of the world's most premium publishers, we have a tremendous amount of first-party data, which is immune to all the changes you're hearing about these days. Second, at my previous company, Quigo, the team and I pioneered the space of contextual advertising on the internet. That core team of contextual experts continued with me to Outbrain, and we built it with contextual algorithms at the core from day one. We've been pioneering and innovating on contextual technologies which don't need any cookies for two decades now. Before I hand the call over to my partners, I would like to note an exciting addition we announced at the board level last week. We're thrilled to have recently added a new board member, Kate Javeri. Kate is currently the Chief Marketing Officer of the NBA continuing an impressive career of executive and senior physicians at Amazon's Twitch interactive at Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft. She brings a wealth of experience in public and growth companies with focus on the consumer and on brand advertisers. Welcome aboard Kate. I will now turn the call over to David who will preview the exciting momentum and our results highlight our competitive advantage in the market. and the opportunity for Outbrain going forward with our differentiated offering. David?