Outbrain Inc.

Good morning, and welcome to the Outbrain, Inc. First Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to your Outbrain Management team.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us on today's conference call to discuss Outbrain's First Quarter 2023 results. Joining me on the call today, we have Outbrain's co-founder and co-CEO, Jeroen Gulley, co-CEO, David Kosman, and CFO, Jason Kvyat. During this conference call, management will make forward-looking statements based on current expectations and assumptions. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our forward-looking statements. These risk factors are discussed in detail in our Form 10-K filed for the year ended December 31, 2022, and in subsequent reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the call's original date, and we do not undertake any duty to update any such statements. Today's presentation also includes references to non-GAAP financial measures. You should refer to the information contained in the company's first quarter earnings release for definitional information and reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to the comparable GAAP financial measures. Our earnings release can be found on our IR website, investors.outbrain.com, under news and events. With that, let me turn the call over to David.

Thank you, McKenna. In Q1, we exceeded the guidance we provided, delivering 52.2 million in extra gross profit and positive adjusted EBITDA of 0.7 million. In what is still an uncertain macro environment, we are focused on first, driving growth of usage and better performance in our current marketplace, and second, growing our addressable market, both on the advertiser side and the publisher side, to a focused product and technology-led strategy while maintaining tight controls on costs. I will start with a macro environment where the outlook continues to be uncertain. The softness in advertising budgets continues. From a geographical perspective, we are seeing some more favorable trends on advertiser budgets in Europe versus a more cautious approach in the U.S. From an industry perspective, we are encouraged by the accelerating trend of advertisers from enterprise brands to performance marketers, increasingly making budget decisions based on measurable outcomes driven by user attention and engagement and leveraging contextual data. This is why, for the last few months, we've been accelerating our focus, helping enterprise brands deliver experiences that drive deeper engagement, attention, and measurable results. We believe that we are well-positioned to deliver on this market need thanks to our heritage and strength in predictive AI-based performance. We've been working with some of the top global agencies and enterprise brands on validating our unique selling proposition and testing it on our platform. We are encouraged by the initial signs, and we'll be making several announcements regarding this product launch in the coming weeks. In order to support our efforts in these growth areas, we've also announced several organizational changes such as the appointment of Andras Tori, the former founder and CTO of Zementa, who has led Outbrain's recommendations and data science department for the past four years, to also become chief product officer, and work closely with our new CTO, Jonathan Mamman, who's led our engineering organization for the past five years. We have also announced several changes in our business organization under the new leadership of our CRO, Alex Erlmeyer, who previously led our international business, to ensure the right focus on our growth areas with teams in local markets, while at the same time consolidating into hubs certain segments of advertisers and publishers to better serve them with centralized know-how and generate cost efficiency. Andrade, Jonathan, and Alex have each been with us for over a decade. With that, I will move to the publisher side of our business. We continued to solidify our position with premium publishers globally. We signed several new deals, including an emphasis on financial publishers with Fortune, Entrepreneur, and Coindesk. We renewed multi-year deals with several anchor premium publishers, including the Washington Post, Le Monde in France at the end of Q4, Ansa in Italy, Hearst and Bocento in Spain, and Orange in France. we remain focused on premium publishers as we believe the trust they've built with their audiences on the open internet leads to a deep and meaningful relationship with their readers, which is a flywheel for a better user experience and better attention and engagement moments for advertisers. On the product side, our publishers are enjoying the constant architectural improvements we are making to smart logic, such as optimizing the experiences, reducing widget latency, which is expected to increase revenue. They also continue the adoption of new products and capabilities to optimize the performance on their properties. An additional growth driver is the increase of in-article integrations to header binning or code on page. In Q1, we added about 70 of such in-article integrations, which is also an important part of our enterprise brand strategy. On the non-publisher supply side of the business, which includes our direct-to-device partnerships that we highlighted as one of our growth drivers, we also continued to expand. And in the last few months, we signed partnerships with SmartNews, Flipboard, Quora, and others, enabling us to expand our advertiser campaigns to such platforms, leveraging our real-time bidding capabilities that optimize the engagement and performance. In Q1 2023, these partnerships contributed approximately 10% of our revenue. On this front, we are particularly excited about the launch of Upday News, an access bringer company on Samsung devices in the US, replacing the resisting news app provider. Through our partnership with Upday, we'll now also be able to access that highly valuable inventory for our advertisers. Moving to the advertiser side of our marketplace. I refer to the macro trends impacting demand and resulting in stable but still lower CPCs than last year. On our end, we continue to improve the programmatic access to our network. In Q1, we fully integrated our performance DSP, Zementa, into our core, such that all our advertisers can select the platform of their choice to access the outbrain supply and our extended network of supply via the Zementa platform or through our Amplify dashboard. We are also leveraging many of the AI-driven ROAS improvements in our Amplify dashboard into our programmatic marketplace. We are seeing some promising success stories for our advertisers, and we believe that we could see significant upside from further scaling the use of the Zementa technology for our core advertisers. Bringing together our investment in AI and CBS conversion-based strategy, I wanted to highlight the results of one of our customers, Babbel, one of the world's top-selling language learning apps. They used Outbrain's title suggestions, a tool powered by AI technology that automatically suggests the titles by scanning the brand landing pages alongside conversion-based strategy, which resulted in an improvement of 20% average click-through rate and a 20% conversion rate improvement. The combination of these products resulted in quality leads and a more effective use of campaign dollars for Babel's team. Another growth driver we highlighted and are excited about is our video business, which includes the VI acquisition and our Outstream video product. In Q1, we saw significant new wins with VI's smart video products, including the SPIEGEL and UPDATE in Germany, ANSA in Italy, and EVENING STANDARD in the UK. These represent just a few examples of the new in-article placements worn in Q1, alongside more than the 190 implementations of the VI product in existing Outbrain publishers. The power and impact that video experiences can have in capturing attention and driving engagement is one of the keys for the future of our enterprise brand strategy. To sum it up, we are pleased that we exceeded our guidance for Q1, and considering the macro headwinds, we are proceeding with caution. We are focused on product and technology-led improvements of the performance of our marketplace and in growing our addressable market for advertisers and publishers, particularly our offering for enterprise brands. At the same time, we are maintaining cost discipline across the company consistent with our previously stated objective of generating positive cash flow in 2023. I'll now hand it over to Yaron. Thanks, David.

Times like this are the perfect opportunity to keep inventing and innovating around product algorithms and AI. I want to highlight a few of the areas where we brought new innovations to our platform during the last quarter. Let's start with algorithms. On our last call, I shared some of the progress we made on the algorithmic side during 2022, culminating in a 9.5% improvement of our yield potential. This is based on our internal A-B testing of algorithms. While these improvements were muted in last year's numbers due to the macro demand challenges, they are spring-loaded, so to speak, into our platform. During the first quarter, we released five new algorithm updates, which our internal A-B testing indicates have further improved our RPM yield potential by another 2.7%. Here are two examples. First, we released a new exploration strategy based on what academics call Wilson score interval, which improves the efficiency of how our system tests new ads. This algorithm allows us to save ad impressions that were previously used for testing ads and instead serve higher yielding ads. Second, we doubled the number of model parameters in our online prediction algorithm and boosted the throughput of predictions we can process to about one billion predictions per second. We've done that while maintaining a very low latency of processing of our recommendations. These are just two examples of five algorithm upgrades we released in Q1. When advertiser demand is robust, we expect the 2.7 increase in yield potential to continue compounding our results on top of the previous upgrades. Switching gears to serving efficiency, which is another example of how we're using these times to innovate by improving our operating model. We've been intensely focused on reducing our cost of sales while maintaining our serving capabilities and RPM yield levels. As a reminder, the majority of our data center capabilities are operated by us in-house with a certain footprint on public clouds like Microsoft Azure. We find this to be much more cost efficient at our scale than relying on public clouds. But more importantly, it allows our engineers better control and the ability to better optimize serving architecture for our specific needs and for efficiency. In Q1, we released a new framework that calculates in real time the revenue potential of each ad we serve, and based on that, it dynamically allocates more or less compute resources for handling that specific ad. We started implementing this on some of the ads we serve, and initial results are showing an approximately 10% saving on cost of sales on those specific ads without a noticeable impact on RPM. In fact, we believe that over time, this technology may help us increase RPMs by allocating more compute resources to those specific ads with the highest potential of driving higher RPMs while staying disciplined on cost of sales. Lastly, AI is obviously an area we're very focused on. I spoke about this in more detail last quarter, and our engineers are obviously exploring multiple ways of leveraging AI on our platform. As I mentioned previously, we've been using our AI solutions for a while to assist advertisers with scaling headline creatives. David mentioned Babel as one example of an advertiser successfully using this technology to achieve better outcomes. We've now built a more robust solution that includes AI headline creatives from OpenAI's ChatGPT. And by April, about 50% of the ad headlines we suggested to outbrain advertisers were originating from ChatGPT. Another area our engineers have been focusing AI efforts on is predictions of ad viewability. Late last year, we started including our AI-predicted viewability within programmatic channels. As David mentioned, viewability is an important factor for our enterprise brand strategy. We're either building or evaluating AI solutions on areas such as code writing and automated code review testing with solutions such as GitHub Copilot, on image creation and enhancement for ad images, on CTR predictions, etc. Overall, we're very excited with the new opportunities that this wave of AI creates for us on many vectors of our technology and business. And with that, I'll hand it over to Jason to cover our financials.

Thanks, Jeroen. As David mentioned, we beat our Q1 guidance for both ex-tech gross profit and adjusted EBITDA. From a demand perspective, we experienced a continued soft but fairly normal pattern in Q1, with strengthening demand over the course of the quarter in both Europe and the U.S. The early portion of Q2 has remained volatile. We have seen a softer start in the U.S. and more relative strength in Europe. Revenue in Q1 was approximately $232 million, a decrease of 7% year-over-year on a constant currency basis and 9% on an as-reported basis. The decrease year-over-year was driven primarily by lower yields, as we continued to last a prior year period that was not meaningfully impacted by the headwinds on advertising demand affecting our industry. These headwinds were partially offset by growth via new supply partners. New media partners in the quarter contributed 11 percentage points, or approximately $29 million, of revenue growth year over year, which compares favorably to the approximately seven points of growth from new media partners that we had averaged in 2020 and 2021. Net revenue retention of our publishers was 80%, reflecting the continued impact of the demand environment on yields, which drove the majority of the decline year-over-year. Our churn remains very low by our standards, and our three largest churns year-over-year contributed just four total points of net revenue retention headwind in Q1. As another data point, our logo retention was 95% for all partners that generated at least $10,000 in Q1 2022. Ex-PAC growth profit was $52.2 million, a decrease of 17% year-over-year on a constant currency basis and 18% as reported. Consistent with what we've seen in the past several quarters in this environment, the steeper decline of Ex-PAC growth profit year-over-year versus revenue was driven by an unfavorable mix of revenue, lower performance on certain media partners driven in part by the demand headwinds we're seeing, which impacts a portion of our take rates with certain partners, and the impact of onboarding and optimizing significant new supply partners, which is challenged by the weaker-than-normal demand environment. Moving to expenses, operating expenses decreased approximately $3.4 million year-over-year to $50.5 million in the first quarter. The decrease is driven largely by lower personnel-related costs, coming from lower headcount year-over-year, favorability of FX rates, and lower variable compensations. This was partially offset by higher bad debts expense and higher severance costs, the latter of which relates to some of the organizational changes that David referred to to prioritize the efforts of our team. As mentioned in previous quarters, we implemented a series of cost reduction efforts to adjust the current business headwinds, and as we said in the prior quarter, we plan to keep our expenses essentially flat over the remaining quarters of the year. We finished Q1 with a headcount of approximately 970 FCEs, which is down 4% year-over-year and down 8% since we began the cost reductions in Q2 of last year. We continue to focus on driving greater efficiencies in our operations, and as noted in the prior quarter, headcount accounts for around 70% of our operating expenses. As a result, adjusted EBITDA was approximately $1 million in Q1. Moving to liquidity. Free cash flow, which, as a reminder, we define as cash from operating activities, less CapEx and capitalized software costs, was a net use of cash in the period of approximately $27 million. The use of cash was primarily due to a significant slowdown in collections of customer receivables, driven most meaningfully by the sudden closure of Silicon Valley Bank in March. Upon the news, we asked customers to hold payments for over a week until we were able to set up supplemental operating accounts at additional financial institutions. We have regained full access to all of our funds held at the bank, and collections in April have returned to more normal levels as we switch over customers to the new accounts. We estimate around $15 million as the temporary impact of reduced cash and cash equivalents on our balance sheet as of March 31st, resulting from this and other operational challenges impacting collections as of the balance sheet date. As these issues have been resolved, we expect the DSO and cash balance to normalize to our historical levels in the coming months. So while it impacted our cash flows for Q1, we do not expect it will impact our cash flow on a full year basis. As we said, our objective is to achieve positive free cash flow for the year. As a result, we ended the quarter with $318 million of cash, cash equivalents, and investments in marketable securities on the balance sheet, and $236 million of long-term convertible debt. On April 14th, We repurchased $118 million aggregate principal amount of the convertible notes for approximately $96.2 million in cash, including accrued interest, representing a discount of approximately 19% to the principal amount of the repurchased notes. We view the opportunity to repurchase a portion of the debt at a considerable discount to be opportunistic, given the strength of our balance sheet, with a remaining cash balance that retains the optionality to invest in any organic or inorganic opportunities that can drive further shareholder value. In December, the company's board of directors authorized a $30 million share repurchase program, incremental to the $30 million program fully executed in 2022. We began executing the new program in Q1, though we temporarily paused share repurchases upon the news of SBB's closure and due to our purchase of the convertible notes in April. We are monitoring closely as our cash collection is normalized, and we continue to believe it is an attractive way to enhance shareholder value under current market conditions. Now turning to our outlook. As discussed today and in prior quarters, visibility to advertising budgets remains limited. In our guidance, we assume that current macro conditions persist with no material deterioration or improvement, regular seasonality, and as noted in the prior quarter, continued execution of our growth drivers, such as optimization of new supply partners, algorithmic improvements, expansion of our video and full funnel offerings, and attracting new partners. With that context, we have provided the following guidance. For Q2, we expect XTAC gross profit of $52 million to $55 million, and we expect adjusted EBITDA of half a million dollars to $1.5 million. We maintain our previous full-year 2023 guidance provided at the beginning of the year of at least $237 million of XTAC gross profit and at least $28 million of adjusted EBITDA. Now, I'll turn it back to the operator for Q&A.

Thank you. At this time, we'll be conducting a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you'd like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. Our first question comes from the line of Shweta Kajuria with Evercore ISI. Please proceed with your question.

Okay, thank you for taking my questions. Jason, for the guidance that you've provided, could you please help us think through the cadence for the rest of the year when it comes to EBITDA as well as revenue stack growth rates? Specifically, the second quarter EBITDA guidance came in lighter than we would have thought. So anything to call out there and how you're thinking about driving profitability in the back half? And the same thing for top line growth. Thanks a lot.

Hey, Shweta, sure. So, you know, I think we mentioned on our call last time and just tried to reiterate on the prepared remarks just now that our plan is to keep the expenses pretty flat each quarter of the year. And if you look back at the last five or six quarters as well, you'll see that we've been, you know, on a cash expenses, you know, meaning XTAC minus EBITDA, you know, equals cash expenses, you know, basis. We've been pretty flat around, you know, 51 to 52 million of cash expenses. And, you know, our intent is still, you know, in our guidance now to keep the cash expenses flat over the course of this year. So the EBITDA growth really towards the end of the year is coming from the XTAC growth. And so, you know, just to talk to that for a moment, you know, we do have our normal kind of process here for forecasting, which is, you know, we're considering trends in the first part, you know, obviously through Q1 and the first part of Q2, using current FX rates, which for us is April. Normal seasonality is assumed and flat macro, meaning not an improvement and not a deterioration from what we've seen so far. And on top of that, you know, our growth levers, right? And so we've talked to that a little bit, I think, on the last couple of calls, but just what they are is, you know, scaling our supply, you know, growth through new partners. I think David touched on some of the exciting kind of new platforms and traditional partners that we're opening ourselves up to now. Obviously, Jeroen talked to some of the algorithmic improvements that we have, and we're continuing to invest there and see fruit that we expect to see to grow more over the course of the year. And, you know, also notably the expansion of our video and full funnel offerings and mid article placements that David talked about today. So those are some of the things we expect to grow really more over the back half of the year and keeping expenses flat. That's essentially the cadence that we expect.

Okay. Thanks, Jason. Go ahead.

Maybe just to add, I mean, on the second quarter, the way we're looking at EBITDA is pretty much in line with our internal plans. I know that some of you have higher numbers, but what we have for us is not a supply. It's pretty much our plan. We never gave specific guidance for Q2, and we're maintaining the guidance for the year.

Okay, that's helpful. Thanks, David. Jason, just to follow up on your prior comments, Any way to quantify the impact of the growth drivers in the back half in terms of contribution? And that's it for me. Thank you.

Sure. So, you know, not to give specific numbers, but maybe just order of magnitude. You know, not one of those four things that I listed is really the lion's share. But the biggest, you know, if you combine... you know, the kind of video growth expansion and growth, the upper funnel, you know, enterprise brand strategy that David talked about, that would probably be the largest. Number two and three would be, you know, scaling our supply and also adding additional new suppliers. And then Algo, number four, you know, that's been our biggest driver, you know, over the last couple of years. But, you know, as we've noted in this demand environment, it's just not as impactful, you know, despite the lifts that we see in our A-B test. So keeping that as kind of the smallest of the four right now.

Okay. Thanks, David. Thanks, Jason.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Boone with J&P Securities. Please proceed with your questions.

Hi guys. Good morning and thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to ask two, the first just on take rates, you know, we've seen a couple of quarters now where it's been below kind of 2021 levels. Is there anything structurally that changed in the contracts over the last kind of two years of the ad market was just higher where we should think about take rates now being lower, just given higher, maybe guarantees that are in there. Is there anything else to call out in terms of take rates? And then in terms of existing publishers, Can you just broadly speaking talk about the path back to 100%? Is this just comps getting easier? What else can you guys do to drive existing publishers back to that 100% level that you guys had so consistently before? Thanks so much.

Thanks, Andrew. So maybe I'll start. So just on the take rates. Nothing's changed as far as contract terms or anything like that. I think we've said in the past around 20% of our revenue is subject to those minimum RPM revenue guarantees. That's still the same vicinity as it's been. The things that have driven it down have been, obviously we've been saying the same thing for a few quarters as we continue to lap the period that's not affected by the headwinds. But, you know, it's been the mix, you know, some of the exciting supply we won, you know, not to speak to anything individually, but maybe at lower rates than, you know, some different segments or geographies. Obviously, macro is playing the biggest factor in the supply and demand, you know, imbalance that we continue to see in this environment. And those are, you know, and obviously the new supply kind of taking time to scale. I mean, those are the things that have brought it down. Those are also the things that will bring it back up. You know, we do have downside protections on these generally. So, you know, there's not like an unlimited risk. And I don't expect these to go down materially further versus the current levels that they're at. You know, if they get back to the levels from a couple of years ago, it probably will take some level of macro recovery. know but there's definitely things in our control to drive them higher uh you know obviously the algo improvements um expansions of segments with higher take rates and we do expect some of that to happen over you know the the tail end of this year you know particularly video expansion which drives higher margins for us and also higher you know better seasonality generally in the end of the year versus the beginning of the year we have higher take rates at the end of the year versus the beginning of the year um as far as retention um You know, again, we're still kind of laughing this, this challenged period. So, so I think as we kind of get into the back half of the year, we'll, we'll have a, you know, easier comp and, and, you know, not expect to be, you know, this, this same, the same 80% range that we've been, we did see some improvement from the prior quarter, you know, Obviously, I think it was 74% last quarter versus 80% this quarter, and that's really driven by some improvement in pricing and also improvement in click-through rates that we've seen. Each month of Q1, we've seen improvements in click-through rates and in pricing. And, you know, again, not churn-driven, low growth retention, I said 95%. You know, largest three churns combined was under 4%. So, you know, again, as we get towards the back half of the year, I think the console will be able to see more growth through how we used to grow through, you know, land and expand.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ross Sandler with Barclays.

Please proceed with your question.

Hey, guys. Just two questions. David, these new senior management changes or appointments, can you just give us some more color on, you know, overall strategy and how this new structure better equips Outbrain to compete? And then, Jeroen, the 10% efficiency improvement for ad serving. That data point's pretty interesting. Just broadly, how is AI helping with efficiency or the productivity of your engineering team? Just any high-level color on this cost savings as a strategy, or is it just shipping product quicker using these new co-pilot tools and stuff like that?

uh thank you hey ross good morning i'll take the first one so on the senior management uh it's about what's about generally about timing of promoting the right talent from from within to new positions you can see that there is a emphasis a little bit more on programmatic so andras who's been a He was the founder and CEO of Zementa, very strong on programmatic and algo AI machine learning. So we wanted to emphasize that and push it more into the product. This is why we also gave him the responsibility for the product organization. And Alex has led our international business, which is more brand focused than the US business. And right now we're pushing very hard on the enterprise brand front. So we believe that his relationships with agencies, brands, and his understanding of the business and just generally was the right time to make some changes and refresh management for the next few years.

Hey, Ross. I'll take the second question. So first, the cost of sales point I made before. The way what our engineers did is deploying AI predictive technologies to try to predict on the fly in real time how valuable each one of the ads that we are about to serve is for us and for the publisher. And based on that AI predicted kind of valuability, we in real time we deploy more or less compute resources. So it really affects our actual ad serving and data center capacity. And so for ads that are predicted to be of lower value, we use less compute data center resources. And those that are more valuable, we use more compute resources. And for those ads that we served through this architecture, we've seen about a 10% savings in cost of sales. So we think that's a very exciting use of kind of AI predictive models. In terms of where else, I'd say our engineers are pretty much all over this in many different directions. I did mention briefly code writing is probably something that will be assisted. It's going to continue being human engineered. We still don't see anything on code writing that is replacing human software engineers anytime soon. But assisting in writing code more efficiently and faster I think is exciting for our engineers. In terms of code testing and review, that's an area where we think we can have the engineers be much more efficient and have much more robust and fast code review testing using AI. And then on pretty much everything you can imagine on generative AI, I mentioned that on headline or ad creative generation, we now deploy ChatGPT on about 50% add headline suggestions for advertisers. And we think there's much more to do there. And the areas we're exploring not deployed yet, but where we're exploring are on the image generative AI for ad creatives. So I'd say the answer is all of the above.

I happened to be in Israel a couple of weeks ago, and we had a hackathon of all our engineers globally doing competition around ideas and like top three and it's a very exciting thing. Everyone is embracing it across all the dimensions Yaron mentioned and I think it's going to be a sort of great infrastructure for the future for us.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Laura Martin with Needleman & Company. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, just continuing on that really interesting generative IA question you're on. Your cost control was really excellent in the quarter, but doesn't this generative AI work you're doing actually add costs? I mean, you're talking about cost savings and the new content capabilities of generative AI, but doesn't it add, isn't it costly? Doesn't it add costs to this stuff, or am I wrong about that?

and decides how much compute resources to dedicate or to take off each one of the ads that we process. So that's on cost of sales. On the generative AI part like the ChatGPT headlines and things like that, the way we view it is ROI driven. It's about creating many more variations of the ads which feeds into the algorithms which allows us to drive higher click rates and higher yields. So the way we view that is really ROI based, and obviously a bunch of it takes investment, but if the return is there we'll deploy it.

Okay, interesting. And then, Jason, one for you. In terms of cash allocation, so your free cash flow is negative 27, but I noticed that you still bought in $3 million worth of shares. So my question is, you know, talk to me about cash allocation. Since it feels like you really need cash for the business right now, why would you be shrinking your shareholder base at the same time, please?

Sure. So maybe I'll start, and David, if you need to add, feel free to chime in. But just to clarify, Laura, it was $6 million of cash that we spent on share repurchases in Q1. Again, we're considering market conditions and pricing and everything, and we do feel it is it is a creative for our shareholders you know obviously have to weigh the context of the environment and and you know our trends on the business and all of that as well which will continue to do I think Laura we we do believe it was it is the right use of capital we have significant amount of cash on our balance sheet we are according to our plan

planning to be cash flow profitable this year. So I think this is another right use for shareholders. And we were also excited about the ball post buyback where we managed to buy back half of the debt in very attractive financial terms. And we believe that shifts the value from sort of that paper into the equity holders of the company.

Thanks very much. Thanks, guys. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Our next question comes from the line of Hugo Arunian with Citi. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, sorry. Can you guys hear me all right?

Hello? Can you guys hear me all right?

Yeah.

Okay. Uh, great. Thanks. Um, I guess just for our first question, just quickly, um, give us a little bit of an update on Keystone. Um, you know, what the progress has been, you know, some of the strategy we could expect there.

Maybe, maybe I'll take that. I think everyone's on this problematic, but, um, On our last call, we mentioned that we had three more publishers, two in the EU and one in Japan. I would say that since then, we deployed the code on page of Keystone on two more new publishers, and we see a healthy pipeline of those.

Okay, thanks. Sorry, there's some background noise here. I hope it's not coming through on your end. Just think about last year's pace of large publisher sign-ups which has slowed a little bit this year. How should we be thinking about how you guys are focused on the integrations there versus looking to expand this year and how that changes over the course of the year into next year?

I'll take that one. So last year was a record year of premium publisher wins. And as we said, we are very, very focused on the premium side of the market. because we also believe it does support sort of the approach that we're having now to more premium enterprise brands. This year, we're looking at it more, as Jason said earlier, we're looking more into going back to hopefully to a better mix of net revenue retention versus new. We still had, I mean, you'll see a very strong growth in you in the coming couple of quarters because of the new publishers that we went up last year, but it should be hopefully getting back to a more normalized level of the mix you've seen in prior years from us where we are getting closer hopefully soon to the 100% net revenue retention on existing and low single digits up to low double digits growth in you. Thanks.

If I could just ask one last bigger picture question. You know, we're coming kind of to the tail end of earnings here for digital advertisers and thinking about some of the trends we've seen this quarter. You know, I guess notably on Meta, you know, they also have outperformed the market. Their guidance for the second quarter was really strong. You know, we're seeing, not just from them, but across the board, but, you know, Advantage Plus and some innovation around ad products and When we've done some of our checks, we've heard things like advertisers are getting stronger ROAS or as strong as they did in the past pre-IDFA. So it looks like we're moving past some of those headwinds and maybe not all the way back to pre-IDFA levels. I know we're certainly not everywhere. But things have kind of evolved since all that came into place. And just take a picture of how that impacts, how you see that impacting the space, how you see it impacting your business and

I think we saw a similar trend that what you mentioned between January, February and March of improvement. April and May started more volatile. April started more volatile and stabilized towards the end of the quarter. So we're still in an uncertain environment generally on demand. The one trend that we see that is very forceful is for advertisers looking for measurable outcome, measurable returns on their expand, even if we're talking about brand awareness campaigns or brand consideration campaigns. This plays very well for us because we can deploy our predictive analytics, predictive capabilities into delivering much better results for those campaigns. That's why we are focused on that. We also believe that premium supply attracts premium demand. That's why we're focused on the premium supply side. These are areas we started making more significant investments last year. We're very limited right now on the amount of areas where we invest. So I would say Keystone and this area are ones that we're investing in. We believe that we can benefit from this trend from advertisers.

Thank you.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our question and answer session. I'll turn the floor back to management for any final comments.

Hi, this is David. Thank you very much for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you on our next call. Thank you.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.