Outbrain Inc.

Good day and welcome to Outbrain Incorporated First Quarter 2024 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. I'd like to turn the call over to Outbrain's investor relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning and thank you for joining us on today's conference call to discuss Outbrain's First Quarter 2024 results. Joining me on the call today we have Outbrain CEO David Kostman 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, 2023 and updated in our 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-GAP financial measures. We should refer to the information contained in the company's First Quarter earnings release for definitional information and reconciliations of non-GAP measures to the comparable GAP financial measures. Our earnings release can be found on our IR website, .outbrain.com, under News and Events. With that, let me turn the call over to David.

Thank you, Laine. Good

morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our first quarter 2024 earnings call. I'm pleased to share with you our progress and achievements over the past quarter as well as our strategic direction moving forward. On the financial front, I'm pleased that we delivered extra gross profit of $52.2 million towards the higher end of our guidance and that we exceeded our adjusted EBITDA guidance reporting $1.4 million. We generated positive free cash flow of $4.6 million. Strategically, Algorand is on a journey to become one of the largest gateways to the open Internet for advertisers. We believe we are uniquely positioned on the open Internet to offer a cross-funded platform that enables advertisers to build their brands, drive consideration, and deliver conversions. The open Internet is estimated to be a $100 billion advertising opportunity, providing advertisers with access to incremental audiences across highly relevant, professionally produced editorial content. As we look to the future, we believe the industry's focus on consumer privacy, premium quality, transparency, and outcomes aligns favorably with our strengths. Now more than ever, we are seeing all biotypes, from brands to performance, focus on measurable outcomes. We believe that we possess a competitive edge in driving these outcomes from relevant audiences. Despite Google's announcement to further delay third-party cookie deprecation on Chrome, we believe advertisers remain focused on finding more advanced solutions to drive brand outcomes from relevant audiences. Our foundational code on page and engagement data signals continue to enable us to leverage our proprietary data and AI to innovate these solutions for advertisers. Next, I want to provide a quick update on how we are progressing on our gross drivers for 2024. As you may recall from our last call, these revolve around three key pillars. Our first pillar focuses on expanding our share of wallet with advertisers, brands and agencies, and performance advertisers. First, our business with brands and agencies. In Q1, overall direct spend from our brand and agency clients was over $100 million globally. This number represents spend from direct advertisers of all sizes, from mid-market to enterprise brands, and independent agencies to holding companies. We are seeing good progress with Onyx, our brand building offering focused on enterprise clients, with revenues in Q1 exceeding $7 million. We launched Onyx in the Japanese market in Q1, which we believe represents a strong agency growth opportunity, and plan to make Onyx available in additional markets in Q2. Speaking of Onyx, I'm excited to share the success story of one of our most recent enterprise clients, Laker. Laker chose to partner with Onyx for the launch of their new home cinema. Laker leveraged the Onyx brand studio to create a custom, high-impact format that enabled audiences to experience the immersive moments of the Laker home cinema. Onyx enabled Laker to outperform attention benchmarks by 65% and spark 550,000 audience interactions. This case study exemplifies Onyx's ability to deliver beautiful brand experiences that deliver measurable outcomes. In addition, we announced Onyx's partnership with Scope3, enabling us to launch Onyx Green in early April. Onyx Green provides buyers with access to curated deals that reduce carbon emissions by up to 30% compared to open exchange video and display. As we said in the past, we are focused and will continue to invest in this flywheel of demand and supply. Premium global publishers like the ones on the Outbreak platform are looking for better quality advertising, and brand advertisers are attracted to our premium publisher base for the cross-funnel objectives. The second pillar growing our share of wallet from advertisers across our core performance offerings. We are invested in enabling growth of large scale advertisers on our performance DSP Zementa. As part of those efforts, we saw increased total spend through Zementa by approximately 40% in Q1 2024 compared to Q1 of last year. We look forward to leveraging our DSP as a strategic enabler for savvy clients to drive strong performance across the open internet. In addition, our ad manager Amplify remains our core offering for advertisers of all sizes to drive scalable performance. Our focus has been on enabling greater automation of workloads and bidding strategies through AI. Growth in adoption of our AI creative tools nearly doubled from Q4 2023 to Q1 with 14% of our customers utilizing creative AI tools. This suite of tools empowers our teams to deliver innovative creative solutions that enable advertisers of all sizes to scale. AI also sits at the core of our prediction engine and corresponding automated bidding technology. Continued investment in the performance of this technology has led to high adoption with 89% of advertisers spend now leveraging one of our automated bidding modes. Moving on to our next pillar, we've continued to expand our supply footprint enabling advertisers to reach consumers across the entirety of the open internet. We've accelerated the expansion of partnerships beyond our core publisher inventory which drove over 25% of total advertisers spent in Q1 on our platform. Bringing our prediction technology and performance capabilities beyond traditional web publishing is a major focus in 2024 that we believe will enable advertisers to reach wider audiences across diverse media types. The next pillar focuses on growing our differentiated premium publisher partnerships. Publisher logo retention remains strong in Q1 at 98%. This achievement reflects the enduring nature of our publisher partnerships which remain core to our future success. Exclusive column page inventory continues to be a differentiator for our demand business both through access to proprietary supply and corresponding page level and engagement data. We are focused on expanding the breadth of services we offer to these premium publishers in an effort to expand monetization opportunities and access viewable, brand-suitable placements. Our premium publisher base is also continuing to expand. In Q1 we added new supply partnerships including Newscope Australia and Webidia Spain, both of them moving from a competitor. In addition, we signed the Telegraph which is working with us on the Keystone platform, showcasing Keystone's ability to bring incremental partnerships and margin opportunities to our portfolio. On the AI front, in addition to our AI efforts on the product side, our team has also been exploring the use of AI to drive business efficiency and operational effectiveness, seeing real success thus far. We've been able to automate the handling and resolution of 40% of account management support cases with our small and medium publisher team by leveraging AI and robotics process automation. We've applied the same approach to our demand operation team support cases and plan to expand the capabilities to more teams. In conclusion, our first quarter results underscore our commitment to broadening our relevance to more advertiser segments, with the objective of becoming one of the leading gateways to the open internet. We are confident that with continued execution on our growth drivers, we will be able to deliver on the growth and profitability targets for this year and 2025. With that, I'll

turn it over to Jason to cover the financials. Thanks David.

As David mentioned, we achieved our Q1 guidance for Exit at Gross Profit and exceeded our Q1 guidance for Adjusted EBITDA. Revenue in Q1 was approximately $217 million, reflecting a decrease of 6% -over-year. New media partners in the quarter contributed 5 percentage points, or approximately $11 million of revenue growth -over-year. Net revenue retention of our publishers was 89%, which reflects a continued headwind from the impact of the demand environment on pricing, which remains the consistent factor driving pressure on our revenue and on our net revenue retention. I'll touch on the demand trends in a moment. As noted in the prior quarter, we also experienced a decline -over-year on ad impressions, contributing to the retention being below 100%. Again, this was driven largely by page view volatility from certain supply sources, as opposed to churn. Consistent with recent quarters, churn has remained at similarly low levels, with logo retention of 98% for all partners that generated at least $10,000. And our five largest churns amounted to only two combined points of -over-year headwind on NRR in Q1. Turning to advertising demand. Following a seasonal step down in January, CPC remained fairly stable throughout February and March, but remained down significantly versus the prior year. Despite the lower pricing, we experienced RPM, or yield growth, for the second consecutive quarter, thanks to ongoing click-through rate expansion, which continues to exceed our previous highs. Ex-tech gross profit was $52.2 million, flat -over-year, outpacing revenue growth for the fourth quarter in a row, driven primarily by improved yield performance on certain media partners and the net impact of revenue mix. As noted previously, the investing areas we were focused on are largely areas that we expect will drive a higher ex-tech take-rate. We experienced supply volatility from a key partner, which negatively impacted -over-year ex-tech gross profit by -to-high single-digit percentage. Our ex-tech would have grown -over-year by this percentage, excluding this one key partner. This impact was primarily a result of this partner's transitioning from their legacy bidding platform. Our tech migration to the new platform was completed last week. However, the optimization and rescaling of our demand is ongoing. And while we see it impacting Q2 results more than we anticipated, we expect to see sequential growth over the coming months. Moving to expenses. Operating expenses decreased by approximately 5% -over-year to $48.2 million in the quarter as we continued to balance investments in our strategic priorities with continued cost discipline. We began in 2024 with a headcount of approximately 870 FTEs, which is down 11% from January 2023, as we have focused our attention on driving greater efficiencies in our operations and now on redeploying resources towards higher confidence growth areas. That decline -over-year was partially offset by a prior year one-time benefit around variable compensation that did not repeat in the current year. Of note, we saw reduced -to-bed expenses in Q1, down nearly $1 million -over-year as we continue to focus on collection efforts, and we expect to see lower levels over the remainder of the year. As a result, we doubled our adjusted EBITDA -over-year to $1.4 million. Moving to liquidity. Free cash flow, which as a reminder, we define as cash from operating activities, less capex and capitalized software costs, was approximately $5 million in the first quarter. This was driven largely by working capital benefits coming from seasonality, timing of payables around period end, and focused improvements in DSO. As a result, we ended the quarter with $232 million of cash, cash equivalents and investments in marketable securities on the balance sheet and $118 million of long-term convertible debt. In December 2022, the company's board of directors authorized a $30 million share repurchase program, and in 2023, we purchased approximately 3.7 million shares for $17.8 million. We continued share repurchases in 2024, and in Q1 we repurchased approximately 1 million shares for $3.9 million. So as of March 31, we have $8.6 million remaining under our current authorization, and we continue to believe it is an attractive way to enhance shareholder value under current market conditions. Now turning to our outlook. 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. Additionally, to add color, we expect to start to lap a softer comparison period as the year progresses in H2, and particularly in Q4. With that context, we have provided the following guidance. For Q2, we expect ex-tech growth profit of $53 million to $57 million, and we expect adjusted EBITDA of $1 million to $4 million. We maintain our previous full year 2024 guidance provided at the beginning of the year of $238 million to $248 million of ex-tech growth profit, and $30 million to $35 million of adjusted EBITDA. Now I'll

turn it back to the operator for Q&A. Thank

you. Ladies and gentlemen, the floor is now open for questions. If you do have a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad at this time. Again, that's star 1 if you do have a question or comment. Please hold as we poll for questions. And we'll take our first question from Andrew Boone from JMP Securities. Please go ahead, Andrew.

Good morning, and thanks so much for taking my questions. Dickie, I have a big picture question, and then Jason will go a little bit more tactical for the second. But Dickie, can you just talk about the key growth drivers in terms of returning revenue to growth for Outbrain? What do you view as kind of the key one, two, three things that you guys can do to drive better top line growth? And then Jason, tactically on take rates, how should we be thinking about that for the remainder of the year, and can you talk about the drivers that you saw in one queue? Thank you so much.

Hey, Andrew. Good morning. Thanks for the question. So I think the biggest growth drive we've had to rank them is really our move to full funnel. I think this is very unique in terms of participation on the open Internet, and we have a unique opportunity here to link brand and performance and to offer advertisers a full funnel solution on the open Internet. The opportunity is very large. It requires formats like video and high impact display. It requires you to have placements on site. So we're very confident that that's a great opportunity for us and pretty unique in terms of the ability to combine a full funnel, mid funnel, and low funnel. The second one is just growing our share of wallet with advertisers, including our performance advertiser, which is the biggest base of our advertisers. So we're investing a lot in two directions there. One is moving some of those large advertisers to the mentor or the speed platform that delivers performance across the entire open Internet, not just on our publisher base and continuously improving amplify, which is our own direct access platform. We've seen record CTRs in the last couple of quarters, so we feel very good about the ability to drive raw there. So I would say these are the two main ones.

And you're adjacent for the second question. So, yeah, so the take rates have been up a few quarters in a row. I mentioned about a point and a half year over year this quarter and to one less about, you know, new part of it, obviously, mix. And some of that means new deals or just different weighting of deals. Of course, mix kind of works both ways, but really the optimizations and performance is something that we're just always working on. I mean, David included in his third pillar of growth, which is improving yields, improving click through rates and optimizations to drive better performance. We had a ton of supply a couple of years ago and we kind of preached. You know, we are we see ourselves as land and expand trade. We see our learning the users and ourselves learning the users and driving better performance in time. And that's certainly part of what's happening here. And beyond that, and going forward, we are focused on on areas of these investments that we see as all things that should drive higher take rates. So whether it's supply beyond the feed where we think we have our bidding technology can help us drive higher take rates and onyx and video, we tend to drive higher take rates, additional margin opportunities from getting more share of wallets or DSP, you know, and of course, more optimization of yields. Right. So they're all things that we're focused on kind of a more efficient growth. And so that's what we expect

going forward. Thank you.

Thank you. And we'll take our next question from Laura Martin from Needham. Please go ahead, Laura. Hi.

So I have three. One is Alprane has traditionally been a performance oriented ad tech company. But what we're seeing in connected television is that with the rise of our men's, they're closing the loop and they're making CTV more performance oriented. And it feels like that segments is growing the fastest TV. So I'm wondering if you think the competitive landscape is worsening for your piece of the market, which is performance as connected television does more performance oriented tasks. My second one is that you in your commentary, you said that you are adding supply that is non-traditional. I'm interested in learning more about that. What kind of supply that's non-traditional are you adding? And then third, when you mentioned cookies, I would have guessed that you don't actually have a lot of cookies risk because you have an end to end platform. Could you just remind us in the first quarter how much of your ad placement was targeted by using cookies? Thanks.

Hey, Laura. Thanks for the question. So I think the first one on CTV, we are today a relatively small player. But if you recall, we made an acquisition a couple of years ago of a company called Video Intelligence that has capabilities that have brought us into CTV. And we believe that video as a format is a very large opportunity. We've made that acquisition. We're seeing good growth in the deployment of VI players on our base of digital publishers. And we need to find a way to grow our CTV business. But we believe that definitely it's a combination also of branding and performance that we see there. And it is becoming a more significant share of market of performance advertisers. We believe we in the future need to find a way to play there in a bigger way. When you talk about non-traditional, it's what we call platforms. It's third parties. It's gaming platforms. It's news apps. It's lock screens and other such environments where users today consume content. So we're growing that. It's part of our strategy of becoming the gateway to the open Internet. Again, full funnel brand building, consideration and performance, but also getting way beyond our traditional publisher base. So that's one of our big efforts. It's today about 25% of our business is done outside of our traditional publisher base, which we think is an important lever for growth. Again, leveraging the core capabilities we have on those premium publishers, which are anchors for those brands who want to spend. So we're not giving up on that. We're growing that. We mentioned Newscope Australia, but we're also expanding beyond that. And the last point on cookies, we said it from the beginning. We are based on contextually driven outgoes primarily. We have first-party data on our publishers that we leverage. So we don't see a risk from the cookie application. On a relative basis on the open Internet, we think we actually have a big advantage versus other companies that are very focused on retargeting and need to track users across third-party sites. So for us, it's a relatively minimal impact on our outgoes when cookies go away. We tested it when Firefox deprecated it, and it had minimal impact.

Thank you very much. Thank you. And we'll take our next question from Zach Cummins from B. Riley. Please go ahead, Zach.

Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions and congrats on the strong start to the year. I really wanted to dig in a little bit more on ONIX. I appreciate the disclosure with the $7 million in revenue here in Q1. But can you just talk about

which

customer side is this really resonating with and kind of what's the strategy to continue to drive adoption on that side since it appears to be a pretty meaningful growth driver in the overall scheme?

Thanks, Zach, for the question. So ONIX is targeting enterprise brands and agencies who are looking to launch campaigns that build brands. So this is we've been very, very focused since our start on performance, but we see a huge opportunity to leverage a lot of our prediction capabilities and our unique supply to drive much better value also for brand-building campaigns. I mean, there's a good positive trend on the Internet generally that also for brand-building, advertisers are looking for measurable outcomes. We've been very focused on driving attention as the key metric and that leverage our heritage of prediction. And this we launched it in the second half of last year. We had about $15 million in the second half of last year. We see good growth getting into Q1 and Q2 of this year. And we believe that this will also position us in a very unique way on the open Internet, being able to provide a full cross funnel. If you think about just an example, take BMW. I mean, they could do with us a campaign that would promote a new engine with a super cool video. And then we understanding the interaction of the user with that campaign could drive performance or consideration of a new car and then on the bottom really drive a lead to their dealership. So being able to combine that is pretty unique. And we're leveraging our existing base of enterprise brands and advertisers to leverage them from driving performance also to brand building. And it's opening new doors for us at the holding companies and very large enterprise brands that have not worked with us before. So it's a great opportunity to really that's why we emphasize it as one of the most important growth drivers and uniquely positions us on the open Internet.

Understood that's helpful. And just one more financial related question in terms of the reaffirmed guidance that you given this year. Jason, can you parse out how should we be thinking about just expansion of the take rate versus overall growth in terms of gross revenue and kind of what's the right way to think about seasonality and progression, especially into the second half of the year?

Yeah, of course. So, yeah, maybe just a reminder on our forecast methodology. So what we do is we we take current trends that we're seeing, you know, kind of right up until the timing here and we build seasonality on top of that based on our history, you know, that we know. You know, month to month and quarter to quarter what what to expect over, you know, 15 year history or so. And, you know, of course, later on other other known items are growth driver assumptions, etc. And it does come out, you know, altogether as a slightly higher percentage of ex-tack in each two to relative to each one. You know, if you compare it to 2023, 56 percent this year versus 53 percent was the actual last year, 56 percent of you're using the midpoint of the guidance. And so, you know, maybe breaking that down to a couple of pieces, you know, if you're using the midpoint of the guidance, close to half of that age to growth is coming from easier comps. And what I mean by that is, you know, last year, Q4 and really started with October, you know, and you know, the attacks on October 7th and the onset of the war, we saw we saw just a smaller increase from Q3 to Q4 as a whole than we historically have seen. We talked in prior quarters about the impact, obviously, on our local business in Israel, but also on our global business where much of the page views of our of our largest partners were temporarily showing lots of news about the war, which were monetizing lower than they typically would due to brand safety concerns and things like that. Right. So we did see a softer Q4 last year, which sets us up for a little bit of a bit easier comp this year. And the other thing is, I mentioned on the call about supply volatility from a key tech partner. We started to see changes from that partner over the course of 23, but really Q4 was the first the first meaningful period of impact. And so, again, as we as we kind of play out this year, I mentioned on the call that we had a mid to high single digit growth, excluding this one partner on expect this year in Q1. And we expect similar in Q2 as we make our way into Q4, you know, that that that your your headwind subsides. And so, you know, obviously also expecting some some modest sequential growth in the coming months and that partner also aids it as well. And the other things are just things that are in our model. Obviously, we talked about our growth drivers. You know, onyx is one where we expect it to be more seasonally Q4 focused than our than our core business has been historically. And then other things flowing through click through rates, we said, and yield growth for the last two quarters, continuing to flow through. We've seen strength in Europe, which we have flowing through in global events like the US election, of course, will will will be a little bit of a lift in the second half of the year. So, hope that hope that helps.

Yeah, very, very helpful. So thank you so much for all the detail and congrats again on on results.

Sure, thank you. And we'll take our next question from your gal from city. Please go ahead. You go.

Hey, guys, good morning. You've Max on for you. Maybe firstly, if you just give us some color on what you're seeing in the ad macro, it seems like, you know, we've seen a better start to one to you. So just wondering what you're seeing there with ad budgets, maybe if there's any geographical or vertical strength and weaknesses to call out and then maybe more like a capital allocation question. But, you know, you mentioned two hundred and thirty two million dollars of cash investments on the balance sheet. I'm just wondering how you guys think about the cash position and understand you have to buy back authorization. But if there's anything else you guys are thinking about on how to deploy that capital, whether it's or some other uses.

Sure, so maybe I'll start on the on the demand trends that we've seen. So it's been it's been kind of more of the same. You know, I'd say we haven't seen a material increase or decrease really for for a couple of quarters now. You know, we did drive yield or RPM growth year over year for the second quarter in a row. So there is some some strength there. Now, a lot of that's coming, as I said, from from breaking our previous highs on click through rates, which comes obviously from from improvements in our tech and our ability to predict what to show to different users. And, you know, on the contrary, we've seen pricing or CPC remaining down year over year. So part of that is because we're optimizing not for for pricing, but for for yields. Obviously, that's what makes us and our partners money. And so, you know, driving higher click through rates at the cost of pricing might be something that we're that's inherent in our in our in our model here. So it's hard to say that pricing down is a sign of anything deteriorating versus, you know, we're able to drive higher yields from it. And as far as geographically in Europe, we've seen stronger trends. Spain, Italy and Germany, Germany's our second largest market have been showing really positive metrics over over Q1 into Q2, you know, relative to U.S., which has been flatter. And then, you know, verticals, we don't really overly kind of rely on any verticals. I mean, just for color, we've seen strength and entertainment and health, all CPG retail and tech probably been weaker verticals for us. But again, not overly meaningful to our results, those verticals.

And maybe in terms of I think the allocation question, so we have a very strong balance sheet. We are, you know, continuously looking to to use some of this cash for for acquisitions. And we think buyback is still an attractive opportunity. So we have an authorization and we still have around eight million dollars on that authorization.

So that's a great thing. Guys, we just call it.

Thank you. Once again, Star one, if you do have a question or comment, and we'll take our next question from James Heaney from Jeffries. Please go ahead, James.

Great. Good morning and thanks for the question. So you saw 40 percent growth in ad spend on the Samantha DSP. So curious if you could just talk about what's driving the success in that channel and also just how you're balancing sense coming from third party DSP. Thank you.

I guess I didn't I think that the second part of that, I'll start with the with the first part on on the mandates. Really, we are strategically shifting some certain types of performance advertisers that have very large elastic budget into into that platform. So given a numerical example, if they spend without doing a hundred thousand dollars now, they will shift it to the man. And since they can also buy a lot of third party supply as effectively and delivering, you know, rush, they will spend the same hundred hopefully or closer that on our brain and will now spend on a total of hundred and fifty. We will also get a service fee on that, like like a DSP, and we will see increased and very effective spend and Ross for that advertiser. So the certain types of segments, it's very technical that were the Samantha platform fits better and delivers better. So we're shifting some of those and that's been, you know, very successful past and for these advertisers. And I think that's a that's a great opportunity. And just can you repeat the second question on the DSP?

Yeah, sorry. The second part of the question was just about just overall trends that you're seeing from spend that's coming from third party.

So we we see on the on the bright side of the business. Good, good, good spend on on on that from from from our programmatic partners. It's about it's a little less than 20 percent of our total business comes from from these into into our network. But we've seen, you know, stable positive trends overall.

Great. And then maybe if I could just ask one more quick question on, you know, you talked about your creative tools that you're giving customers. Just any sense for what some of these tools are and then just any, you know, case studies of clients seeing success or improved return on investment from, you know, implementing these tools.

But the user is very exciting when you when you see it allows customers to much faster test with different types of images and text and in real time understand what's working, what's not working on which placement and iterate on it in a in a way that prior would require a lot of manual intervention. So I think the models are learning it and automatically updating. It allows you to test thousands of variations, which you couldn't do before. We've seen increased adoption of it. And right now it's still early. We're measuring raw as that it's definitely improving the raw for for that, because it's optimizes their campaign. We see right now we're really focused on adoption and working and analyzing that. So again, that's we mentioned it on the call. It's a big part of our investments generally are now on AI on text and images and also on internal tools, leveraging AI to optimize our business.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you. And that concludes our question and answer session. I'd like to turn the floor back to management for closing remarks.

Thank you very much, everyone, for attending the call today. We are very excited about the growth opportunities we highlighted today. We think the open Internet is a great opportunity. Being a player that can provide the full funnel solution is where we're very, very focused on again, driving brand building, consideration and performance. And look forward to updating your focus on our next call.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude today's teleconference. We thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time and have a great day.