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Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Today's call will begin momentarily. Until that time, you will be placed on music hold. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for standing by. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Podcast One Q2 results and corporate update webcast and conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during that time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, again, press star one. Thank you.
spk02
I will now turn today's call over to Aaron Sullivan, Interim CFO. Please go ahead.
Aaron Sullivan
Thank you, and welcome to Podcast One's second quarter fiscal 2024 business update and financial results conference call on webcast. Presenting on today's call are Kate Graves, President of Podcast One, Rob Allen, CEO and Chairman of Live One and Executive Chairman of Podcast One, and myself, Aaron Sullivan, interim CFO of LiveOne and PodcastOne. I would like to remind you that some of the statements made on today's call are forward-looking and are based on current expectations, forecasts, and assumptions that involve various risks and uncertainties. These statements include but are not limited to statements regarding the future performance of the company, including expected future financial results and expected future growth in the business. Actual results may differ materially from those discussed on this call for a variety of reasons. Please refer to Podcast One's filings with the SEC for information about factors which could cause the company's actual results to differ materially from those forward-looking statements, including those described in Podcast One's Form 10-K for the year ended March 31, 23, filed by the company with the SEC on June 29, 2023, and subsequent SEC filings made by the company. You will find reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures discussed today in the company's earnings release which is posted on its investor relations website. The company encourages you to periodically visit its investor relations website for important content. Following discussion, including responses to your questions, contains time-sensitive information and reflects management's view as of the date of this call, November 9, 2023. And as required by law, the company does not undertake any obligation to update or revise this information after the date of this call. I'd like to highlight to investors that the call is being recorded. Podcast One is making it available to investors and the media via webcast, and a replay will be available on Podcast One's IR website in the events section, shortly following the conclusion of the call. Additionally, it is the property of the company, and any redistribution, retransmission, or rebroadcast of the call or the webcast in any form without the company's express written consent is strictly prohibited. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Podcast One's Executive Chairman, Rob Adams.
Kate Graves
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining. Podcast one, we acquired three years ago doing 20 million in revenues and losing over 5 million a year. Kit Gray and the world-class management team that was there when we acquired it stepped in to run the company day-to-day. And as you can see from the results today, we're now doing $21 million in EBITDA positive, right, for the first six months of the year. So a huge success and huge growth story that's developing here. Second is we spun out our podcast business into its own public company in a very difficult market, but we spun it out for multiple reasons. One is to give that management team an opportunity to stretch their legs and prove how talented they are, and they've consistently delivered to us on a quarter-to-quarter basis. Second is to give us the opportunity to acquire additional assets. We have over 100 podcasts in our pipeline, the biggest in history of the company, as well as 10 acquisitions. And we've announced a major initiative with Cast Media to acquire certain of their podcasts. We've had huge success with it already. We've added over five podcasts, well over $4 million in revenues, and we see a telltale sign. There'll be multiple more coming very shortly. With that, I want to hand it over to Kit to talk about the company where it's growing and why we're hitting all of our metrics and growth and why the opportunity is the biggest it's ever been for podcasting right now. Thank you, Chip.
Kit Gray
Thanks, Rob. Appreciate everybody's time today. This is our first quarterly conference call as a public company. I wanted to take a few minutes to give a brief history on both Podcast One and provide an overview of Podcast One's business model. I co-founded Podcast One over 10 years ago with the iconic broadcaster entrepreneur, the late Norm Pattis, who founded Westwood One Radio Network. Westwood One grew into one of the largest radio networks in the United States and one of the top media companies in the world. It still exists today. Norm and I were pioneers in the podcast industry, and using extensive research, we built a team of 40 employees and over 100 shows that have made millions of dollars over the years. Working and learning from Norm was an experience that largely shapes the way I manage podcasts once a day. especially when it comes to talent management, which Norm was magnificent at. We sold Podcast One to Live One in 2020, and since then we have successfully integrated Podcast One's business with Live One's streaming radio subscription business, Slacker, as well as greatly benefited from Live One's expertise in producing both live audio and video streaming content. We have done pay-per-view events, such as the Adam Carolla Live show on Sunday nights in Improv in San Diego. The podcast marketplace has been on a wild 10- to 12-year run. Over that time, some of the large media companies have come in and overspent on talent, tech, top shows, and acquisitions of entire podcast networks. Podcasts once stayed true to the Norm Pattis way, and it did not. In most cases, it has not worked out financially for those acquirers. Abstaining Podcast One is now in a power position of being a fast-growing, top-ten profitable podcast network. We always wanted to be in a place where we were making money simply because we had to, and that edict has ensured success for the company. The current state of the industry is economically different than it was just a year or two ago, but it continues to be very strong. Whereas overall ad growth in traditional media may have slowed over the last year or two, we're seeing growth in the podcast advertising spend. And different revenue opportunities have emerged, such as programmatic radio, video opportunities, 360 sponsorships, including social media, as well as live shows, pay-per-view events, IP, and merch. Podcast One is currently in a fast growth mode, and we are... We are complementing organic growth with tactical acquisitions of both individual shows as well as smaller entrepreneurial-run podcast networks, many of which are experiencing growing pains and are undercapitalized. We are quickly integrating these new assets into our proven system and models that we've built over the last 10 years to maximize revenue growth and margins. Our basic metrics come down to we have over 200 shows produced annually about 350 episodes weekly with over 44 million monthly downloads and 6 million monthly unique listeners today podcast one is ranked number 10 on pod track ranking service for the month of september we're ahead of such media powerhouses as paramount fox and cnn 200 plus advertisers uh are on our art on our books and it's growing every day with many of them being fortune 500 companies many of these companies have built their businesses through a podcast advertiser. Our business model is very much designed where we exclusively control the distribution and sales rights of all our shows. Our shows are not only distributed on our network, but the likes of Apple, Spotify, iHeart, individual platforms, PC1 TV, over a million Teslas, YouTube, which is the second largest search engine in the world, and pretty much anywhere you can get podcast content. The key to that is we control the advertising inventory and the impressions and everything that is associated with the advertising and the revenue generating channels. PC1 offers high touch resources to podcasters that include marketing, sales, tech, and production. We have high state-of-the-art studio, Beverly Hills, where many of our shows are produced, but we have the capabilities of producing these programs all over the world with our world-class production team. Our model has specifically been built on a revenue share with talent. And in some cases, we provide minimum guarantees. But we do not lay out large sums of capital up front to acquire talent for shows. But rather, our revenue share partner models increase as both the talent and the Podcast One team drives revenue. We use a formula of growth potential, audience metrics, sales availability, and flexibility to make calculated decisions on deals with new and existing programs as we look to acquire them. We have an advantage where unsold inventory on our networks can now be used for marketing our programs. This is a cost-efficient way and really the most successful way to attain new podcast growth by advertising in current podcasts. We have a fantastic and seasoned ad team that is responsible for driving audience and ad revenue. It is also important to note that our business model has a degree of operating leverage in it so far that we see operating margins improve when we scale business. We do not need to use capital to grow our infrastructure and our back end. We're okay there. Our growth will now come from acquisitions and programs and sales. Our management team Many of us have been here for over 10 plus years. My right-hand man, Eli DeBorken, is our chief content officer and is a huge part of the company. He's been with me since day one of Podcast One. Our chief revenue officer, Sue McNamara, has been with us for over four years of Podcast One and has a successful career leading the CBS Howard Stern company. network, and she's just well-versed in the entire industry and has a great reputation and is a great manager of our 10-plus sales reps across the country. Stacy Parra and Alistair Walford run our production team with over 10 years of producing podcasts. We also have the advantage of our own platform. There are the likes of Art19, Megaphone, which have both been acquired by Amazon and Spotify respectively for millions of dollars. We have our own hosting platform that works specifically with AdWiz, which is operated and owned by SiriusXM. This allows us to use digital ad insertion technologies for behavioral targeting, geo-targeting, and time-sensitive campaigns. It also allows us to monetize backlog episodes. So if you find out about a new podcast that's been going on for years and you listen to episode one, we can monetize that impression. Launchpad, which is a service we offer to people that want to create their own podcast and don't want to have any hosting fees. When we give them that opportunity free, there's over a thousand shows on that network. And that is a great opportunity for us to have a farm team for new, growing, existing podcasts. as well as use that inventory for sales and monetization and promotion. Our roster at Podcast One includes the likes of Adam Carolla, Lady Gang, Jordan Harbinger, Caitlin Brasseau, A&E that has the cold case files and I Survive, and many, many more. We have many recent acquisitions and shows, and we acquire shows on a weekly, monthly basis. We just acquired some more news, which has over 500,000 video and audio impressions a week. Brendan Schaaf's three programs, The Fighter and the Kid, The Golden Hour, and The Brendan Schaaf Show have over a million video views and audio listens a week. We just launched the second season of our hit show, Bad, Bad Things, with Barbara Schroeder, the director of the hit Netflix documentary, Evil Genius. This fall, actually next week, we will be launching Barnumtown with Kyle McLaughlin and Josh Davis, produced by Patrick Washberger, who's known for his time developing CODA, The Hunger Games, and Divergent. We're working with Epic on that process, that project. We have a funnel, as Rob mentioned, over 100 shows led by Eli Dvorkin and our team to acquire those shows, grow, and maximize revenue. We have over 10 years of Financial models to clearly understand the ad marketplace as we craft deals for talent to make successful decisions that will limit our risk. Very much a money ball game. And hedging our bets to make sure everything that we acquire makes sense for us to not only grow, but make money. Many of our long-term shows relationships recommend Podcast One as a referral business. So many of our podcasts say, hey, we've had a great experience working with Podcast One. and they come and work with us. The current state of the industry is that there are a lot of big deals that have been declined by some of those major companies, iHeart, Amazon, Spotify, that are ending. Talent is looking for new homes and different opportunities. Maybe they're not getting the attention that they once were, and their deals aren't going to be renewed at what they once were. Well, that leaves us a lot of opportunity to go out, acquire those shows, grow those shows, make them profitable experiences for us. As Rob mentioned, The recent spinoff of Podcast One to be a standalone public company allows us to use Podcast One stock to help acquire additional program assets and retain talent. We've recently did a deal with a small podcasting network pursuant to which we acquire a number of shows which have already driven seven-figure revenues. Podcast One works hand-in-hand with Live One Slacker subsidiary driving efficiencies, including the Tesla-Amazon partnership Amazing a Tesla relationship and gives us exposure to Podcast One shows that other networks simply just can't get. They also, as we mentioned, help us with our pay-per-view and our live shows, and we get hosting discounts based on the size and scale of both of those companies together. The future looks extremely bright for Podcast One, and we appreciate all the support from our shareholders. At this point, I'd like to hand it back to Rob Ellen. Thank you for your time.
Kate Graves
Thank you everyone for joining. And as you can see, Kit has years of experience. His team has delivered hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues across radio and audio and are really pioneers in the podcast space. And the best way we can show that is you'll see shortly as we've announced, we will add to our buyback. We will start to buy back stock in podcast one as we believe it is trading at a deep, deep discount. And as you look at the comps and the deals that have been done even recently, Sirius radio bought a podcast network doing 10 million in revenues. That doesn't even show up. It doesn't even show up on contracts. We've now moved from number 13 to number 10 and we're shooting to be top five this year. And so we'll be buying back stock and we'll be buying back substantial stock and big believers in this team and big believers in what we're building. So thank you everyone for joining and we look forward to any questions that you have.
Operator
At this time, if you'd like to ask a question, press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Again, if you'd like to ask an audio question, press star 1. We'll pause for a moment to compile the Q&A roster.
spk03
At this time, there are no audio questions. Thank you, everyone.
spk02
This concludes today's call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines. This concludes today's call. Thank you for joining.
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