MediaAlpha, Inc.

Greetings. Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Media Alpha Q1 2021 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Denise Garcia, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Our discussion today will include forward-looking statements about our outlook for future financial results, including our financial guidance for the second quarter and the full year 2021, which are based on assumptions, forecasts, expectations, and information currently available to management. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause future results or events to differ materially from today's guidance. Please refer to the earnings release we filed with the SEC on Form 8K and the shareholder letter we posted to the investor relations section of our website today for a fuller explanation of those risks and uncertainties and the limits applicable to forward-looking statements. MediaAlpha will routinely post information that may be important to investors on our IR website, investors.medialpha.com. and we use this website as a means of disclosing material information to the public in a broad, non-exclusionary manner for the purposes of the SEC's regulation fair disclosure. In addition, we will be referring to a certain actual and projected financial metrics of Media Alpha, which are non-GAAP financial measures. These metrics include adjusted EBITDA, contribution, and contribution margin, and we present them in order to supplement your understanding and assessment of our financial performance. Non-GAAP measures should not be considered a substitute for or superior to financial measures calculated in accordance with GAAP. The most directly comparable GAAP measures, as well as reconciliations of the non-GAAP measures to those GAAP measures, are available in our first quarter earnings release. As a reminder, we've published a shareholder letter on our IR website, and we'll refer to that during this Q&A session. Now I'll turn the call over to Steve.

Hey, thanks, Denise. Hi, everyone. We're pleased to report yet another record-breaking quarter. Our top line transaction value in the first quarter of 2021 was $262.5 million, an increase of 58% year over year and above the high end of our guidance range. Our outstanding performance was driven by continued strength of our P&C vertical, where we saw 74% year over year growth, as well as excellent momentum in our health insurance vertical, which achieved 51% year over year growth. As we discussed in our shareholder letter, our industry leading scale, growth rate, and operating leverage are unmistakable signs that our model is working. Our scale advantages are enabling us to offer increasing efficiencies to our partners, both through superior economics and data science. Moreover, we continue to see greenfield opportunities ahead of us. In 2020, A year when we saw the effects of COVID-19 accelerate the insurance sector's adoption of online distribution channels, the insurance industry still spent only 21% of its marketing dollars online, as compared with 65% for marketers across all industries. We're pleased with how well we're positioned to capture this market opportunity and the four-day strong continued growth in 2021 in our core insurance markets, as reflected in our increased full-year guidance. With that, we'll open it up to your questions.