MediaAlpha, Inc.

Hello, and thank you for standing by. My name is Lacey, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Media Alpha, Inc. third quarter 2026 earnings 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 this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Alex. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Lacey. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. With me are co-founder and CEO Steve Yi and CFO Tigran Sinanyan. On today's call, we'll make forward-looking statements relating to our business and outlook for future financial results, including our financial guidance for the fourth quarter and full year of 2026. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Please refer to our SEC filings, including our annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q for a fuller explanation of those risks and uncertainties and limits applicable to forward-looking statements. All the forward-looking statements we make on this call reflect our assumptions and beliefs as of today, and we disclaim any obligation to update such statements except as required by law. Today's discussion will include non-GAAP financial measures, which are not a substitute for GAAP results. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the corresponding GAAP measures can be found in our press release and investor supplement issued today, which are available on the investor relations section of our website. I'll now turn the call over to Steve. Hey, thanks, Alex.

Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us. The third quarter was the best quarter in media analysis history across all of our key metrics. During the quarter, our revenue base continued to broaden as multiple carriers stepped up their budgets meaningfully, driven by intensifying competition for policy growth. This resulted in strong volume for our supply partners, who delivered more high-quality consumer referrals into our marketplace. We continue to execute very well in these favorable market conditions, which we expect to continue for the foreseeable future. Auto insurance revenue grew 17% year over year and remains the largest driver of growth in our property and casualty insurance vertical. We're also seeing more carriers put real ad dollars behind home insurance, where we've historically had a much smaller footprint. In home and renters, revenue hit a record $66 million in the third quarter, up 116% year over year. That growth was driven by strengthening market conditions and wallet share gains as both traditional and natively online direct-to-consumer digital carriers allocated more of their budgets to us in pursuit of efficient growth. As carriers evolved towards more multi-channel distribution, we're uniquely positioned to help them acquire customers effectively across both their direct-to-consumer and agent-based channels. As a reminder, we started our agent business from scratch in Q1 of 2021 We help captive and independent insurance agents acquire customers efficiently and directly on our platform using the same programmatic capabilities we offer to our carrier partners. We invested in automation to serve a growing number of agents with a much smaller, leaner team, which enables us to scale efficiently. Today, we work directly with over 3,000 active agents, up from approximately 2,000 a year ago. In the third quarter alone, agent revenue was $21 million, up approximately 46% from $14 million a year ago. Agents continue to represent a significant share of insurance distribution and an attractive growth driver for MediaAlpha, complementing our direct-to-consumer capabilities. Our platform powered over $2.5 billion We believe this scale, which is the largest in our industry, makes our predictive algorithms more effective at delivering unique insights and superior value to carriers. For example, in a recent test, a carrier that opted into our proprietary optimization models saw conversion rates improved by roughly 80%, which drove far greater sales at a lower cost per policy. We love these kinds of tests because they demonstrate to carriers As we keep delivering such results, we expect carriers to shift more budget into our higher margin open marketplace. This drives the flywheel of our two-sided marketplace by further increasing our scale advantage, which allows us to deliver even more differentiated insights and greater efficiencies over time. As we look ahead, we expect consumers to increasingly leverage AI to help them shop for insurance. While no one can predict exactly how this will unfold, we remain confident that major carriers will retain a high level of control over how their policies are advertised, distributed, and sold. We're also confident that advertising will emerge as the dominant monetization paradigm for consumer AI companies, creating a new acquisition channel for our supply partners. We've seen ChatGPT aggressively roll out advertising to three-tier subscribers. In September, according to SimilarWeb, 43% of free-tier chat GPT users in the United States were shown ads. While the impact of agentic commerce, as enabled by personal AI agents like Muse, will vary widely across consumer products and services, large brands and merchants are already signaling that they intend to retain control over how AI agents access their systems and interact with customers on their behalf. Earlier this month, Meta and Sierra, with partners including Shopify, Stripe, and Walmart, announced the Personal Agent Protocol, an emerging standard designed to let businesses verify who an AI agent represents and sets rules for what an agent is allowed and not allowed to do. That reflects a simple reality. Companies want to control how third parties access and interact with their website systems and customer-facing experiences. Insurance carriers are no different. and we expect quoting and binding to largely stay in carrier-controlled systems whether the shopper is a person or an AI agent. As we look ahead to 2027, we're confident in the momentum we're seeing as broader carrier mix reflects the wider demand in the market. We're continuing to operate in a growth-oriented auto insurance market cycle and our marketplace delivers the scale and efficiency that carriers need to compete. That competition is driving higher carrier budgets, and more of those dollars are flowing through our marketplace. Longer term, the shift towards direct distribution will continue, with carriers expected to shift a growing portion of their $35 billion of spend in insurance agent commissions into digital marketing over time. As we wrap up 2026, we believe our business has years of durable, double-digit growth to come, and that will translate into real value for our shareholders. With that, I'm excited to welcome Tigran back as our CSO. Tigran, I'll hand it over to you to take us through our numbers.