VerticalScope Holdings Inc.

have the opportunity to ask any questions, which you can do so at any time by pressing start, followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I will now hand over to our host, Diane Yu, Chief Legal Officer to begin. Please go ahead, Diane.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Vertical Scope Holdings' first quarter 2025 earnings call. I'm joined by Rob Laidlaw, our Founder, Chair, and Chief Executive Officer Vince Bellissimo, our Chief Financial Officer, and Chris Goodridge, our President and Chief Operating Officer. We'll begin with commentary on the quarter before opening the floor to questions. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that today's presentation contains forward-looking information that involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual events to differ materially from current expectations. These statements should not be read as assurances of future performance or results. Such statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from those implied by such statements. A more complete discussion of the risks and uncertainties facing the company appears in the company's management discussion and analysis for the three-month period ended March 31, 2025, which is available under the company's profile on CDER+, as well as on the company's website. You were cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this presentation. The company disclaims any intention or obligation, except to the extent required by law, to update and revise any forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events, or for any other reason. Our discussion today will include references to adjusted financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA, free cash flow, free cash flow conversion, and MAU, which are non-IFRS measures. All references to currency in this presentation shall refer to USD unless otherwise specified. Now, I will turn the call over to Rob Laidlaw, founder, chair, and CEO of Vertical Scope. Rob?

Thanks, Diane. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Q1 was a challenging quarter for our business. Coming off of a very strong 2024, we were provided with an uphill battle from the beginning of the quarter with changes around the treatment of certain programmatic video ad units. While these changes came without notice, they will give us the opportunity to place more focus on our direct sales team in order to not only replace this revenue, but significantly increase the CPMs. Outside of video, programmatic revenue was actually up in the quarter, albeit single digits, but a positive sign that our tech stack is still working well there. I want to spend most of my time today speaking about MAUs. In the quarter, our MAUs were 104 million, with Q1 typically being the strongest quarter of the year. On a year-over-year basis, with the 2025 March core algorithm hitting, we saw monthly patterns showing January down 1.8%, February, with one less day than last year, down 4.7%, and March down 16%. I caution that last year Q2 was unusually strong, as Google algorithms at the time were driving record traffic levels to our forum communities. With the strong comparable in Q2, we expect the percentage lost year over year to increase, with MAUs likely to come in around 90 million based on current data we're seeing. I think there are a few points to touch on. These algorithms happen quite regularly, and we've been dealing with them for many, many years. Typically, you will see multiple of those per year, sometimes as many as 10 to 12 updates. Some of these are smaller and some are larger. In the past year and a half, we've been major beneficiaries as Google drove more traffic to user-generated foreign communities like ours and Reddit as it sought to send traffic to authentic voices rather than AI-generated content. Today, Google seems to be more focused on driving traffic to its own AI overviews and YouTube. And we have read a few studies and articles recently that show other publishers are being similarly affected. While Reddit seems to be at least somewhat affected, they have built a very strong DAU base on their mobile app and are continuing to benefit from platform investments. In order to counteract the MAU challenges, we are focusing on two key paths. First, we are improving our own AI to provide users with better, quicker, and faster answers. and in their native languages with translations. AI translations are already proving their value with approximately 2 million MAUs now visiting one of our translated experiences on a run-right basis. Fortunately, these users are also continuing to engage at about 80% of the level of the English language visitors. This bodes well for our content flywheel. With Answers, we are moving towards creating interactive Answers experiences and increasing the quality of responses that users can expect when visiting a forum community. While we may not have as large of a user base as Reddit, we most certainly have high quality, long form, in-depth responses to highly technical questions. We play in verticals like automotive with high consumer spending on big ticket items. According to recent studies, these are the places where users want social proof. Even when AI gives them an answer, they want to back it up with social proof from forums, Reddit, and YouTube to make sure they are getting sound advice before making their purchase. Second, we are turning up the attention on our direct sources of traffic that do not require a search engine. Our forum mobile app is giving users to our full network of content on their mobile devices, and we have also significantly stepped up our efforts on email newsletters and engagements. We'll be ramping up investment in all direct traffic sources throughout the remainder of the year and into 2026 to reduce our traffic volatility from search for the long term. We believe that over the long run, as AI begins to answer users' questions before they get to organic search results, that our communities will become an increasingly valuable way to reach consumers during their product purchase experience. The usage of our communities, the new and novel questions being asked, and the quality of responses from authentic humans will provide significant long-term value in the changing digital landscape. AI disruption is already here, and I continue to believe that this is the beginning of a consumer shift in behavior that will result in forms becoming more valuable. The business model will shift alongside consumer attention, and over time, we should see ARPU benefit from this new user attention model. where forums, Reddit, and YouTube become the last step before making a purchase. As a company and as a management team, we understand that it's been a difficult quarter, and for those of you that have been around since the IPO, a challenging stock to navigate with various ups and downs. However, I urge you to think about your own usage patterns, where value lies in the overall ecosystem, and how, in an AI-driven world that forms become even more important for authenticity and real human connection. These are passionate enthusiasts that we serve every day and aren't going away. The model is evolving, and in this change, our communities will be even greater assets to our business and our shareholders. With that, I will turn it over to Chris and Vince to walk you through the numbers.