VerticalScope Holdings Inc.

and I'll be coordinating your call today. After the presentation, you will have the opportunity to ask any questions, which you can do so by pressing start, followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the call over to Diane Yu, Chief Legal Officer, to begin. Please go ahead, Diane.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Vertical Scope Holding's second quarter 2025 earnings call. I'm joined by Chris Goodridge, our Chief Executive Officer, and Vince Bellissimo, our Chief Financial 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 and 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 3 and 6 month period and the June 30th, 2025, which is available under the company's profile on CDAR+, as well as on the company's website. who are 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 Chris Goodridge, CEO of Vertical Scope. Chris?

Thanks, Diane, and thanks, everyone, for joining us bright and early this morning. I'm excited to be here for my first call as CEO of Vertical Scope. After five years as COO, I'm grateful for the trust that Rob and the board placed in me at such a pivotal time. Rob's been an incredible leader through many chapters of this company's journey, and I'm thrilled he'll continue to be deeply involved as chair of the board. We've also strengthened our leadership bench with Ezra Menaged stepping into the COO role and Mayor Welker becoming our CTO. Both joined through our Home Talk acquisition in 2021, and both have a track record of innovation and strong execution. Their leadership, along with our experienced senior team, positioned us very well for the road ahead. Now, there's no question the broader internet is going through a period of rapid change, especially in content discovery. Google's AI overviews and evolving search algorithms have shifted traffic patterns across the open web. Over the past couple of years, forums like ours and Reddit benefited from Google rewarding authentic human content. More recently, zero-click search has become a bigger factor, reducing the number of visitors referred from search results to the broader web. Traffic patterns are changing, and while it creates short-term pressure on total MAUs, it also opens a significant long-term opportunity. In an AI-first discovery world, platforms with authentic voices, deep expertise, and strong user connections will stand out. We believe forums like ours, along with Reddit and YouTube, will increasingly become a key step before consumers make decisions, creating higher value user interactions and stronger monetization potential. So with this backdrop, our strategy is simple. Build stronger direct relationships with our users, make their experience richer and more useful with AI, and turn that engagement into diversified revenue streams. On the user side, we're putting greater emphasis on higher quality direct connections, things like scaling out our logged in users and our mobile app. Our login users are far more engaged and valuable, and we're putting a much stronger emphasis on growing them. With more than 50 million registered users, we already have a huge base to work with. And the more directly we connect with them, the less they need to rely on intermediaries to discover new form content. We're seeing solid direct traffic growth, and we'll have a lot more to share on this initiative in the coming quarters. On the engagement side, AI is opening up some powerful new opportunities. We're translating our content into multiple languages to reach entirely new audiences and AI generated summaries are making it easier for new visitors to dive into long detailed threads. We're particularly excited about our new AI powered community assistant that we call Fora Frank. It's Fora's proprietary AI that's trained on our data set of over 2.3 billion posts. Fora Frank was initially rolled out to our communities to encourage posting and help users ask better questions. Now users can tag 4Frank, much like the way people use Grok on the X platform, and it opens up a whole new avenue of engagement and content discovery. We're just scratching the surface with 4Frank's potential, and there are many more applications that we're exploring. It's a really powerful example of how AI can reshape the community experience and improve the value that we can add to our users. And finally, when you have an audience that's both engaged and loyal, and a platform where we own the data, the monetization opportunities expand. Beyond advertising, we're building out branded content offerings, commerce, and data-driven products that leverage the trust and expertise inside our forums. We believe that combination, more direct traffic, richer engagement, and broader monetization, creates a growth flywheel that will get stronger the more that we invest in it. I'll offer a few comments on Q2 before passing to Vince for a deeper dive. Q2 performance was in line with our expectations and prior guidance. MAUs were 90 million, down from record levels last year due to shifting search patterns. Revenue was 14.5 million, down 13% year over year, largely from lower programmatic advertising from both display and video. Despite the recent challenges we've experienced with video ads, we've made some product changes that strengthened performance in June, and we expect video trends to be much stronger in the back half of the year. Direct advertising was around 400,000 lower than last year, largely due to campaign timing, but we're seeing an encouraging pickup in Q3 that bodes well for the coming quarters. We're starting to use AI to provide insight reports, leveraging our form data to some of our major brand clients, and it's opening up new lines of discussion. We think there's an opportunity to turn AI insights into a subscription product and are confident that new revenue opportunities will be surfacing soon from our data. E-commerce revenue was up 41% in Q2, with most of the growth coming from our Ritual acquisition, which closed in April, while our core commerce business was relatively stable. Overall, I'm pleased with how quickly Ritual has fit into our operations and the growth potential it's showing. With Ritual in the fold, and as additional product initiatives pick up, we expect e-commerce will continue to grow by double digits in the second half of the year. The profitability of our business continues to be a real strength. Adjusted EBITDA was $4.3 million with 87% conversion to free cash flow. Our balance sheet is strong, we've got low leverage, and we've got ample liquidity to fund growth. Turning quickly to M&A, we only closed one deal in the quarter with the ritual acquisition in early April, but we've seen a notable pickup in inbound opportunities. I think this is largely because of the broader traffic trends on the open web. If you're an independent community owner, without the benefit of a tech platform, AI roadmap and an engineering team to execute, it's going to be tough to compete. We're keeping our eyes open, but our near-term focus is on reigniting our organic growth. This will put us in an even stronger position to execute on the best M&A opportunities down the road. In closing, our team is energized for this next phase. The value of our communities, their expertise, authenticity and engagement is only going to grow as the digital landscape evolves. AI disruption is here, but we see it as a catalyst for a consumer shift that makes forms more valuable than ever. We have the team, the platform, and the strategy to navigate this change and emerge stronger. And with that, I'll turn it over to Vince to walk through the numbers and comment on our outlook.

Thanks, Chris, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you all joining the call today. Over the last quarter, we have made a number of organizational moves aimed at better aligning our business in a world of AI-supported content discovery. Our profitable and highly cash-generative business model continues to be the cornerstone of our financial strength and provides us with the flexibility to invest in long-term initiatives aimed at driving ARPU, engagement, and audience growth across our platform. Turning to our results. Revenue for the quarter was $14.5 million, down 13% year-over-year due to lower overall MAUs and partially offset by improving ARPU across digital advertising and e-commerce channels. Digital advertising revenue totaled 11.5 million, down 21% from the prior year, primarily driven by a 26% decline in programmatic revenue to 7.3 million. This decline was largely due to lower impression volumes and softer performance from our video advertising unit, which faced headwinds from browser-level policy changes implemented in the second half of 2024. As we lap these changes, we expect to see growth contributions from the video advertising unit in the second half of the year. Our direct advertising channel has held up well, despite a noisy macro backdrop, declining 9% or 400,000 in the period. This decline was mainly due to the timing of campaigns rather than a drop in bookings. Looking ahead, we're encouraged by a rising demand for customized content for major brands and OEMs, a trend that underscores the critical role of authentic audience connection in an AI-driven landscape. These high ARPU campaigns, often featuring video content, are designed to precisely target our niche and highly valuable audience. Additionally, as Chris noted earlier, there is a strong interest in data-driven products designed to help brands better understand consumer sentiment and feedback. Once fully developed, we expect these offerings will provide actual insights for brands aiming to enhance existing products and innovate new ones. Our communities are uniquely positioned to connect brands with right audiences and support the generation of future advertising growth. Turning to e-commerce. e-commerce revenue grew by 41%, or $887,000 in the quarter. This growth was largely driven by the April 2025 acquisition of Ritual Technologies, including their well-known food pickup app, which serves markets in Canada, the U.S., and Australia. While the acquisition has provided a solid boost to e-commerce revenue, it also brings added value to its dedicated team with expertise in mobile products and marketplace experiences. Excluding contributions from Ritual, the channel was flat year over year, With about half of the channel's activity driven by subscriptions, this performance highlights our loyal subscriber base and the resilience they provide against traffic volatility. E-commerce continues to be a growth leader for our business going forward, including new commerce-driven experiences and using AI solutions such as For a Frank to serve relevant discussions to our users and keep them engaged on our platform. Just even though for the quarter was 4.3 million, reflecting a margin of 30% compared to 7.1 million and a margin of 42% in the prior year. Margin compression during the quarter reflects our continued investment in strategic areas, including AI, audience growth, engagement, and data products. All end up building a foundation for long-term growth across our sites and communities. We also made significant progress in adopting an AI-first approach, encouraging employees to integrate AI-driven tools into their daily workflows. These tools have enabled us to streamline internal resources, forming smaller, more agile teams, focused on execution. Operating expenses for the quarter increased by 12% or $1.8 million, reaching $16.4 million. This increase was largely driven by a $1.6 million in one-time costs related to acquisitions and restructuring in the quarter. As a business, we pride ourselves on our ability to generate healthy and sustainable free cash flow, and this quarter was no different. We converted to Justity without the cash at a rate of 87% compared to 93% in the prior year. Free cash flow for the period was $3.7 million, and cash from operations was $6.4 million, up 4% year over year, inclusive of non-recurring working capital impacts from the acquisition of virtual technologies. In the current environment, cash remains a critical asset, and our focus going forward is to maximize our liquidity and be ready to move quickly on M&A if the right opportunity arises. As of the end of the quarter, we had $64.1 million in liquidity, comprising of $8.1 million in unrestricted cash, and $56 million available to draw from a revolving credit facility at very favorable rates compared to the current market for a business of our size. Our net leverage is a comfortable 1.22 times based on a net debt of $36 million as defined by our credit agreement, which includes pro forma impacts from recent cost-cutting initiatives. In line with the trends we are seeing in adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow, we reported a net loss of $1.8 million in the quarter compared to net income of $400,000 in the prior year. This loss was primarily driven by a $2.1 million decline in revenue and $1.6 million in one-time related operating expenses. Excluding these one-time costs, our net loss would have been $200,000, underscoring the resilience of our core business model while we continue to invest in growth initiatives across our platform. Looking ahead, there is no change in the full-year guidance we shared in April. We're confident in our ability to grow and strengthen our communities, bringing together passionate and like-minded enthusiasts to talk about the things they love. Our strong balance sheet and solid free cash will provide us with the financial flexibility to navigate the rapidly changing landscape of AI content discovery. These strengths position us to execute on our priorities and work towards delivering sustained long-term value for our shareholders and employees. With that, I'll pass it back to Chris to close things up. Chris?

Thanks, Vince. Let's turn it right over to questions.

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question today, please do so now by pressing start followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind or you feel like your question has already been answered, you can press start followed by two to withdraw yourself from the queue. Our first question today comes from Aravinda Galapatagar with Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead, Aravinda.

Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I just wanted to go back to some of the earlier comments that Chris made about logged-in uses. Chris, can you just remind us of some of the initiatives there? And I may have missed whether you disclosed a proportion of your MAUs that are kind of direct traffic or already logged-in users, if there was an updated number that you provided.

Yeah, thanks. We're not providing that updated number today. I expect that you'll start to see more metrics like that coming for us in the coming quarters as some of these initiatives really take hold. But what I would say is a significant portion of our engagement on our platform is coming from logged in direct connections. The logged in user is a lot more valuable to us. We can communicate with them more directly. We can send them push notifications. They can subscribe to um, you know, uh, newsletter updates, uh, all those types of things, um, to really, um, you know, push that, you know, continued usage of the platform, but also the time they spend, the contributions they make to the community as far as posts, um, all those things, uh, make those users a lot, a lot more valuable and really underpin kind of the, the foundation of, of the community. So, you know, it's a real strength. It is that, you know, kind of nerve center of the business and we see opportunity to grow it. In various communities within our platform, you know, we see very, very high levels of registered users or logged in users. So as high, you know, in some cases as 80%. And so, and some of the capabilities with the team that we've kind of brought together, particularly that home talk leadership I mentioned, are real specialists in growing those direct connections and the direct user base. So we're pretty excited with the initiatives they're working on. We're seeing results already and we're seeing the gains show up on a month-to-month basis. So it is a lot more kind of block and tackling from a marketing perspective. It's a lot more getting more out of your user base and being more proactive with the content that you're pushing out to those users as opposed to being passive and waiting for them to arrive through a search result. The mobile app is also part of the mix. You know, to this point, it's really been our power users that have leaned in to the mobile app. We haven't marketed in a big way, but we think we've got the app to a point where it provides a really solid community experience. And so we're going to be amping up the marketing of the app as well. The good news about marketing is we already have a huge audience that we can market it against. So initially, a lot of our marketing efforts will be focused on converting our existing user base into mobile app users before we look to any sort of external marketing initiatives. So those are the primary things that I think we're focused on with respect to direct audience.

Thanks, Chris. And then just switching gears, any update on your content licensing plans? Anything in terms of how you're looking at it? I know you've been in discussions for a while. Wanted to touch on that as well.

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for that, Aravinda. It's a space that we've seen evolve quite a bit, right, since this became a popular topic. I really believe that our patience is going to pay off for a few reasons. First off, of course, we saw a handful of deals right away. We saw some of the major platforms cut deals. We haven't seen a lot since. And in some cases, even a couple of the major platforms or one major platform in particular has turned to litigation to kind of defend their interests. So, you know, we think that's quite interesting. We think the relationship between the LLMs and content owners, we think the dynamics will shift more and more towards being more favorable for platforms and content owners for a couple of reasons. The first is, you know, the tools that are available. This is really the main one. The tools that are available to actually spot, block, and then now monetize that traffic are becoming more sophisticated. And we're looking really closely at a lot of those. So you see Cloudflare making a lot of noise about their offering. Fastly's got other offerings. So at the CDN level, where you're actually able to spot the bot traffic and then create a tool around it so that if they want to access your content, they're paying each time they do that. We think that's a pretty interesting model that we're looking at. And it could lead to some incremental revenue for us. The other side of it as well, though, is we think from a data licensing perspective, and both Vince and I touched on this in our remarks, we see it more as just providing data to train LLMs. I think that's a pretty simplified view of the opportunity for our data. And we touched on it with respect to how we're engaging with clients. So we're using AI today to provide really interesting insights to those clients. So information and kind of nuance that it's able to pull out of our datasets that you wouldn't be able to really do without the power of AI. It's really kind of impressing a lot of customers we work with and kind of leading to some new business for us. And in some cases, we have some major brands that are interested in looking at ways to subscribe to a regular feed of that data to help with things like marketing decisions or even product development within the OEMs. So we think it's really cool. Like I mentioned as well, we're also using our form data to train our own AI. And we think that that eventually could be a much bigger part of our story.

Thanks for that context, Chris. And then just lastly, Vince, I know you maintain guidance, but sort of looking at sort of the quarterly cadence, how should we think of margins? Obviously, Q4 is seasonally high, but are you still sort of thinking sort of low 30s or in that zone for Q3 and that kind of a pickup in Q4? Is that the shape we should be thinking of?

Yeah, thanks for the question. Yeah, I think that's correct, right, in terms of sort of the trajectory from a margin perspective. We've done quite a bit of work in the quarter, sort of optimized costs around many key areas. We talked about the AI-first approach internally that's really helped us consolidate team sizes in key areas like engineering. We're harnessing AI tools, helps people, helps us not only Dariush Mozaffarian, Co-Chair, Save Costs that helps our team work that much faster and deploy these initiatives to our platform, so we can start realizing the results. So in the quarter alone, based on the initiative that took place, equates to about $5 million a year in annualized run rate savings, mostly around headcount. We're also looking at areas like SaaS and consultants. as well as optimizing our hosting environment. So that will continue to support margin expansion. And if you were to look at our quarter, you would see that as a quarter progressed on a month-over-month basis, you would see much favorable margins approaching close to 40%. That said, we're still investing in our platform, right? There's still a long way to go in a lot of these initiatives. They all come with a cost, computing costs. people costs, strategic costs with consultants, et cetera. So from a margin perspective, staying within sort of the 30% range for the year is still our target.

Thank you. I'll pass the line.

Thank you. Our next question comes from David McSagin with Cormark Security. Please go ahead.

Well, thank you. Sorry. Yeah, just a couple of questions. So, you know, when you look at the MAUs, obviously they're down in the quarter. You know, you highlighted changes to search algorithms. So when you talk about these changes to the search algorithms, is it primarily the, you know, the addition of AI now and how AI is impacting search, or are there other factors?

Yeah, thanks, David. I think what we saw in March, and we talked about this previously, the biggest shift was AI added to the search result. I think you'll see a lot written about this. That was a relatively big change at that time. I think our expectation is at this stage that it's more tweaks from here, but we'll see. We know Google's in a pretty heated competition with some of the, you know, the other large language model providers. So, you know, we'll see how that evolves. Again, I'll just reiterate that the search traffic is great for an overall MEU number, and you do monetize it, but you just don't monetize it to the same extent that you do kind of that core audience. And you see that with, you know, even platforms like Reddit, right? The logged in user is a lot more valuable. So that's where we see a great opportunity going forward.

Okay, and then just on video advertising, you know, when you read through the MD&A, you called out the muted by default playback as having an impact on the impressions or the value. Are there other factors at play here besides that main item?

That was the main item that caused the change that, you know, we kind of had to navigate. What we've done is, you know, made product improvements to actually improve the performance of the unit on mobile devices. And so we started to see that improve fairly nicely towards the end of June when it went through testing and rolled out. And July, now into August, we're seeing much stronger performance compared to what we were seeing previously. You know, again, it's another example of kind of getting more out of that core user base and how valuable they are. And, you know, the video advertising that we provide them is very relevant. And we see video as, you know, a source of growth from here.

Okay. And then just on the potential for acquisitions, I mean, wouldn't it make sense to kind of put that on hold until the business starts growing again? as opposed to acquiring and you're not sure when this can actually turn around?

David, I think if you read into my comments a little bit more, I think that's effectively what I'm saying as far as keeping an open mind. If we see opportunities that could accelerate our direct connections with users, that could accelerate our AI initiatives, that could improve commerce or monetization, I think we'd look at those things, so anything that could actually be an accelerant. Buying an individual community business right now, it would have to be really special and have some unique characteristics for us to to really look at that. So, you know, I think, you know, and Vince reiterated this, we see, you know, building up our cash position here, you know, creates some really great optionality for us. And so absent one of those types of acquisitions that really, you know, accelerates us along that strategic path, we'll continue to build up our cash.

Okay. All right. Thanks.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Drew McReynolds with RBC. Drew, please go ahead.

Yeah, thanks very much. Good morning. I may have missed this just in terms of the MAU trends and Chris, you know, fully understand, you know, your three prong strategy makes perfect sense focusing on, you know, the logged in users and registered users. Are you providing MAU guidance for Q3 or for the rest of the year, just as you report it. And then secondly, maybe back to you, Chris. Yeah, interesting on kind of the toll model and just how the data ecosystem is evolving. When do you think, from a timing perspective, you begin to get enough clarity on kind of where all this lands? So then you can maybe more you know, lean into it more than maybe you are now. Just any sense of that, or is it still early days kind of post all the changes in March for there to be a landing anytime soon?

Yeah, great questions, Drew. Thanks for that. I think The first thing I'd say on MEU, we're not going to get in the habit of providing, you know, guidance on MEU on a regular basis. You know, our guidance this year was sort of, I think, unique. The circumstances were unique. Overall, you know, traffic is relatively stable, right? At this stage, it's the way we see it. And we see the opportunity to kind of grow that direct base. And, you know, if you'll bear with us, we'll start to hopefully share a lot more data and thoughts on helping break down our user base over time so you can get a better feel for that. So that's on the come. And I think it'll help investors and yourselves really understand kind of the power of that core audience we have. On the licensing side, I appreciate your comment that a lot has changed and there's a lot of dynamics at play that um, we believe, uh, can, can shift the power more towards content owners and platforms. Um, I think it's, I think it's just inevitable. And so, you know, we're very active is what I'd say. We're very active, um, in the conversations and understanding kind of the opportunity for us to, to start to, to turn that on. Um, and, uh, you know, I think we'll have, I expect we'll have a lot more to say about it, um, within, within months, not, uh, not years.

Oh, okay.

Okay. I'll leave it there. Thanks very much.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Todd Cootland with RBC. Please go ahead, Todd.

Oh, great. Thanks. Good morning, everyone. I wanted to ask you about the guidance. So, if I have this right, adjusted EBITDA guidance is 21 to 24 million. and you've done $8 million. So could you just talk about where you think you'll land within that range and what are the assumptions in the back half of the year at a high level? Thanks, Todd.

Yeah. Hey, Todd. Thanks for the question. So yeah, to reiterate, there's no change to that $21 to $24 million range that we provided back in April. A lot of what's built into that guidance is based on the initiatives that the team is working on today and then there's been some rapid movement over the last call it six to eight weeks on on. Things like you know Ai driven solutions direct traffic, etc, and we expect these to start, we expect to start seeing results at least monetization results for these efforts in the coming quarter so in Q3. So from an outlook perspective, it's back half loaded, right? And that's no different than any other sort of year for our business where you start to see or you will see that seasonal high in Q4 from an EBITDA perspective. So I would say we're tracking within that range. Whether it's on the low end or high end, it's still PVD based on how quickly these initiatives wrap and continue to drive results and contributions to our results. More to come on that, but we're still comfortable with the $21 to $24 million range.

Okay. And for the fourth quarter, is there an implied assumption that your MAUs or however you're measuring it, login or mobile or whatever the core assumptions there is, is that assumed to improve materially in the fourth quarter?

No.

Okay. Okay. And then just get a sense on what Frank might have, what kind of impact Frank might have on ad pricing. Do you have any conceptual ranges and what that potentially could do in terms of ad pricing at this point?

Not at this point on ad pricing specifically, but what we're seeing the kind of the value for, Frank, in the advertising context, it's actually with our small business subscription product. So what I mean by that is when businesses subscribe to one of our communities, it gives them a bunch of privileges to post commercial messages, right? So it's effectively promoted posts. And what you've seen on some of the major platforms that have adopted AI is it really does accelerate, you know, ad impression volume and rate because you make it a lot easier. You remove a lot of friction for the user of the platform. And so in a lot of cases, these are, you know, niche small businesses that work with us. And we think by having Frank be effectively a community assistant for those types of customers, reduces their friction in a big way of being able to use the kind of the promoted subscription product. So, you know, hopefully Todd will be able to give you something that is a lot more easy to think about from a modeling perspective as to how that could impact ARPU. But we see it as creating, you know, stickier relationships with those advertisers, getting them to use the platform more, and that leads to greater volume and stronger rates. Okay.

Last question for me. I don't know if you're providing this, but of the 50 million logged in, what's the mix between desktop and mobile at this point? Thanks a lot.

Yeah, it's a significant tilt towards mobile.

Okay, great. Appreciate it, Chris. Thanks a lot. Thanks, Todd.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Gabriel Leung with Beacon Securities. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. Just one quick follow-up. Just from a capital allocation perspective, Chris or Vince, can you just talk about how you're prioritizing, I guess, your free cash flow generation over the near term, you know, sort of split between investing in the business, M&A, share bypass, et cetera?

Yeah, thanks, Gabriel. If I had to rank order them, number one is for sure investing in the core business and kind of reigniting that organic growth. That's really the focus. Within reason, obviously, we are really committed to the free cash flow model we have. We think building up cash creates some optionality for us. So that is the main focus. As always, we keep an open posture to M&A, and like I mentioned earlier, if there's things that really kind of accelerate us along that strategic path we're taking, we'll take a close look. We've got a lot of experience doing M&A, and we think it's a real strength of the team. Um, with respect to kind of the core community acquisitions, where we buy the communities and bring them onto the four platform, there'll be a time and a place for those. But I think we want to, you know, we'd like to see how the kind of the broader, um, landscape plays out over the next period. So, and then, you know, lastly on, uh, on share buybacks, that'd be, that'd be the lowest priority for us. We think. our shareholders are far better served by accelerating the growth rate of the business than, you know, short-term kind of gains from share buybacks.

Gotcha. Maybe just one follow-up. We sort of look at your full year guidance and just looking into the back half. I know you kind of talked about it, but are you expecting any sort of material changes to your MAUs in the back half, you know, one way or the other, positive or negative. I'm just curious to hear a bit more about your assumptions around MEU from the 90 million you just reported.

Yeah, thanks, Gabe. So from a modeling perspective, it's very difficult to predict any sort of, you know, changes on the negative side. So I think our answer to that is no, we're not predicting any substantive Dariush Mozaffarian, negative changes from any sort of algorithms. Dariush Mozaffarian, That are coming in second half of the year, nor can we predict those on the positive side that we are expecting some incremental contributions from. Dariush Mozaffarian, The initiative teams are working on, especially around a direct traffic perspective, so there is there is some upside of expect in the back half a year from those.

Dariush Mozaffarian, That you know thanks for that, thank you.

Thank you. At this time, we have no further questions, and so I'll hand back to Chris for closing remarks.

Well, thanks, everyone. I appreciate the engagement, particularly in mid-August here at 7 a.m. So thanks for the questions and the engagement. We look forward to speaking with everyone again next quarter.

Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. This concludes our call and you may now disconnect your lines.